Noticeable Changes

DICK SAYS: Every five days or so, a guy starts hammering, drilling or scraping in one of the apartments in the building next to ours. Generally, the activity starts around 8 a.m. When it ends is up to him. More often than not, he doesn't stick around for more than three hours, and with very few exceptions, nothing ever happens in the afternoon. What's he doing? Well, Liz once inspected a place that was for sale in that building. Unsurprisingly, it was in terrible shape and designed to be as cramped as possible. But that was at least nine months ago, and one imagines that if someone is paying for this guy's work, he or she isn't getting their money's worth. That's pretty typical too--or so we were told by a woman who has had workmen promising that they are close to "finishing" her apartment for the last three years. To be fair, she seems to be pursuing a very old-school Parisian, high quality look that requires covering the walls with cloth and installing real slate floors in the entryway (entryway!). But three years is a long time. And as I understand it, her apartment is smaller than the ground floor of a very modest American ranch house.

Today is Saturday, and once again, we awoke to the gentle, steady tapping of a hammer. It's the first time there's been much action for at least a week, and even though the guy did take off a couple hours for lunch, the tapping actually resumed after he'd sucked down his postprandial "express." Does that mean the apartment next door will be finished when we finally move down the street in May? It'll have been a full year at that point, and for the record, the apartment in question is about the size of a very modest American living room. But there at least two
national holidays between now and then, and the French have no difficulty expanding one official day of leisure into four or five, so maybe that's a foolish question. So maybe he'll be hammering us a percussive goodbye as we're lugging the last box out the more. Or maybe not.
After all, three floors down in our building, someone's been renovating an apartment of similar size for nearly as long. The difference here is that after a group of North African guys dumped a
dozen or so boxes of cream-colored floor tile in the hall three months ago, work on the project stopped. And nothing has happened to that apartment since. Not one thing. The hall outside the front door bears the same dusty footprints in the same places. The same hastily bunched up rag is shoved into the crack below the door. And the boxes of tile are still piled in such a way that the people who live across from the renovation project must turn sideways in order to access their own front door.

I doubt that work there will resume before the next snowfall, which will likely take place sometime in December. But then, you never know. Just when we thought the guy banging away next door was, most improbably, going to put in a full day's bashing, the building has gone blissfully silent.

Maybe he'll be back next week if he's up to it.