My retirement pandemic bathroom remodel: Did this really happen?

By Catherine Carroll, January 31, 2022. Word count approximately 4,646

My house, in the midwest rust belt, was built in 1942.  It’s a very basic house;  brick exterior,  plaster walls, hardwood floors and small.  Less than 900 square feet.  This gives me a living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms, one bathroom and an unfinished basement. It’s a duplex with a cinderblock wall between my home and my neighbor's home.  Enough to make some Manhattanites envious perhaps, but overall an undesirable style of house in this part of the country.  Nevertheless, it’s a good house for me.  My neighborhood has sidewalks, mature landscaping and, in good weather, people out riding bikes, exercising, walking their kids and dogs -l the kinds of things one thinks of for a desirable neighborhood atmosphere.

In the sixteen years I’ve lived here I have done my fair share of home improvements.  New copper plumbing, new furnace, new kitchen, three new hot water heaters, a new roof, new windows, new front and back doors, refinishing hardwood floors, painting and this is just a partial list.  Despite all of this, I forget exactly when but for sure pre-pandemic, I began to notice how shabby the place was looking.  I made excuses and attributed this to the long hours I worked and the long periods of time between cleanings.  After working during the week, I needed to do other things on the weekend - often including more work.  Fortunately, I am not a hoarder, in fact the opposite of, but nevertheless magazines, books and mail pile up.  Thick or thin layers of dust, depending upon where I look, accumulate under the bed, in corners and on horizontal and vertical surfaces.  My leather sofa was faded with crushed cushions and the rug was worn and stained.  Of all the shabby things that bothered me, the bathroom was the worst.  I recalled my words to the real estate agent upon seeing the bathroom sixteen years earlier,  “I can never get a break.”   

By ‘never get a break’, I meant, just for once, couldn’t a house I was considering for purchase have a nice, or even decent, bathroom.  Many years earlier my very first house in rural Kentucky had its bathroom window boarded up.  The bathroom in my Baltimore house did not have a door.  My childhood home had one bathroom for two adults and eight kids until my father built a bathroom in the basement with a stand-up shower when I was 13 or 14.  Prior to this we did not have a shower and I remember rotating bath nights with my siblings.  We washed our hair in the kitchen sink.  But the bathroom in this house, albeit functional, was inarguably the worst.  I still purchased the house.  Never one to enjoy a long commute, this house was an easy drive to work.  All of the other good things made up the difference.

Flash forward, I knew my time to retire was knocking on the door.  I also knew that I was not ready for retirement; for sure not physically, but mostly not mentally or emotionally.  I worked as a nurse practitioner in a large, urban health system and took care of adult patients with acute leukemia and spent sixty hours each week doing it.  Sixty hours seemed like a lot, but my job was also the best of my thirty-five year career.  So many things about it suited me; the multidisciplinary elements, the people I worked with and the mobility I enjoyed.  However, it was really the patients who tilted the job to being the best.  Helping them understand the severity and complexity of their diagnosis, teaching them about their treatment and guiding them through it were the things I thrived on.  I came to know not just each patient but their whole family.  We all have our quirks and foibles and learning how to maneuver around those of each patient, for some in their darkest hour, was a never ending challenge.  As nurse practitioner jobs go, mine was about as good as it gets.  As with any job, there were also the undesirable things, but just as I had purchased a house with a bad bathroom, none of the undesirable things deterred me from wanting to continue working.

In my last several years of working I paid off my mortgage but continued to save the monthly amount toward the renovation of my bathroom when I retired.  I just couldn’t see how to do a bathroom renovation in a single bathroom house while I was working.

In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic came and my hospital was immediately hit hard.  At one point most of the 500 rooms were occupied by COVID-19 patients and non-clinical areas of the hospital were transitioned to accommodate overflow.  The unit where I did nearly all of my work was meant to be kept COVID-free secondary to the treatment effects (immunosuppression) experienced by oncology and hematology patients.  But COVID still snuck in.  All of the physicians and most of the nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants decamped to work from home.  For a brief period during this early phase of COVID-19, before the health system had a chance to adapt, one physician, a nurse practitioner colleague and I held down the inpatient services for our division.  The same NP colleague later tested positive for COVID, as did many nurses and other hospital staff.  The health system would ultimately experience many employee deaths secondary to COVID-19. 

By Christmas of 2020, with activity in the hospital now at a new normal and the worst of COVID-19 seemingly behind us, I was sitting at my desk on Christmas Eve finishing up for the day.  At 4:30 pm I got up to leave and was unable to walk.  Doing so required an exaggerated, painful limp with my right leg.  I hobbled to my car and, with my knee swollen to the size of a melon, did my best to proceed with my Christmas Eve plans.  Several days later I saw a sports medicine physician and was told that I had experienced a flare-up of osteoarthritis in my right knee.  I didn’t even know I had osteoarthritis.  How could I have a flare-up?

I had always wanted to work until I was at least age 70 but for a multiplicity of reasons, not just my knee, the time for retirement seemed right.  I set my date for March 1st but the date was delayed until July 1st.  Such dysfunction is not uncommon in many health care systems mostly because everything is done with threadbare resources.  I was relieved.  I knew I needed the time.  Because of the workload I had done nothing to prepare and was still not even remotely ready.  I could only hope that when the time came things would somehow fall into place.

A few days before my last day my hematology physician colleagues gave me a surprise retirement gathering with a card, cake and beautiful gift.  They went around the table and each said something that they thought to be memorable about me.  Some of it was funny and all of it was nice.  I hoped it was sincere.  For all of the years I worked with them I always did my best, but because of the demands of the job, it was not always pretty.  There were plenty of flare-ups having nothing to do with osteoarthritis.  When my turn came they asked me what I was going to do.  I wanted to say that I was going to miss them terribly and I didn’t want my time with them to end.   Instead I replied that I was going to get a new bathroom; “I have never lived in a house with a nice bathroom and I don’t care what it costs.” 

My first month of retirement was spent sitting at my patio table with my laptop and phone trying to work out the details of Social Security and Medicare.  My employer based health insurance ended on July 31st and I finalized the most important part of Medicare on July 30th.  I remember thinking how ironic it would be to spend most of my career working in health care and then come to retirement and have no health insurance.  

Finding someone to do my bathroom renovation promised to be the tricky part. Almost immediately I began speaking with family, friends and neighbors to inquire if anyone knew of someone who did bathroom renovations.  No one knew anyone.  Then, one Sunday evening, my mother showed me a small block advertisement for home and bathroom remodeling on the last page of her church paper.  Aging in place was a specialty of this company.  In business for 27 years.  The company’s owner attended my mother’s church.  I called and left a message and when the owner returned my call I made an appointment for him to come see my bathroom.  

The Tokyo Summer Olympics were on TV and Gabrielle Thomas was getting ready to run in the 200 meter race when the contractor’s truck stopped in front of my house.  Since the runners were already in the starting blocks, I asked if we could watch the race.  It would only take 25 seconds.  Gabrielle Thomas won the bronze medal and we spoke about the race for a couple of minutes.  He thought Gabrielle Thomas was beautiful.  I agreed.  We went upstairs to see the bathroom.  I made it clear that I wanted to gut everything and that I did not want a bathtub, only a shower.  Since I had never done such a renovation I didn’t know much after that.  He had questions - did I want to keep the soffit, keep the clothes chute, want another electrical outlet; what about the windowsill, the threshold, the door and the trim? - all of which I had to ask for his advice.  Just meeting him and speaking with him I was confident he would do a good job.  But the look on his face also suggested that he had little enthusiasm for it.  I ignored this look and told him that I would like him to do the project and asked when he thought he could start.  “Right now it’s looking like the end of October or beginning of November.”  He told me it would take four to five weeks.  With those words I was reminded of my leukemia patients when they learned they would be in the hospital for a month - maybe slightly less, but maybe even a little longer - definitely not what they wanted to hear.  But it was also the start of their learning.   They thought about it and decided they could do it.   “I don’t ever want to feel this bad again,” was a common response.  Four to five weeks was not what I wanted to hear for the renovation of my 5’x7’ bathroom, but if they could do it, so could I.  He asked for a couple of weeks to prepare the contract.  He gave me the names of a nearby cabinet-making company for the vanity and of a tile store to make my tile selection. Three weeks later I signed a contract and wrote a check for the down payment.

It was still summer and COVID-19 seemed to be moving toward being a thing of the past.  Of course, we now know this wasn’t true.  Even as the Delta variant seemed to be waning, I learned that a trip to India planned for February 2022 was delayed until 2023.  I made a reservation with my alumni travel group to go to Costa Rica in March 2022.  I asked a young friend, a gifted nature artist who was completing her linguistics dissertation, if she would like to join me.  She said yes.  It would be a fun goal and compel her to work harder.  Otherwise, I didn’t do anything special.  Summer was enjoyable.  There were still calls to make and forms to complete for Social Security and Medicare as new issues popped up and, of course, I had to shop for my bathroom..  September came and went and was just as nice.  By the time October arrived my contractor’s (this is how I now referred to him) words were fresh in my mind.  End of October, beginning of November.   News of the Omicron variant began to surface.  I checked in with friends from work but no one seemed very alarmed.  By then this was the new normal for health care workers.

I got my influenza vaccine and later followed with my COVID-19 booster on October 19th.  I still had not heard anything from my contractor.  Finally I emailed him to inquire about my place in line.  I thought that some delay would be normal given that delays often occur with construction projects.  Twenty-four hours passed.  Then forty-eight hours.  No reply.  Finally, I opened my email and read his one sentence reply.  “Right now it’s looking like March or April.” 

I hated giving my patients news that their discharge would be delayed.  In particular, I recalled one patient’s response.  “Be honest with me.  Am I ever going to get out of here?”

I wouldn’t be able to stick with the March or April delay.  There were just too many adverse possibilities that were so easy to imagine.  Near the start of my contractor search, I recalled my sister-in-law, Kay, asking why I hadn’t considered Rob, my brother Tom’s and her son.  “Rob does beautiful work.”  The past winter he had renovated the two bathrooms in their Florida condo so that they could put it on the red hot real estate market.  I pointed out that Rob lived five hours away in a northern tourist city on Lake Michigan and I didn’t think he would be interested.  “Well, that’s true,” she replied.  But I had seen the photos of their bathrooms and now I had to call.  I left a message and he called back almost immediately.  I explained my situation.  Rob was coming to my area to attend a recognition his father (my brother) and others were receiving at a high school football play-off game.  He would stop by on the weekend.  He didn’t say he would do the project but I had a foot in the door.  

Rob surveyed my bathroom shaking while I told him what I would like.  I had learned a lot from my experience with the first contractor.  Finally, he said, “Well, it’s functional, but I agree, it’s time.  All of this is within my skill set.”  He was finishing an outdoor house painting job up north and was trying to beat the weather.  He couldn’t start until mid-November or beginning of December and, yes, I should start buying tile and the other necessary bathroom  accessories..  I had already purchased the vanity and sink.  I went on a shopping spree paying $5,000 for tile and then transported 1000 pounds of tile to my house.  I purchased grout, two niches, the medicine cabinet, the faucet, a towel bar, an exhaust fan, the light and a beautiful one piece skirted toilet.  I set everything up in the spare bedroom and cleared out the rest of my house.  I had been warned that it would be messy.  I had all of this done by the beginning of November.  Then I waited.                  

The plan was that Rob and Tom - I learned that my brother was his project manager for at least the first two weeks - would stay at our eighty-eight year old mother’s house approximately five miles away.  They showed up the morning of our pre-arranged Friday set-up day.  As Rob and I discussed the project - “this is your work of art Cathy” - my brother prepared the house for major construction.  The hardwood stairs were covered by cardboard pieces, the floors covered with heavy construction paper and every tool known to man was unpacked and stored in my garage and basement.  My brother said, “You never know what you’ll need for a bathroom so we brought everything.”  My small house turned into a construction site.  All that was missing were the orange barrels.

Demolition started the following Monday.  The dust and noise was fierce.  The sound of a cast iron bathtub being broken up is not for the faint-hearted.  Rob carried my tiny toilet bowl like a baby outside to his trailer with the construction waste.  He walked past me and said, “Hmmm, must have been an $89 special” and laughed.   Four layers of prior attempts at bathroom renovation were torn away and at the end of the day we were looking at a cinderblock wall, eighty year old boards, galvanized steel plumbing, the soil stack and uninsulated walls.  Rob, Tom and Al, the demolition man, left for the day.  I stood in the doorway and stared into the naked room.  It was December 6, 2021 and the thing that I began saving for in 2018 and what I had said would happen when I retired was finally happening.

As the days went by I watched the whole renovation.  The work was noisy, dirty and slow.  Measure twice, cut once.  At the end of each day, after my nephew and brother left, I used Rob's shop vac to remove the debris that had collected.  Some of the debris was from when the house was built.  I wanted even the underwear of my new bathroom to be clean.  With the early December start we bumped into Christmas.  The drywall was up and some of the mudding was done.  I had no idea how long mudding took or how important it is, but I learned.  My bathroom had a ceiling, walls and a plywood floor when Rob and Tom left for Florida to join the rest of their family for the holiday.  The Omicron variant was wreaking havoc on the country with the highest infection rates ever of the pandemic.  Florida was red hot on the daily map published in the New York Times.  I was left with a week of peace living in a construction zone.  Two weeks had passed since the start of the project.  Fourteen days was also the half-way point of my patients’ treatment and hospitalization.  By this time I recalled how, for some, they were ready to jump out of the window.  But they didn’t.  If they could do it, so could I.

I was also learning more about my brother and nephew.  I had no idea my brother was so handy.  I noticed that he and my nephew worked well together.  From time to time I would hear Tom call his son “Robbie.”  I had only ever heard my nephew referred to as Robert (by his mother) or Rob (by everyone else.)  I came to recognize that “Robbie” was my brother’s term of endearment for his son, used especially when he wanted to make a suggestion or to point out something that was being overlooked.  At one point Tom said to me, “You don’t tell Rob what to do.”  

I realized that I did not know Rob at all.  He was my mother’s first grandchild and had three younger sisters.  He graduated from the same high school that I had graduated from.  But, other than the stories over the years, my memories of him were few.  I saw how expertly and efficiently he worked.  When did he become so skillful at this kind of work?  Was this the same kid who attended a snowbound northern university and skipped morning classes to drive over the Sault Ste. Marie bridge to go snowboarding in Ontario?  Ultimately,  he dropped out.  Or the same guy who, with his best friend, attempted to cross a narrow part of Lake Huron from Drummond Island to Ontario in a small watercraft.  No part of Lake Huron is that narrow and they landed on the rocky shore of an island with engine trouble thinking it was the Ontario mainland.  Or the same guy who, with the same friend, and without any big water sailing experience that his family knew of, sailed from Seattle to Long Beach.  He laughed when I asked him about this during a break in construction.  Yes, they had done that but midway through they docked the boat near San Francisco and flew back to Michigan to build an apartment over a garage for a guy in Ann Arbor.  When they finished building the apartment, they flew back to San Francisco and the sailboat to continue their trip.  So he had been learning and honing his skills all along.

Rob returned from the Christmas break alone.  The work his father could help him with was finished.  I was happy to see him.  My thought that everything should now go quickly was a pipedream.  I learned that bathrooms are the most difficult room to renovate.  By contrast, kitchens are easy.  It occurred to me, and HGTV confirms this, that there are three main reasons why people move:  Relocation, the family has outgrown their living space and, finally, because the bathrooms need renovation.  

On the second day of Rob’s return, he called me in the morning to say that he wasn’t feeling well.  He was concerned it could be COVID.  ( I later learned he had many reasons to think this.)  A rapid test was negative but when he arrived at my house I was double-masked.  I did my H&P questioning and considered that it could be many things.  However, he had also just returned from Florida.  He seemed lethargic and uninterested in the bathroom.  That afternoon his temperature was 102.5.  Off we went for PCR testing and the next day learned it was positive.  There was little surprise in this but it seemed to rattle him.  Rhetorically, he asked, “how could I have got COVID?”  Throughout the whole renovation Rob's temperament was even and unruffled.  Not wanting to provoke him now, (my bathroom was only halfway finished), I tried to remain silent and calm.  But my brain swirled with other thoughts.  Oh, I don’t know.   Could it be because you are unvaccinated and traveled to red hot Florida?  That you never wear a mask?  Perhaps it was at the night club?  Or the magic show on the beach?  Possibly the cheek by jowl restaurant seating?. Every spoken sentence included the word COVID.  As a masking, fully vaccinated health care professional I mostly bit my tongue.  When I did make a few remarks I noticed how easily he brushed them off.  I knew, we all know, it was hopeless.  Fortunately the frequency of the word diminished as the days went by. 

We paid strict attention to our social-distancing, Rob began wearing a mask and I double-masked.  We switched places for sleeping.  I now went to my mother’s to spend the night (and found this freeing and relaxing) and he remained at my house.  He developed a fondness for my shy cat and she for him.  In the evenings while my mother and I watched Amy Schneider on Jeopardy, Rob was grateful for my cat’s companionship.  When I returned in the morning he would report on the cute things she did.  The bathroom was progressing; the tiling - Rob’s specialty - was in progress..

Laying bathroom tile is indeed a specialty.  Over the course of the project Rob would share observations he had learned from doing prior renovations.  When it came to laying tile, people were not patient, they couldn’t understand why it took so long.  He also happened to be a perfectionist which suited me just fine.  One Friday morning, with the completion of the bathroom still a week away, I had my annual ophthalmology appointment.  In the waiting room the television was programmed to HGTV and I became absorbed in one of those house-flipping programs.  I noticed that when it came time to lay the bathroom tile, two or three pieces were carefully placed and then, all of a sudden, the activity speeded up and the bathroom renovation was completed in about 30 seconds of TV time.  This was followed by staging the house, then a For Sale sign went up and then people were coming to the Open House.  Knowing how popular HGTV is, and that such renovation is a vicarious experience for most people; I thought, this is why people cannot understand the time and attention to detail laying tile requires.  

The process of tiling a bathroom is carefully planned - this is done before that and that before this, and so on.  Everything takes at least 24 hours to dry; sometimes 48 hours.  When the grouting is finished and dry then it needs to be sealed.   Even I am short-cutting with this explanation.  When Rob was working on the tile - measuring, cutting, thinsetting -  I noticed that he would start to hum the same tuneless notes.  He probably is somewhat tone deaf - my whole family seems to be - but I came to recognize his tuneless humming as a sign of his deep concentration.

My bathroom was nearly finished.  People called to check on us.  I would tell them it was 98.5% finished; two days later it was 99.5% finished.  On Friday, January 21st, Rob hung the bathroom door and trimmed out the door frame.  In the early afternoon he finished painting and caulking the trim.  My bathroom renovation was complete.  It was a bitterly cold, but sunny and dry afternoon.  We began packing up his truck and trailer.  This took awhile and I helped where I could.  He had a five hour drive home and was eager to be on the road.  From my own work I am well-acquainted with burnout and, as the weeks went by, I came to recognize Rob’s burnout.  At one point late in the project, out of the blue, he said to me, “No one likes to do bathrooms Cathy.”  Even though he considered bathroom renovation to be his specialty, I now understood why.  I now also understood the unenthusiastic look on the face of my first contractor.  But, if I was the designer of my work of art, Rob was the artist.  I  would be remiss if I didn’t add that over the course of renovating my bathroom, Rob also helped me with or advised me on many other projects around the house.  During this time, both my basement and kitchen got facelifts.  

I waved as Rob pulled away from my driveway at 4:30 pm.  I walked into my house and just stood there.  Six and a half weeks.  The place was a mess.  I didn’t know what to do first.  So I climbed the stairs to my new bathroom, stood in the center and, turning slowly, just looked.  I thought I might cry, but I didn’t.  

I thought of my patients when they learned that the result of their post-induction chemotherapy bone marrow biopsy was clear of leukemia.  Occasionally they would cry; often their family members cried, so great was their relief.  The crying was brief because it was really about happiness.  I would wait until everyone could listen again and then ask if they were ready to hear what came next.  They were always ready.  I had prepared them for it.  They knew they still had a long road of treatment remaining.

My bathroom renovation was complete and the finished result far exceeded what I had ever imagined.  Unlike my patients I don’t know what comes next.  I didn’t prepare myself for it.  The rest will fall into place.