00About

A two flat on the north side of Chicago.
900 sq ft. Four people, two dogs.

I'm not a contractor, an architect, or a designer. My husband and I decide what's worth spending money on.

This is the renovation of a Chicago two flat, in order, with the real numbers attached. At this stage almost everything is a decision, a question, or a number nobody has given me yet.

01Why

What every other renovation account left out.

Am I the only one who watches shows on HGTV and wonders how in the heck people can afford it?

I went looking for one place that said what a phase actually costs. I couldn't find it.

Design magazines can't print honest prices, because the advertisers are the people selling the tile. Trade press writes for builders instead of owners. YouTube shows me a different budget in a different building at a different risk. And the reveal accounts skip the phase where the money ran out, because nobody films the thing they cut.

Every one of them withheld the number.

So the arithmetic goes in here. What I estimated before the bids arrived, what the bids came back at, and how far off I was. Being wrong in public isn't fun, but it's also the only part of this that's worth paying attention to.

02Who

Why a person hiring the work out has any authority over pricing.

Hi, I'm Briana

I had migraines from the time I was eight, and I was told I was fine. It took fourteen years and access to a school health office before the thing got a name, and I pursued the diagnosis myself. Third grade was also the year they put me in the gifted program and I started feeling slow. That got a different verdict. The headaches got you're fine. The schoolwork got try harder. Nobody looked at either one.

So I tried harder, for thirty-five years, until four years ago when my body and my brain went at once. Seventeen specialties and eight more practitioners I paid for out of pocket, and every result came back unremarkable. I received my ADHD diagnosis at forty-three, after someone in my family was evaluated. Not because anyone had ever looked at me.

I wasn't being denied anything. I was being overlooked, which is worse, because there's nothing to argue with.

That's also why this site exists. Before the pain stopped my work I spent about twenty years making a case to people who could say no. Cars, travel, enrollment, donations. Different rooms, same job. A contractor's bid is a proposal, and I know how a quote gets built because I used to build them.

The other half is the floor plans. Designing them is my favorite thing on earth, and the systems I build around them aren't a professional habit. They're the accommodation.

I'm not an architect or a designer. I taught myself RoomSketcher and laid all three floors out myself, which took considerably longer than it sounds like it should. When the time comes I'll hand them to an architect to turn into real plans. The layouts are mine. The stamped set won't be.

The rest of that story lives over at brianajwatson.com. This site is just the house.

03Off limits

What I'm keeping off this site

Decided in advance and written down, so it isn't a judgment call I make at eleven at night with an entry due.

  • 01

    The kids

    Two kids sharing one bedroom is a design constraint, and it's in here. Their names, their faces, and anything that belongs to them rather than to me is not.

  • 02

    The tenants

    There are people living in this building on a lease. They didn't sign up for a publication. No names, no lease terms, no characterization of anybody.

  • 03

    Estimates, mistaken for quotes

    Every figure that isn't a signed quote is labeled an estimate. Every time, no shorthand after the first mention. The moment you mistake one for the other, none of this is worth reading.