What I Learned from a Massive Hole in My House

2024 had a lot of lessons to learn, but the ones that stand out the most vividly were from a major house repair after an even bigger accident.

The Accident

On Saturday, August 3, at 2:20am, a car ran into my house. I honestly thought it was thunder and groggily picked my head up, removed my earplugs and eyeshades momentarily, then laid my head back down. My sister looked out the window to see that there was a Mercedes sticking out of the foundation and got me and the dog out of bed.

Mercedes in Foundation — Please note the “no parking” sign where the car bounced off the house

You can see the lintel that was above the window and joists that were attached to the foundation

Note the headlights are still on! And you can see some of the (many) airbags

Over the next three hours, we saw the fire department, emergency building inspector, EMTs, several police officers, a tow truck driver, and several caring neighbors. Two neighbors in particular (thanks, Sara and Aaron!) were voices of reason at a completely unreasonable hour and took the dog to their house for the rest of the night.

We also endured a lot of crying and screaming from the driver and passengers (who were safe, thanks to a plethora of air bags and the excellent construction of their car and my house) and a lot of forced conversation with the driver’s mother, who owned the (brand new) car. I sent her away after the car was towed, since I honestly couldn’t deal with the house situation and the awkwardness of having her there.

The two shelves directly in the line of impact tumbled, but the two shelves to their right only had one can of vegetables topple over

Foundation stones flew nearly the entire span of the house!

Emergency Stabilization

Around 5:00am, Sam from emergency services arrived! He boarded up the hole while my sister Annette worked on clearing debris and I grabbed supplies from Home Depot. (Doggy daycare also took Pippin on a few moments’ notice, which was very much appreciated. There were a lot of strange noises in and around the house that day.)

The backlight from one light on in the basement was a bit spooky, and you can see that the sun was rising by this point

Boarded up and secure! I ended up stapling and taping on plastic to make it more rain-worthy, but these boards protected the house for four months

By noon, Sam had built two temporary walls to hold up the house.

Sam built the front wall while my sister cleared enough debris for him to be able to shore up closer to the foundation

The temporary walls held up the side of our house quite adequately for months

The sitting room wasn’t level to start with, but the piano didn’t previously lean that much… The baseboard separated and drywall cracked in the few hours that they weren’t supported. (It turns out that the foundation does have a purpose!)

Note the piano’s lean and the drywall crack

After Sam left, my sister and I were absolutely exhausted. The adrenaline from the night’s misadventures eventually wore off, and the reality of the situation sunk in.

The next day, some very dear friends (thanks Kristin, Natalie, and Bella!) helped clear more debris, sweep the basement, and mow the yard. In what you’ll see is a theme, with a hole in my house, I was determined that everything else would feel normal. Thus: mowing around the board-up.

Afterwards, my sister and I decided to go to the pool and then out to lunch, where we ran into a friend, who listened to our crazy story and very generously covered lunch. (Much appreciated, Clarissa!) The kindness of friends is also a theme of this experience.

The Aftermath

I could not have predicted the number of people that would come to my house over the next four months to measure the same hole, take the same pictures, and ask the same questions.

Insurance was a delight to work with. (Well, my homeowners insurance was great; the driver’s mom’s car insurance was less of a delight, but they eventually paid my insurance back for the repair.)

The general contractor I selected was not great: he was the opposite of proactive, and every step along the way felt like pulling out teeth. Most of the lessons learned, included below, come from my back-and-forth with the GC over these months that felt like years.

Thankfully everything got in order, and we got back on the brick team’s schedule before it got bitterly cold!

Repair

On Friday, November 15, Dan, Jimmy, John, and James began the foundation and brick repair. They reused almost every foundation stone and brick that had crashed down, along with a few from their stash. Watching them rebuild the wall was absolutely amazing, and my sister was our main quality assurance specialist. Her key accomplishment was making sure the two rows of freehand arches had the correct number of bricks!

Look at those sturdy stones on their way to supporting the joists again!

They cut the foam to size to support the new custom brick arch

A complete wall! Before the window was installed, and before the brick team did an acid wash that made the bricks blend in with the rest of the wall

The brick team finished their portion of the repair in three days, and the GC’s team installed the window over the next two weeks.

Repaired and covered with a parge (skim) coat of mortar

The cherry on top was getting the front room repaired and repainted so we could decorate for Christmas.

The level in the windowsill is SO CLOSE to dead on. And no cracks in the wall or baseboard!

Pippin particularly enjoyed having the house put back together

I decided to paint the basement walls and floor myself (with help – thanks, Mom and Kristin!) rather than coordinate with vendors for several more weeks (the new mortar needed to cure before paint could go on).

So, many mornings and evenings were spent deep cleaning the basement, patching cracks, taping edges, and painting. In what will go down as the most satisfying (but not necessarily fun) PTO day ever, Mom and I painted nearly all of the walls one Thursday, so that it could dry before Kristin and I painted the floor on Monday afternoon.

Mom hard at work rolling that bright white paint! The stone walls are *not* flat, so it was a slog and required a lot of brushwork

Yes, I leaned against a painted doorframe. Rookie mistake

The damage is gone! And fresh paint feels so good.

Lessons Learned about being a Consultant

It was incredibly eye-opening to be on the other side of the client services relationship through this process! I was vividly reminded of a lot of things about communication, program management, and design.

Communication

Communicate proactively, even when you don’t have a big update. In the early days of planning the repair, the GC was making progress but not updating me. So, I would call him and he’d tell me what he’d been doing, and he’d say, “I’ll call you when I have something.” Then I wouldn’t hear from him for days… and I would eventually call him back. It turned out that some things were covered well and others were not, but I had to learn the hard way which were which.

My friendly amendment to the GC’s approach: “I’ll call you when I have something, or in a week, whichever comes first.”

As consultants, we need to proactively communicate, even when the update is “we’re still working on the things we last discussed.” At FlexPoint, we typically have weekly status syncs with the project sponsor or steering committee. This helps us not go too long without providing an update, no matter the cadence of progress.

Another lesson I felt deeply: if a client is asking the same question over and over again, it’s because they weren’t satisfied with the previous answer. I spent what felt like years of my life crafting clear questions to the GC, rehearsing how I would ask them to provide the greatest chance of a successful exchange, and then being dissatisfied or truly angry at the response (or non-response) I got. The fact that I ruminated on this is my problem, but the need for clients to receive clear information from their service provider is universal!

As consultants, if we get the same question from a client more than once, we need to take a few moments to reflect on whether the actions or the communication may have been off, and correct one or both of them!

Program Management

Work the critical path and take care of the other workstreams well enough so that they don’t become the critical path. I was reminded of this lesson viscerally several times through the home repair. Of course, repairing the foundation and brick wall needed to be done before the interior could be repaired. So, the GC understandably focused on scheduling with the brick team. But he underestimated what the permit office needed and didn’t START getting the permit until days before the brick team was ready. Then when the permit office said they needed architectural drawings, that set us back four weeks instead of taking care of them concurrently with the brick scheduling process.

Another example of this was with the basement window. The insurance estimate included pictures and dimensions of the window, and I discussed needing to purchase a new window with the GC and his team very early in the project. I even got them the serial number of one of the other windows, so they could look it up directly.

But, what would you know, they hadn’t started sourcing the window until the day before the brick team began working. (The GC’s team was responsible for building a wooden frame that got inserted into the brick wall and then installing a window within that.)

The GC’s guy told me, “the exact window isn’t in stock, and it’ll take a week to get the window.” I responded, “a week is unacceptable; go buy a window from Home Depot.” The GC’s guy came back a few hours later with a purchased window (that was slightly different than all the others, since we didn’t special order the exact right one) and the window box. While no one but me will notice that my house has one mismatched window, it was an unnecessary annoyance in the project that could easily have been avoided with some foresight and planning.

Rather than the GC’s approach of dealing with things mere days before they’re needed, a better path would have been to identify the first step or two in each of the workstreams, work them well enough so that they didn’t become the critical path, and then finish each workstream in a more cohesive manner when their time truly arrived.

Repairing a house is a distinctly un-Agile program, so we were relying on waterfall methods of project management. But we can take this lesson to heart in Agile programs by glancing at the dependencies within and across workstreams and including some discovery or other preparation in sprints or program increments before we expect to tackle them in full.

Design

On a happier note, I learned through this that modular, resilient design is awesome! A limestone foundation is by definition modular (lots of stones stacked on each other), and it’s very resilient. The car hit a window, which almost certainly made the hole bigger than it would have been. In an instant, the window and foundation stones exploded into the basement, but they absorbed the impact wonderfully. The floor joists were completely undamaged. The electrical line that was just inches above the impact spot was perfect. And the house except for the spot just above the impact (that sagged for a few hours) was completely fine. Wow!

It is worth it to build in modular, resilient ways. The brick team simply cleared a few extra foundation stones and bricks to get clear margins, and then they built the wall right back where it was.

(My rudimentary understanding is, if I’d had a concrete foundation, we would have had to repair a much larger area to be confident that it was truly sound going forward.)

Thanks to modular and resilient design, and some very skilled craftsmen in both 1928 and 2024, the house is truly ready to stand for another hundred years!

Lessons Learned about being a Client

I also learned a lot about how to be a successful client on a transformation program, particularly around setting expectations and advocating for yourself, worthy scope creep, and pacing yourself.

Setting Expectations and Advocating for Yourself

Insist on a kickoff meeting where you discuss the program scope, how you’ll approach completing it, how you’ll coordinate and understand progress/issues/roadblocks, and what success looks like. In this case, we had the insurance estimate as a general guide, and the GC told me which brick company he was using, but I didn’t have a clear sense for precisely how the repair would get done, which high-level steps would be completed, and what each party was responsible for.

In an early conversation, I asked what the GC needed of me, and he said making decisions quickly, which fits a renovation more than a repair. (“Make it a wall again!”) In retrospect, I should have insisted on getting on the same page with the GC early on. Once we were in the flow of the project, and I wasn’t getting the results or communication I wanted, every question I sent came at a considerable emotional cost, so I only sent the highest priority questions to the GC. That resulted in surprises, stall-outs, and frustration.

Understanding the overall flow also would have allowed me to advocate for myself more effectively. For instance, if I’d known each of the steps we were following and how long they were supposed to take, I could have offered a completion incentive for having a permit in hand within four weeks from signing on with the GC.

Moreover: check references. The GC was recommended by someone I trusted, so I considered that the reference check. Bad choice! I should have required two references of similar repair work. There certainly would still have been unhappy surprises inherent in construction like this, but I bet the overall project would have been better if I’d known what to do/ask or chosen a different general contractor based on reference checks.

Worthy Scope Creep

Some scope creep is worth it, and the rest is a distraction. Understand your priorities and constraints well enough to parse through the project scope and potential additions/adjustments. In this case, the worthy scope creep was having the brick team patch the entire basement wall where years had taken their toll, not just doing a parge (or skim) coat of mortar over the repaired section. This required specific skill, and it was worth having the brick team take a few additional hours to repair the vast majority of the basement wall imperfections.

I also considered painting the basement walls and floors worthy scope creep. We’d cleared everything out of the basement because it was VERY dusty, and it would only get dirtier with the repair. So, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to paint every surface while the basement was as close to empty as it will ever be.

What didn’t end up making sense: having a vendor paint the basement walls. I’d gotten some money from insurance to paint the one affected wall, but it covered so little of the quote that I was going to pay more out of pocket than I was willing. So I used that money to purchase paint and supplies, and I donated the labor myself. Good compromise! Even though I spent many too many hours hunched in non-ergonomic positions, it was totally worth it.

A related lesson learned: ask for help! Truly. This does not come easily to me, but it was an important part of surviving these four-and-a-half months. Actively look for opportunities to engage supporters, particularly on items that have flexible timeframes. Then ask for help, and let them be part of designing and implementing the solution.

Pacing Yourself

This brings us to a final set of lessons learned and relearned: home repair and business transformation is a marathon, not a sprint. Take care of yourself to enable long-term success. For me, this included maintaining a semblance of normalcy in the rest of life. I decided that the rest of the house could not feel like a construction zone… until it actually was one. So, we sacrificed the garage. My sister and I moved our cars to the street, and we moved all our basement belongings and the growing set of cleaning and painting supplies to the garage. We kept the piles there instead of in the dining room to protect what sanity we had left.

We also cooked more Costco freezer meals than we typically do. It was healthy enough and fast enough for what we needed.

A final lesson I’ll always be learning: work the problem in front of you. I spent a lot of this experience ruminating about what might happen, what I might say, what I previously said and whether it hurt or helped the situation. That took a considerable toll on my well-being. It took attention, effort, and focus that I could have spent on more valuable things. So, do what you can to focus on the thing that’s right in front of you, knowing that you’ve made the best choices you could with the information and energy you had, and trusting that you can navigate next steps as they come.

Concluding Thoughts

I wouldn’t wish this situation on anyone, but I’m glad for the lessons I can take away from it. I hope this recounting of what I’m somewhat fondly calling the Big Damn Hole Saga (named by the ever-creative April) will help you navigate the next major program you encounter, whether in a service-providing capacity or as a client.

(If you’re in the midst of a construction project or transformation program and want a listening ear, please set up time with me. Happy to support!)