Everybody who’s ever lived through renos knows the truth: nothing goes to plan. Not the timeline. Not your sanity. Not the “It’ll only take a month” optimism your contractor said with a straight face.
I sat down to write today like a responsible author-person. Coffee? Made. Tabs? Closed (mostly). Brain? Attempting to load fantasy romance.exe.
And then… the universe handed me my plot twist.
First: the new fridge arrived. Beautiful. Shiny. Promising a future where my condiments aren’t playing Jenga in a cooler.
Except it was scratched.
Not “tiny little oops” scratched. More like “a cat dragged Excalibur down the side of it” scratched. So now I’m standing there like, Cool cool cool, yes, I’d love to spend my afternoon debating the emotional impact of stainless steel trauma instead of writing Chapter 12.
Then: the bathroom light I’d been excited about showed up… and it’s too big.
Like I held it up and the fixture was like, Aw, you thought you lived in a normal-sized house. Adorable. So now I have a lamp that belongs in a ballroom, and a bathroom that’s more “cozy spa” than “Versailles, but make it damp.”
Meanwhile, the construction zone is doing what construction zones do: reshuffling reality.
I swear I walked from the office to the kitchen and ended up in a different dimension where drywall dust is the dominant life form. I’m living in a tornado. Not the fun movie kind where you get a magical makeover mid-spin. The kind where every surface is gritty, every sound is a power tool auditioning for a heavy metal band, and you can’t find the one thing you just had in your hand.
And I’m still trying to write.
Which means my characters are currently having a very intense emotional conversation while I’m in the background whispering, “Hold on, sorry, someone is sawing through the fabric of time again.”
Renovations are a lot like drafting a book, honestly. You start with a vision. You tell yourself it’ll be clean and linear. And then suddenly you’re covered in dust, questioning all your choices, and the thing you were most excited about is… scratched.
But. We keep going.
Because at the end of this, I’ll have a functional kitchen and a bathroom light that doesn’t require cathedral ceilings… and, hopefully, a finished manuscript that wasn’t written entirely in survival mode.
If you need me, I’ll be over here rewriting a scene for the fourth time while dodging flying chaos. Like a professional.
