Sheltering at Home Week 8. May 8, 2020
Great news. Our porta-potty is back!
There it is, taking up space on the street in front of our house, looking ugly as only a porta-potty knows how to be ugly.
For Jon and me, as construction work resumes on our house remodel projects, that porta-potty is a sight for sore eyes.
Our remodel began way, way back on November 1. It came to a sharp halt on March 17, when shelter-at-home orders went into effect in our county.
This week, construction work resumes here, as six San Francisco Bay Area counties cautiously loosen their guidelines.
For us Newhalls, that means our precarious, twenty-foot-high deck is finally getting a proper railing. It also means that our new sliding glass doors are in place — and at last our gorgeous sylvan setting is coming into view from our dining room.
Our Coronavirus Companions: Lumber, Shovel, Drills
Soon, very soon, the stuff that’s been cluttering our living room and keeping us company since November — the stacks of lumber, the shovel, the compressor, the saw horses, the clamps, the drills and the dusty batt of insulation — will go away. The new hardwood flooring will go in.
San Francisco and its surrounding counties are doing it right, in my opinion. We were the first in the U.S. to implement shelter-at-home orders. And now the coronavirus numbers are looking good enough to let some businesses get back to business — such as construction, and outdoor enterprises like nurseries and landscapers.
My Bay Area Bias Kicks In
Bear with me. I’m now going to let fly with my Bay Area biases. The San Francisco area, like the state of California, is a great place in many ways. It’s off-the-charts beautiful, for starters. But it’s also got a lot of thoughtful elected officials — conscientious people making tough decisions.
More about living in a construction zone at “Dining in a Construction Zone. Sheltering at Home Day 7.” For a glimpse of California in May, see “Look What Happened in My Front Yard Over the Weekend.”
