Life under construction—or, at least, living in our future rental unit above what will be our apartment—comes with a thin layer of dust. The soundtrack is drilling and thwacking in the early morning and, by the end of the day, the whirr of the Shop-Vac. That’s when the pipe soldering doesn’t set off the smoke alarm.
We have learned workarounds to the intermittent interruptions: no heat (a space heater, extra blankets, tea), no hot water (boil cold water, pour into basin like the Victorians did), no water at all (wipes, learning to live with our own stink). It has been months since we had a working oven or gas range, since the upstairs gas line was leaking and had to be turned off until the whole system could be replaced. We cook on a plug-in camp stove that takes about twenty minutes to boil a pot of water.
