Page 15 of Love It or List It
With a shake of his head and a small amount of dread, Joe turned his podcast back on and kept sorting.
He was alone at the house that day, as it was the middle of a weekday and no one else’s day job was so weather dependent.Another rainy day in November meant another day not landscaping.He was just tying up another full garbage bag when Starling’s voice came booming through the house from the front door.
“José Vasquez Joseph Romano!”
“Still no Joseph in my name,” Joe said, as he always did.And he hadn’t been a Vasquez since his parents divorced and his mother reclaimed her maiden name.Not that he thought Starling would stop the joke now, almost twenty years after it started.
“Tell me you didnotagree to keep owning a house with a man that your children call ‘snatched’!”
“Well, you know that it’s a terrible time of year to sell,” Joe started.
Starling crossed her arms.
“And if we can make it livable, then it’ll actually be worth more than just the land.Honestly, making it not an instant teardown will double its value.”
“Joe,” Starling said, her voice soft and full of concern.“They said you were vibing with this guy.Just tell me you’re not—”
Joe sighed.“Look, do I want to take him to bed and mess him up until he can no longer say anything but my name?Sure.He’s hot.Like, smoking.The kids weren’t lying.But I’m not making an unwise decision just for the sake of a pretty face.”
Starling stared him down.
“Sure, maybe the pretty face helped to talk me into it, but it really does make sense to fix up the house and sell in the spring, so long as we take the DIY approach.”
Starling snorted.“Not with the electricity, you’re not.”
“Nope,” Joe happily agreed.“Which needs a total overhaul, probably, since the inspector found knob-and-tube and there’s no reason to think any of it got updated.”
“Hence the aforementioned bill weeping, I guess.”
“Hence the weeping,” Joe agreed cheerfully.
Starling pulled out a stylus and her phone—a large tablet-like thing—and tapped at the screen.“Okay, let’s get started.Walk me through the house and let’s start talking about the needs.”
As they went room by room, Starling added up the existing number of outlets and lights, and together they made guesstimates for additional ones.If they were going to have to pay Starling to rewire the whole goddamned house, Joe was not going to live without overhead lighting.He was tired of sorting through things in the dark.
“So, here’s the thing.It’s not the cost of the materials.I mean sure, you need several hundred feet of wiring and a whole new panel.But the real issue is the time, because rewiring the existing setup is enough of a bitch.But if you’re willing to embrace a piecemeal work schedule and pay for materials up front, then I’ll do it for cost and the promise of future earnings when you sell.”
Joe hugged her.
“Also,” she said, holding him tightly, “I’ll be doing a vibe check on your house husband.”
Joe never should’ve mentioned Austin called him that.Scratch that, Joe should’ve called another electrician.Now Starling was going tomeetAustin, and they were either going to get along like two wet cats in a bag or bond instantly and start plotting how to divest Joe of his last remaining shred of sanity.
“On second thought,” he said and tried to pull away.
“Nuh-uh.”Starling squeezed one more time and then let him go.“Sorry.We hugged on it.It’s a hug deal.Can’t break those.”
Joe wouldn’t anyway—couldn’t afford to—but he could see how the next few weeks were going to play out.Rather like the past two weeks, but with one more person and an exponentially higher number of third-degree burns about his love life.
At least now he could see the floor in most of the rooms on the ground level.Notallof the floor of course, but still.Floor.Progress.
“Fine,” he acquiesced.
“Great.Now we can celebrate our business relationship with pizza.”
Joe figured buying her dinner was the least he could do.But there was nowhere to sit to eat now that the dining table had been liquidated into… well, probably part of a septic repair, and anyway, nobody delivered out here.They went into Essex and hit up Woodcraft for dinner, but Joe didn’t want to linger.He’d made good progress today, and if he could stick it out for another hour and a half, he could finish sorting the office and bedroom.Then he could amalgamate all the accumulated “What are we doing with this, anyway?”piles in one and pull up the kitchen subfloor to see how bad the joists had rotted.
“Just as an FYI,” Starling said when they were pulling back into the driveway, their leftovers stashed safely in Joe’s cooler because he was still too chickenshit to open the fridge, “you are going to need, like, so much drywall compound.Can you even use drywall compound on plaster?”
