Home Sick

By Sarah Pekkanen

Living in a basement in Potomac—miles away from their home, friends and routines—has left the Brilliant family frazzled, drained and eager for their renovation to be over


Myron Brilliant had a busy day ahead of him. He'd just wrapped up an early morning workout at Bethesda Sport & Health Club, and now he had to rush to be on time for a day crammed full of meetings in Washington at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he works as a vice president. There was just one problem.

He wasn't wearing any pants.

Myron picked up the phone and called his wife: "Jenny? I did it again."

Somewhere along his route from his temporary home—Jenny's parents' basement in Potomac—to the gym on Montgomery Avenue in Bethesda, the bottom half of Myron's suit had slipped, unnoticed, off its hanger. As Myron waited for Jenny to bring him new clothes, he phoned his office to announce he'd be late—again. Then he began counting how many weeks remained until his family could finally go home.

When the Brilliants moved out of their 100-year-old Chevy Chase farmhouse in January so contractors could gut and rebuild it, they knew things would be tough. Living with Jenny's parents would be an adjustment, as would be absorbing the cost of their $600,000—plus renovation and addition. But they didn't expect it to be quite this bad.

"I'm in need of intensive therapy," Jenny sighed one recent afternoon, fresh—or not so fresh—from her usual weekday rounds: Dropping her two oldest kids at school in Chevy Chase. Dragging 2-year-old Eric to a tile store to stare at seemingly endless shades of earth-toned porcelain. Stopping by her house around noon to check on its progress while she waited for the school bus to deliver her daughter Liza, 5, from kindergarten. Driving back to Potomac so Liza and Eric could have lunch—then retracing their route to Bethesda to pick up 8-year-old Andrew at 3:30. And, finally, heading once again to Potomac.

If it's true that the little stresses in life are what kill you, Jenny thinks, then she and Myron should probably start picking out their headstones.

Take the other morning: Jenny was backing her minivan out of the driveway and felt the van crunch into something, but she was distracted and rushed and she figured it was a recycling bin. So she kept backing up and crunching until she realized: It was Myron's car.

The strange thing is, neither Jenny nor Myron seemed the slightest bit perturbed about the accident. On their list of concerns, a dented car ranks far below the stress Myron feels when he gets stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic after putting in a 12-hour-day at work, or the frustration Jenny feels when she agonizes over the perfect wood floor only to have Myron veto it, or the sympathy they feel for Andrew, who misses the neighborhood friends he used to play with nearly every afternoon on the street in front of his house.

Jenny and Myron miss the rhythms and relationships of their neighborhood, too, which is why they still drive to Bethesda to use the dry cleaner who always greets them like old friends, and why Myron keeps working out at the same gym. ("I just got another call from him," Jenny sighed recently. "He forgot a shoe.")

They just need to hold on a little longer, Jenny and Myron keep telling themselves. "One of the things that's hard is I see other houses popping up overnight all over the neighborhood," Jenny says. "Our neighbors are kind of chuckling and saying, 'What's taking so long?'"

That's probably not a question Paul Connolly would welcome right now. Connolly, the perpetually harried project manager for Prill Construction, is overseeing the Brilliant's renovation.

"Look at this wall," Connolly says, jabbing his index finger into the wood that once held up the back of the Brilliant's house. The wood crumbles under his touch and fragments fall to the ground. "Termites," Connolly says grimly. "We'll have to stabilize it with new wood."

That wasn't in the original plan; nor were the heavy rains that fell this spring and created a wading pool in the Brilliants' newly dug basement. "It means an extra day or two here, an extra day or two there," Connolly sighs.

But he knows how desperately the Brilliants want to come home, so he's determined they'll move back in August—even if it means late nights and weekends for his crews.

Speaking of crews, Connolly needs to get one to the house pronto. Because Connolly and architects Jim Rill and Kay Kim just spotted a problem—one of the beams rising out of what will be the Brilliants' new kitchen needs to be lowered by several inches. Connolly gets on his cell phone and, miraculously, tracks down a team who promise to bring a blowtorch to the house and repair the problem within the hour.

As Connolly paces the partially framed addition to the Brilliants' house, issuing instructions on his phone, Jenny—who has popped by to chat with Rill and Kim—leafs through her plump three-ring binder that's filled with timetables and contracts and photographs of kitchens and bathrooms. She and Rill flip through pictures of a kitchen faucet before settling on the perfect one, then Jenny hands Rill a sample square of the tile she has selected for the master bathroom floor.

It's an unusual choice: black, distressed porcelain that looks more like wood. "It's kind of eccentric," Rill says, moving the square into the sunlight, then folding his arms as he stares at it.

"It's got an Asian feeling to it," says Jenny, who's confident in her taste. A degree from a Manhattan art school and 13 years spent working as a graphic designer will do that for you.

"I think," Rill finally says, "it might look pretty cool."

And when Jenny lays the tiny, earth-colored tiles she has chosen to line the shower walls next to the black porcelain, the colors and textures are utterly unexpected and unusual—and stunning together.

Next Jenny pulls out a sample of her mustard-green kitchen cabinets. Although Jenny had initially longed for the clean lines of an all-white kitchen, her kitchen designer, Robin Lynch, gently explained that kitchens don't stay white when you have three kids.

A truckload of the cabinets is scheduled to arrive in late June, which could present a bit of a problem, since the kitchen won't be prepped for cabinet installation that soon. When Robin informed Connolly of the schedule, he gave her a "look," Jenny recalls. Then Connolly mentioned they could store the cabinets on the front porch and wrap a tarp around them. Robin shot him a look of her own, said Jenny, who just felt relieved that it wasn't her and Myron bickering for once.

By now, she and Myron have resolved their differences on the wood floors. There was a home show this spring at the D.C. Convention Center, and Jenny hurried inside and selected oak boards reclaimed from an old barn—while Myron circled the block in the minivan, with little Eric asleep in his car seat.

Poor Eric, Jenny thinks. The little boy has been dragged to so many home stores and tile showrooms these past few months. If weren't for Jenny's parents, who generously offer to baby-sit on many mornings, Eric would also have to suffer through seemingly endless Potomac-to-Chevy Chase runs.

But Jenny knows that Eric—a happy, active toddler who isn't easily dissuaded by the word "No!"—tires out her parents. She feels guilty when she asks them to baby-sit, and she feels guilty when, after putting the kids to bed, she collapses on the basement pull-out sofa. She knows her mother would love it if Jenny would come upstairs to talk and play the board games they both enjoy. But by nighttime, Jenny feels too exhausted to do anything but stare at a movie.

Then one day Myron telephones Jenny with an incredible invitation: He has a business trip over Memorial Day weekend, and he wants to bring her along. To Paris.

Jenny has never been to Paris. She imagines strolling its romantic old streets with Myron, and sharing a bottle of wine at a sidewalk café while the stresses of the past few months wash off them. Then she thinks: How can she ask her parents to baby-sit for a long weekend, when they've done so much already? How can she leave for a vacation when their lives are in such upheaval?

Paris, she decides, will have to wait. For now, it'll be enough for Jenny and Myron just to go home.

Chevy Chase writer Sarah Pekkanen has written for the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post and People.