Chapter 9 - The Renovation Begins
Back at 442 Oakridge Lane, the transformation of the house matched my own inner renewal.
I hired a local contractor named Thomas—a kind, steady man in his late fifties whose wife had passed away a few years prior—to completely gut the damp, neglected hallway and the storage room where Stephanie used to cram her holiday decorations.
"You know, Margaret," Thomas said one Tuesday morning, wiping sweat from his forehead as he measured a new door frame, "this house has good bones. It just needed someone who actually cared about its foundation to live in it."
"It needed a lot more than care, Thomas," I replied, handing him a cold bottle of lemonade. "It needed honesty."
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We knocked down the makeshift wall Clinton had put up to turn my private sitting room into his home office. When the drywall came down, the sunlight flooded back into the space, illuminating the original hardwood floors that had been hidden under cheap carpet for years.
By the end of the second week, my downstairs apartment was unrecognizable. It was bright, airy, and entirely mine. There were no boxes of seasonal clutter, no damp corners, and no lingering sense of being an unwelcome guest in my own life.
