Aliens and Interstellar Mosquitoes, Explained

So, I realized you might be wondering. What’s the bar tab for this dining room remodeling project? It’s just one room. It’s heavy on elbow grease, and comparatively light on material. There’s no porcelain stuff or stainless steel items or granite this and that, like rooms that cost, baby. But even by stripping out the labor by using indentured servants and vacuuming the few remaining hours of the day out of my life, it has to cost something.

Let’s see what it’s worth, at least to civilians, anyway. This website asks the question, how much does it cost to renovate a dining room, and answers it, too, after a fashion. The punchline, like most jokes, comes at the end, although some of the numbers that people apparently spend on a dining room gave me a chuckle. It says you can build one for between $20,000 and $50,000. Do tell. I could build you a fairly good space shuttle for fifty grand. If you skimped on the project, and only had twenty thousand, the space shuttle would have storm windows instead of fused silica outer panes to keep out the aliens and the interstellar mosquitoes, but it would still get you there and back. Or there. Maybe. I just want a dining room where my socks don’t get caught on abandoned carpet staples anymore.

But we’re not building a dining room, are we? We’ve already got one, such as it is. We’re applying some spit and polish, and skimping on the polish at that. How much do they estimate it would cost to just fix one, or if I know the American public, paint one badly, swap out the old unattractive light fixture for a new hideous light fixture, and hang four GATHER signs? According to the same article, about $3,000.

That doesn’t sound like a crazy number out in contractor-world. By definition they’ll be working in an occupied house, and that makes the tumblers spin on the renovator slot machine. We can’t afford that kind of dough, and if we could, I’d spend it somewhere else anyway. Probably somewhere with a liquor license on the wall.

But let’s add to the sum total of human knowledge, instead of increasing the amount of internet snark. Here’s what our dining room renovation required in one form or another:

• Drywall
• Lumber
• Plaster
• Electrical
• Woodwork
• Light fixtures
• Paint
• Flooring
• Painter’s tape

And here’s what it cost, as far as I can remember:

Drywall: $120

Drywall increased in price a lot recently, but it’s still pretty cheap. A 4′ x 8′ sheet was about $15, and the local lumber yard delivered it. Anything that covers anything in this house for 50 cents a square foot is alright by me. We needed 8 sheets.

Lumber: $20

Lumber consisted solely of firring strips to level the ceiling. I put $20 in there because that’s what you put in there when you can’t count that low on an estimate.

Plaster: $50

Two bags of setting drywall compound and a five gallon pail of ready-mix drywall compound. A five gallon pail of drywall compound now has four-and-a-half gallons of drywall mud in it. Remember, your world isn’t getting more expensive, it’s getting smaller.

Light fixtures: $48

A canless 6″ LED light is like $12 if you buy them in bulk and skip all the smart home horseshite. I’m the smartest thing in my house, thank you very much.

Electrical: $20

Insulated copper wire is still fairly cheap if you buy it in long lengths. They don’t make pennies out of it anymore, but I don’t see why not. You couldn’t buy anything with pennies these days, no matter how small the five gallon pails get. There wouldn’t be that many in circulation.

Woodwork: No value

I used to be an estimator. Whenever you had stuff you had already paid for, and needed to use, but didn’t want to include in an estimate, you’d write, “No Value” in the cost column. It was a great way to look profitable on one job by simply molesting some other job’s spreadsheet. Once a job was operating at a loss, it might as well go right down into the No Value volcano to the bottom floor. The woodwork was made from stuff whose cost was pillaged in the mists of antiquity, stripped from the knights of the castle NoValue.

Paint: $100

Paint the ceiling white. Paint the walls brick red. Two gallons and done. I threw in a few tablespoons of clear wood finish to recoat the wood trim.

Flooring: $337

Whoa, there. That looks like a hard number. A real number. Worst of all, it looks like a three-digit number. We can’t afford too many of them. But the room is big, about sixteen feet square, and when we bought laminate flooring for the kitchen, we bought enough to do the whole first floor of our house. We got it at Marden’s, a Maine tradition, which is one step away from rummaging through dumpsters. I said “away,” you’ll notice, not “above.” It was discounted all to hell, but it still cost more than any other item, except:

Painter’s tape: $143,879

I’m not sure this number is accurate. It might be low. I’m not certain when painter’s tape got more expensive than Faberge eggs, but it happened. I tried asking the clerk in the hardware store if his pricing gun was on the blink, or maybe he put the tag for a snowblower or a pallet of peat moss on a single roll of blue tape by accident. He said, “If you don’t like the blue tape, we have green tape now, too, but it costs more.”

I couldn’t bear to pay what they’re asking for it. I went down in my basement and hunted around for a couple of rolls I bought before painter’s tape became a federal cabinet post and an integral part of GDP calculations, and marked it on the estimate as NO VALUE.

Problem solved.

[To be continued]