Recently, I came across a sign on a studio that read “Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two”. Took me a minute, but I totally GOT that. I thought it was both hilarious and also remarkably relevant to my start-stop-stall-restart farmhouse rescue project, now on it’s 22nd month! Also come to find out — “Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two” is a whole THING. It’s actually many things, including being the “Iron Triangle” of product development, aka cost-quality tradeoff theory as well as applied to project management practices routinely. Who knew this was the stuff of industry. I mean – seriously, I just thought it was FUNNY.

Funny because it’s true, less funny when it’s your truth. To refresh memories, in the Fall of 2016 I bought a couple of acres out on Vashon with some cool outbuildings and a less cool, brink-of-collapse 1912 farmhouse. I refer to the place as “Black Sheep Farm”, and it’s basically my entire retirement plan. I then decided to restore the farmhouse, a choice met with much skepticism by many. Thankfully, I have a few supporters. By the fall of 2017, I’d spent the entire budget for this project, plus more, managed to pull it pretty far back from the brink of collapse and decidedly stop any further deterioration.

Since “good” is one of my core real-life values, and since “cheap” is my real-life reality, “fast” was off the table early in the curve. I didn’t “pick two” as much as they picked me. “Fast” plainly wasn’t going to happen. Towards the end of 2017, the infrastructure and the exterior (sans paint) was buttoned up, I closed Black Sheep Farm up for the winter and recuperated. I needed a break after an emotionally exhausting year. I set my sights on 2018 being the year of the “habitable” restoration stages – the interior spaces.  I had a sound building in place, I needed to make it a house. You know, with a kitchen and floors and stuff. I had things all lined up to start again in the spring. At least, I thought I did.

Personal aside – other stuff happened in the Fall ’17 to Spring ’18 timeframe. My extended family took a huge loss and suffered plenty of collateral damage, my professional life took an unexpected turn, the world changed in ominous and terrifying ways. Black Sheep Farm is a restoration project but it’s also a “dream” – it represents my best efforts at living out my life in a manageable, genuine and contented ways. However steadfastly one is chasing a dream, the day-to-day realities of everyday life are always in play. Life is a balancing act. 

The “habitable” line-up included a set stairs, the balance of the interior framing on the second floor*, another quick round of electrical (again, on the second floor*), high-end insulation, sheetrock and floors throughout. Then cabinets, doors, fixtures and finishes. All the big-ticket infrastructure (restructuring entire areas of the house, all new plumbing + water main, all new electrical + panel) was done. Next on the schedule: a series of less intimidating but significant steps forward, each dependent on the one before it.

*Ok – about the second floor. It’s an attic space with steeply vaulted walls and very head-bangingly low in spaces. In the farmhouse’s earlier lives, it was kids’ rooms. The kids-now-adults that slept up there don’t have fond memories of the space and that’s an understatement. There was plenty of common-sense reasoning to return that floor to attic/storage space and be done with it. Bwa-Ha-Ha! Common sense left that building a long way back. Plus, the peek-a-boo view of the harbor is up there. Duh – I’m building around that!

March became April which became May. Here’s the tedious part where I could whine about the contractor lack of availability, recount all the empty reassurances and consistent no-shows. Around these parts, complaining about contractors (or the lack thereof) is the equivalent of whining about the weather – futile and annoying. Either you don’t want to read about it or you’re living some version of it yourself. Or, you already had to hear about it and as such, I could do that but why bother.

As much as I appreciate my friends’ interest, I came to dread “How’s the farmhouse project going”. For one thing, if they dared to ask, they’d be bound to have to listen to me bemoan the lack of progress no matter how hard I tried to keep my spirits up and my complaining to a minimum. The project wasn’t going anywhere and I was getting pretty fixated and upset about it.

My dismay centered, metaphorically and in many literal ways — the stairs. More precisely on the lack of a set of stairs from the main floor to second floor. The stairs that not only provide access to the second floor, but ultimately shape the entirety of the interior layout, both in form and function. The stairs the house came with were dizzyingly steep and impractically narrow. There was zero question about that – if I was going to reclaim the second floor as living space, there had to be better stairs to get there.  The stairs had to be both bigger and take up less valuable space on the main floor. Definitely a cute trick.

Terrible, terrible stairs! It was almost fun taking them out.

As long as the new stairs weren’t getting built none of the other things could happen. So, there’s that – no stairs equaled no progress. No-Stairs May evolved into No-Stairs June which became No-Stairs July and hope diminished every passing week. Fast forward through the minutiae and months of frustration and here we are in August. Hottest month of the year, miserable working conditions, and lo and behold – the faint light of progress appeared! Contractor has started popping in on site and things started happening, including a couple of false starts building stairs. Which led to trying to schedule electricians to follow.

The main thing I needed the electricians for was the basic wiring to the second floor, work being stalled by lack of easy access. Yep – again with the stairs. However, if the off-island electricians are on island, and they have a half day, but you’re not ready because the stairs aren’t actually in place at all, you scramble for work-arounds. In this case, ladders. Once you’ve let the electrician genie out of the bottle, you don’t make ’em wait. So, they came and did a bunch of stuff. The days of only 2 functional outlets and only during daylight hours are over now. Working conditions got better, for sure.

Then came the stairs. To be more specific, the rough-in stairs. The last. Major. Infrastructure. Carpentry. Bit. The core of this house AND the cause of so much agonizing. It was a big deal. The beginning of the end of this project. The floodgates are kinda open now. We’re “Go” for habitable and a lot of things are going to happen now. TA-DA: Here are the stairs!

With the stairs – access to the second floor and the validation I so desperately needed for reclaiming this funky upstairs area for living space.

Inhale. Exhale. Next up was the insulation. There are a few insulation options, the highest-end being spray foam. Gold plating this house was only slightly less expensive (apologies if you’ve heard that joke already). Spray foam insulation has pretty high “R-Value” (which means “Resist-Value” as in resist heat flow. Look at all the new, fun things I’m learning!), sound-proofing qualities, is considerably less attractive to pests but here’s the thing – it fills a lot of gaps, compensates for (ahem) “quirky” or ancient construction and by extension, adds stability and rigidity to a structure. Or, rephrased, “Duh”. This investment had to be made. We have all been though a lot, we have fixed, corrected, reframed, treated, reconfigured, repaired this farmhouse for 18 months now and even still, it can use all the support it can get.

Funny thing happened once the insulation guys got a couple of hours into the work – they kicked me out! Something about “safety”. Boo! So, GET THIS — I evidently have to stay out of the “off-gassing” part of the show. It’s not like there’s not holly and blackberry to wage landscape war with, or mind-numbing drywall material calculations to invariably do incorrectly, or any number of other “next step” things, so of course….

To Be Continued.

All my love from Black Sheep Farm – X/O JA

“People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and the loss and aching pain of the heart will lessen as time passes, but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we have to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.” Fredrik Backman.