We Said Eight Months. We Cooked on a Hot Plate in the Garage for Nearly Three Years

A reader writes:

When people hear that our renovation took nearly three years instead of eight months, they always ask the same thing: “How are you two still married?” I laugh, but it is a fair question. There were nights I was not sure.

We live in St Philip, in the house my husband’s parents built in the seventies. When they passed, we moved in with our three children. It was solid but tired: a dark kitchen, two small bedrooms upstairs with a flat roof that leaked every rainy season, one bathroom. The plan was simple. Take the roof off the upstairs, put on a pitched roof with a proper third bedroom and a second bathroom under it, and open the kitchen to the back patio. A builder a friend recommended said eight months, maybe nine. We moved the fridge and a two-burner hot plate into the garage and told the children it would be like camping until the summer.

I will not list every problem, because it would take the whole page, but here are the big ones. When they took the old roof off, they found the top of two walls were cracked and had to be rebuilt, which the builder said nobody could have known. Then the rainy season came early and the upstairs was open to the sky for longer than planned, and water got into the ground floor ceiling. Then the builder had a heart scare and was out for nearly four months, and his crew drifted off to other jobs. Then materials went up and the money we had set aside ran out while the roof was only half done.

We had to stop completely for almost eight months while we saved and borrowed from my husband’s cousin. That was the worst time. Tarpaulin over part of the upstairs. Children sleeping downstairs in the living room. Me cooking dinner on a hot plate in the garage with a torch in my mouth because the extension cord kept tripping. Our youngest did her exams during all this. I am still amazed she passed.

We fought. Of course we fought. My husband thought I should have pushed harder on the builder’s price at the start. I thought he should have got a structural engineer to look at the walls before anybody touched the roof. We were both right, which did not help. There was a whole month when we only spoke about practical things, and I would go and sit in the car in the driveway just to have somewhere quiet.

So what kept us together? I have thought about this a lot, and it was not any one big thing.

One was a rule my husband’s mother used to have, which we found written inside the cover of her old Bible when we were clearing the house: “No quarrel after ten.” We started keeping it. If we were still arguing at ten o’clock, whoever noticed first would say “ten o’clock”, and we would stop and go to bed, even if we were still vexed. More than once we woke up and could not remember why we were so angry.

Another was our small group at church. We had not told anybody how bad it was, because we were embarrassed. Then one Sunday I broke down in the car park and a lady from the group saw me. Within a week, three families were taking turns bringing a hot meal on Wednesdays. One of the men was an electrician and he came and sorted out the garage wiring for nothing. I will never forget that.

Another was the children, strangely enough. Our eldest, who was sixteen, said to us one night, “You know we don’t care about the kitchen, right? We just want you two to stop being miserable.” That was hard to hear and it was exactly what we needed to hear.

And we changed how we handled the builder. When he came back, we sat down with him and wrote out a proper schedule for the rest of the work, with payments tied to each stage being finished. We should have done that from day one.

The house is finished now. The kitchen is bright and opens on to the patio. There is a pitched roof that does not leak, a third bedroom and a second bathroom. People say it is beautiful. I still get a small shiver when I see a tarpaulin on anybody’s roof. And I have kept the two-burner hot plate. It is in a cupboard. I don’t know why. Maybe to remember.

— Beverley, Barbados

Editor’s note

Beverley’s story holds two kinds of lessons. The practical ones: have a structural engineer look at an older building before major work, keep a real contingency, plan around the rainy season, and agree a written schedule with payments tied to completed stages. The deeper ones: a simple household rule like “no quarrel after ten” echoes Paul’s counsel not to let the sun go down on our anger (Ephesians 4:26), and letting your church family see your need can turn a lonely struggle into a shared one. Houses can be rebuilt. It is worth protecting the people inside while you do it.

Reader letters may be edited for length and clarity, and names and identifying details are changed.

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