A Little Fairy Tale...

Once upon a time a long, long, long, long, long time ago in a little town called The Gundo lived a girl in her apartment. The building was old but it was in a great location, grass for her dog and lots of parking unlike her previous place in Manhattan Beach so she could actually entertain and have a bible study at her place. She loved it, such a great place to live and work.

Sidebar - this girl had just finished living through 2 years of renovations to the Manhattan Beach apartment.

Back to the story...

Six months after she moved in, the apartment building changed ownership and the new landlord decided to do renovations. Old so thin they might as well not be there windows were replaced with double paned windows, roof was redone (there were some leaks although not in my apartment), plumbing redone, new garage doors with openers, water heaters (the size of maybe 4 Sparkletts containers removed for tankless water heaters (whoo hoo for those who don't have one, you can take hours worth of showers and it never gets cold) and some of the apartments were remodeled and upgraded (envision Brigitte's apartment). All great things but then progress stopped not the landlord's fault but rather the contractors - one guy was living in the garage (guess he had been kicked out), deck guy decided this "life" wasn't the one he wanted (could be concidence but the same thing happened to the deck guy in Manhattan Beach) and the stucco guys were just plain not reliable.

Silence for a few years. Although the building looked half done with stucco surrounding the windows not matching the building and deck torn up with plywood showing, it was so wonderful for the girl to not be woken up to hammering, staple gunning, or the sound of an electric saw or other languages being spoken, have to ask a truck owner to move so the girl could get her car out of the garage or dust her house and plants off every day.

Neighbors and friends were puzzled by the left undone state of the apartment building but the girl felt blessed to have noise free work days and waited patiently for the conclusion.

One day a few years later the contractors reappeared (remember the blog entry from September 2008) and the symphony of construction began again. Scaffolding was erected and a lovely veil encased the apartment building.




The windows were covered with black plastic...



Creating this work in the dark atmosphere at mid-day.



For the sandblasting. A few cracks and holes were found during the next rain storm and more stucco was added. The outside ceiling was redone. The roof was tilted or angled and tiled. And then wind and rain curbed the momentum that was building and the veil was lifted. Now the building was still undone but now surrounded by scaffolding and the flooring was covered in plastic and the death trap stairs.

Earlier this week, the veil came down again. There was some more stucco'ing going on behind there, more pounding on the roof and...

Waaaaahhhhhh Laaaaaaaaa

A new castle (remember the fairy tale theme) for the girl. Come by and visit it looks pretty cool at night with the lights over the garages.

And they all lived happily ever after...well almost... There was still some residual scaffolding, but that is actually dismantled now as well. All that is left is re-doing the stairs and walkways and landscaping.

In all seriousness, although it seems like a long time coming, God has blessed me with alot of patience so, for the most part, the noise, workers or the duration really didn't bother me. And he blessed me with a great apartment that didn't have any leaks or issues as some of the other apartments did and taught me over the years to unclench my hold on my stuff and things that had to be moved, covered, or exposed as workers came through my apartment. My landlord is awesome for caring and investing so much time and money into her building.