Home renovations in the time of Covid

I’m writing this while confined with a mild case of COVID. After two and a half years of evading the virus, it finally caught up with me. Thankfully, symptoms are very mild, with slight cough and fever the first few days. 

It’s a bummer though — as we had to postpone current renovations to two rooms at home. We are blessed to be able to work from home for the foreseable future. On our third year of the pandemic, we decided to renovate two rooms — my wife’s “solar” which she wanted to turn into a hotel-room style office and my man cave, that needed major overhaul.

Halfway into renovating my home office, we found out that the wood flooring was not waterproofed well, so there was a lot of moisture underneath. This added 2 more weeks of work. From wooden flooring I decided to go for tiles to make things simpler and straightforward. After the first week of work where tiles were laid, the family caught Covid, which meant postponing the work inside the house indefinitely. We’re currently on week 2 of isolation and it looks like we will be clear soon.

One thing I had not anticipated was the increase in cost for the construction. The waterproofing, floor removal and replacement almost doubled the cost of my initial budget, so we had issues with estimating payments. We discovered the problem halfway into the tiles removal so this was definitely not budgeted. I had to recalculate the costs (add the fact that we were paying off our home loan so the loan calculator was a huge help here by the way) made it rather tricky.

Construction and renovations in a post-Covid world can be tricky. For one, this isn’t 2020 — vaccines are widely available, even here in the Philippines (I am double boosted!) so I’ve been resigned to the fact that everyone’s going to get it, and it’s mimicking the flu or common cold. I guess it’s the frustration of having construction delayed and in my case the added cost from the surprise we discovered with the tiles.