We were evicted from our basement in mid-March as Mr. Le needed to work on the HVAC and electrical systems and have them inspected. (You know that you have sunk to a new low in home renovation when you can’t even stay in your own basement.)
The eviction was originally scheduled to be for 2 weeks. We jiggled slightly with the schedule so that the 2nd week of the eviction was during our spring break. Because our 7th grader was doing a community service project at Children’s National Medical Center, during the 1st week of our eviction, we stayed near Potomac so that we could carpool with the other family whose children were also doing their service project at Children’s. We then left for Paris for spring break and had a marvelous time. (See previous post.)
About halfway through our stay in Paris, we received an email from Mr. Le saying that our eviction would have to be extended by a week. So we threw ourselves upon the mercy of some friends who live in Chevy Chase and who were about to go out of town on their spring break. As they said, we replaced 2 adults, 1 girl, 1 boy, and 1 bullmastiff in their house with 2 adults, 1 girl, 1 boy, and 1 bullmastiff. It was incredibly generous of our friends to let us stay at their house for the week. And as much as I love our house, it was lovely to be 10 minutes away from the school and walking distance from downtown Bethesda. We are very grateful to them for giving the homeless Mole Family a place to stay.
We finally moved back in after Easter. Who knew you could miss living in a basement so much? But it was good to be back, even if it meant that there was no longer any excuse not to do the 10 loads of laundry that had accumulated during our wanderings.
The main floor and upper floor are still only framed as they finish up the wiring and other internal renovations. They have started painting the exterior brick a very nice shade of taupe/gray.
Barring a miracle, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to move back into the rest of the house at the end of April (as originally projected), but we are still hopeful that we can move in by the end of June (our internal projection). We’d feel more optimistic if there weren’t so many gigantic holes in the house!