On my first day back in Portland I buy four pairs of pants, a heavy woolen jacket, a thick hat, a pair of boots, and a bag of socks…it’s friggin cold!

I arrive at my sister’s new house and am totally blown away. Liz has always been the most “grown-up” of us four kids but now she has the house to prove it. It’s massive and decked-out, practically glamorous. I get the tour before depositing my bags in the basement apartment—my home-away-from-home for the next two months—and reacquaint myself with niece and nephew, Harper and Samuel. Later that afternoon we make the first of what will become countless trips to the hardware store and buy the first round of necessary tools. I’ve been flown to Oregon to tackle a big list of home renovation projects, and waste no time getting started the next morning.

There’s frost covering the grass (COLD for my thinned blood), but at least the skies are unseasonably clear and rain-free. I take advantage of the favorable weather and get started with building a stairway for their second-story deck by first pouring a concrete landing. My father arrives on the scene a week later and together we clad the new framing I’ve built with the just-enough decking that had to be special ordered—okay so maybe we’re a board short and have to scab a couple of the old pieces back together, what’s the big deal? Surprisingly, we then manage to exhaust our supply of explicit language while installing the “easy” do-it-yourself hand railing system, and have to move on to another project before we either maim each other or completely mis-cut the entire supply of yet another special-order product.

So with the weather still holding, we hop around to the other side of the house, open up the existing fence, and proceed to hand-mix a cubic-yard of concrete to set posts and pour a slab for the new opening. That cures over a much needed weekend, and I quickly finish the project by slapping together a gate before moving operations up to the garage where an opening needs to be cut in the wall to allow for a new door. A rented concrete chainsaw (so glad to learn that such things exist) accomplishes in one hour what probably would’ve taken us two days of back-breaking chiseling to do, and now the rough-opening is complete. We get the door hung and sealed—even complete the job with a new overhead motion-sensing light—with just enough time to thoroughly cleanup and reorganize our mess before the entire Krochina clan descends on the house for family photos and holiday cheer.

This is to be our family’s first fully-attended Christmas in ten years, so I suppose the pressure is on. I am able to completely surprise Natasha and Wade (who think I am still in Tunisia), and Liz and Marcus manage to comfortably keep us all under one roof for three days and two nights, thereby receiving the proverbial torch from our parents’ generation. Well done you two, well done indeed. Surprisingly, we laugh more than we argue, we tell more stories than we give gifts, and we eat more than we play on our phones. Ends up being one of the best family gatherings we can remember…other than the fact that Clare is not there to share in the festivities. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, her family is on the other side of the globe celebrating their first Christmas together in almost as long, but she’ll have to write her own review of how things went Down Under.

I ring in the first hours of 2018 at a house party with some old high-school friends who now live in Portland—thus marking my first social outing since returning to the US—and I guess you can say I was enthusiastic. After nursing the requisite hangover at Benzy’s place, I get myself back to Liz’s house in time for an early trip to bed. It is now officially the halfway point, and the biggest project is still yet to unfold.

When Liz first contacted me about working on their new house she started with the question, “Can you flip a stairway?”

“Uh yeah, I suppose so…” I don’t want to seem daunted, “but why do you want to flip the stairs?” I can’t say I’ve ever really heard of someone doing this.

So she goes on to explain that although their basement has a fantastic fully-functioning apartment–something they fully intend to rent out– there is one drawback. The stairway that leads to the kids’ basement playroom and their household storage room passes directly through the apartment. That’s a tough-ask for any renter, not to mention a potentially uncomfortable (or even unsafe) situation for their kids. Not gonna fly. If only we could somehow flip the stairs around backwards and seal off the apartment entirely…

So that’s what I am hired to do. I’ll spare you all the details, but suffice it to say that as the month of January progresses, the pinch to finish the work is felt by all. Work days end up stretching into evenings and even nights. Necessary material from the hardware store is strategically pre-coordinated with either Liz or Marcus so that my time away from the house is utterly minimized. We even hire some of their friends on a day-by-day basis to help share the load and expedite the progress. Honestly, it’s nothing you wouldn’t expect while in the middle of renovating your two-story house that is without a set of stairs, but at the time it feels frantic. That said, I still manage weekends off-the-job to enjoy some personal time in nearby Portland with my mom, my sister, and my friends. Let’s no forget, all work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

Weekends or not we accomplish a lot. In fact, other than hanging the last two sheets of drywall (which has since been completed by Liz and Marcus) we manage to tick every box that I thought possible within a six-week working window. Perhaps we didn’t get as far along in the finishing process as hoped, but I left them with a secure, safe, and functioning new layout. And now they can safety rent their basement apartment to generate some extra income with which to finish the project. Bravo team.

All in all the trip is a total success. I make some much needed income to help fund another cruising season in the Med, Liz and Marucs get a ton of work done on their house for a good price, and we all get lots of family time together over the holidays. By all accounts, a hat-trick of events. Like I mentioned before, the only thing missing is the company of my wife, but we are soon to reunite…