Nolan looked at Grayson, alarmed. Rachel was now a month old, so Nolan had felt okay going back to work. He’d hired a nanny he absolutely adored. She was a perky twenty-two-year-old named Emily who had been taking nanny jobs while she saved up to get her degree in early childhood education. She was great with Rachel and lived close enough that she could get to his place quickly if need be. He’d hoped to postpone going back to work, but the Restoration Channel had a schedule to adhere to, and anyway, he was only really working three days a week. Restoration let him bring Rachel to the studio on days they weren’t filming, although he’d also filmed a segment where he explained his absence at the Peter/Justin reveal by saying that he’d adopted a baby. So if he did bring her to filming at the studio, the audience wouldn’t be too surprised by a crying baby.
But he’d been looking forward to the hiatus while work was in progress at the Chu house. That promised to be a tearjerker of a project, as it was. Linda Chu was a woman in her sixties who had just gone through a pretty rigorous round of treatment for breast cancer, but her doctor had declared her cancer-free, so she’d decided to seize life by the horns. Her first step was renovating the house she’d been in for thirty years, where she’d lived with her late husband and raised her two now-adult children. Zero work had been done to the house in all the years she’d been there, and it was in pretty rough shape. Linda’s kids had no idea how to even start to help, so they’d gotten in touch with the show. So, basically, Nolan and Grayson were now renovating a grandma’s house so that it could be the place where everyone went for holidays.
And now Helena was saying she wanted them to do two more.
The next day Nolan drove himself and Grayson out to a house on Long Island, where the Martin family lived.
Grayson read the brief, as had become their routine for in-car footage.
“Kevin Martin works for a social media company, and Debra Martin is a freelancer-slash-stay-at-home mom. Debra has lupus and a few other health problems, which has slowed down renovating this house they bought two years ago. They have two kids, ages two and five.” Grayson paused and turned a page. “Okay, so, this house. They bought it two years ago and hired a contractor to fix it, but he was a shady character who left the place a shambles. So they’ve been saving money for a while to do it right, but in the meantime, half their house is unusable.”
They arrived at the house a half hour later. It was a two-story Colonial, just like most of the houses in the neighborhood, and it looked fine from the outside. The front door was ajar, because the film crew was already inside, and Grayson and Nolan were here for the ambush.
Grayson had really started getting into these ambushes. He grinned as they slid through the front door opening, and Nolan found himself getting caught up in it too as they walked down the narrow vestibule.
Here was clearly where the problems began. The floor was sanded but not refinished. The baseboards were missing. The outlets didn’t have plates. And this was just the vestibule.
The couple in question were standing in their living room. They both squealed when Grayson and Nolan entered the room.
After hugs were exchanged, Nolan said, “So this is rough.”
“No kidding,” said Kevin.
“We bought this house two years ago,” Debra explained. “When we first walked in, there was something really homey about it. I just had this gut feeling that this was our home, you know? But we wanted to customize it, so we hired this contractor who our friends recommended, but he was… well, what’s the contractor equivalent of a quack?”
“Ah,” said Nolan.
“He did a lot of things poorly, which makes me think most of his work is not up to code,” said Kevin. “We fired him, but then he left our house like this.” He gestured around. “But by then we were almost out of money, so we haven’t been able to do anything to fix it.”
“Upstairs is not usable,” added Debra. “The staircase is a hazard, and I won’t let the kids on it.”
Nolan looked at the staircase and saw right away that that it was missing a railing and that a few of the treads on the steps were not sitting correctly. “Is there anything else wrong with upstairs?”
“Well, we planned to move the laundry upstairs, and the contractor started doing the plumbing work,” said Debra, “but who knows if any of it is right?”
So the scope of work here was extensive. The good news was that the Martins had saved money over the past year to fix it. Hopefully the money supplied by the Restoration Channel would be enough to finish the job. Because Nolan’s heartstrings were definitely being tugged at.
“We will fix this for you,” he said.
Just then, a woman walked into the house with two small children, who immediately ran through the living room and launched themselves at Debra.
Something in Nolan broke then. The previous couples had inspired him and made him want to fix their homes and make them work, but he’d been thinking about each house as a job. This one really hit him right in the heart. This poor couple, with these two adorable little children, were living in this broken, ruined building that had so much potential but didn’t work.
Yeah, he and Grayson were going to fix this one.
On the car ride back to the city an hour later, Grayson was uncharacteristically quiet.
“Is anything going on?” Nolan asked. “You’re not saying anything.”
“I just feel so bad for this family. The house has such a good footprint, and there’s a lot of potential to make it a really great place to live, but they got swindled by a bad contractor.”
“Yeah. I don’t know why, but this one is really hitting me too.”
Grayson was silent for another beat before he said, “Well, your life has changed pretty substantially in the last six weeks. You’re probably thinking about home and family in a different way.”
That was definitely true. “I had a crazy thought the other day about selling the loft. It’s fine right now, but in a couple of years, walls are going to be more important.”
“Couldn’t you just build walls in the loft?”
