Domestic Do-over

by Kate McMurray

  “Basically,” Travis said, “here’s the rundown.” He glanced at the cameras, clearly not completely comfortable with their presence yet.

  “Cut,” said Erik, the director, who stood quietly in a corner supervising. “Okay, Travis, I’m going to need you to sound a little more forceful. You’re about to give Brandon some bad news. That sucks, and you can be regretful about it, but go ahead and just say what it is. But first I think we should actually show the damage to the audience. Just describing it isn’t all that interesting.”

  Something changed on Travis’s face. Maybe he understood what he was supposed to do better now. Brandon did not want to get bad news, and he hated that Erik was forcing them to draw this out—he wanted to know what he was dealing with so he could make a plan to fix it—but he understood that these kinds of scenes were the bread and butter of any home renovation show. These were the stakes; fixing a house this old and broken was nearly impossible, so how would our hero get out of this jam?

  Travis nodded. “Come with me to the basement.”

  Erik ordered the cameras to start filming again as everyone followed Travis downstairs. Then Travis held court.

  “I checked with the city, and according to the records, there was a renovation done on this house in 1983. But whoever did it cut some corners. So, first, let me show you this.” Travis bent down and grabbed the edge of an area rug that rested against the basement wall. Brandon tried not to see the strip of skin exposed between the bottom of Travis’s shirt and the waistband of his jeans.

  The basement was unfinished, but there were plumbing hookups for a washer, dryer, and sink, so that was presumably how the previous owners had used the space. Travis peeled back the rug and gestured. “There’s a crack in the foundation here. We’ll have to get an engineer in to really find out what the problem is. It could just be that the house has settled after being here for more than a hundred years, but….” He glanced at the camera. “There could be a bigger problem too. There’s also an issue here.” He pulled a metal tape measure from his tool belt and unfurled enough of it to use as a pointer. “At some point in the life of this house, there was a wall or a few posts here, and whoever removed it did not properly support the ceiling. See where it’s starting to sag here? So just to start, you’ve got a bigger structural issue on your hands than we initially thought.”

  Brandon let out a breath. His heart pounded. “All right.”

  Travis nodded. “I think you’d better come with me back up to the kitchen,” he said.

  So everyone followed Travis back upstairs. Travis went straight to the wall near a window in the kitchen’s eating area. A section of the wall had been peeled away to reveal that some of the framing had rotted.

  “What is this?” Brandon asked.

  “Ancient termite damage. The good news is that the termites are long gone. The bad news is that all this wood will have to be replaced. And there are mice and cockroaches in the walls. There are also asbestos wraps around every heating duct I’ve found so far, but I’d recommend putting in an all-new HVAC system anyway because the existing one is not up to code for a house this size. Still, there’s no asbestos otherwise, so the expense will likely be less than what we budgeted for. But we have to get exterminators and abatement teams in here before we can do much work.”

  Every word Travis spoke sounded like the ring of a cash register; Brandon saw the expenses piling up, and all of these items were things they’d have to do to make the house safe and salable. They’d budgeted for abatement and exterminators but not to repair concrete slabs in the basement. “Anything else?”

  Travis crossed the room and touched one of the walls. He looked completely at ease, despite dishing out all this bad news. “This wall is load-bearing. We can still take it down if we replace it with an engineered beam, but, you know, that’s a few thousand dollars. And I’d want to test for lead paint.”

  “Lead paint. I hadn’t thought of that.” Brandon sighed. “Do you have a sense for the financial damage?”

  “It’s hard to say. Depends on how bad the structural issues are. But we’re talking at least fifty thousand dollars to fix all of the issues I’ve just shown you.”

  Brandon nodded. That was a big budget hit. “Does this affect any of our cosmetic plans?”

  “I mean… we’ll probably have to strip the walls anyway. In a house this old, it’s lath and plaster, possibly even some wire mesh, and that will be a pain to remove. Labor costs are something to think about.”

  “That’s accounted for in the budget, unless we go beyond our scheduled dates.” Brandon pressed his lips together and looked around. “How much will all this extra work set us back, schedule-wise?”

  “Could be as much as a week or two, depending on how much structural work is needed.”

  “All right. I can tweak the design budget to offset some of these costs. And this doesn’t even get into plumbing and electrical, does it?”

  “I’m not sure about plumbing yet, but we definitely have to upgrade the electrical. It’s all knob and tube. None of it is to code. We need to do a complete rewire.”

  “All right. Well. Let’s get the engineer and a plumber in here as soon as we can so we know for sure how big of a hit to the budget this is.”

  Travis nodded. At Erik’s urging, he walked over to stand closer to Brandon so that they’d both be in the tighter camera shot. He opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something, then closed it again. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Did you not have this place inspected before you bought it?”

  “We bought it as-is.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Brandon could hear the sarcasm. He crossed his arms and leaned closer to Travis. “I’d much rather discover the issues and have our team fix them instead of having the previous owners trying to half-ass fix something in a hurry to sell the house. At least this way I know things will be fixed right and I’ll be able to vouch for the house.”

  Travis met Brandon’s gaze directly and held it as he spoke. “All right. I agree. But since we’ve barely started demo, I’m guessing there are still some surprises hiding in the house. Once we get everything stripped down, we’ll have a better picture of what we’re dealing with.”

  Brandon nodded. He was paying a crew to start demo today, but they couldn’t do much if asbestos was on the pipes. “Is there anything we can start today?”

  “You could take everything out of the kitchen and bathrooms. And I drew up a design plan for the kitchen, so we can talk about that too.”

  “All right, let’s do it.”

  THE CAMERAS spent the next few hours filming the crew as they destroyed kitchen cabinets and hauled toilets and sinks to the dumpster out front. Erik told everyone to act very excited about “Demo Day!”

  Travis didn’t do much of the demolition himself. He spent about twenty minutes filming a segment where he described his own design plan for the kitchen; the style he was going for was antique but with modern conveniences. Brandon stood on the sidelines with his lips pressed together, as if he didn’t approve.

  Travis was constantly aware of Brandon’s presence, and it unnerved him. Travis had been pretty determined to treat this like a job, just one on TV, and part of his code of ethics was to never get involved with a client. Brandon riled him up, there was no doubt about it. Part of that was that Brandon was wrong about the design, but a larger part of it was that the more time Travis spent near Brandon, the more he was attracted to him.

  Today Brandon had on a short-sleeved gingham shirt with the top couple of buttons undone, and it pulled across his broad chest in a way Travis found really appealing. It was an unseasonably warm day, and Brandon was sweating a little, and as Travis described the color palette he had in mind, a bead of sweat escaped Brandon’s hairline and dripped down the side of his face. It was all Travis could do not to lean over and lick it off.

  Once that segment was, thankfully, out of the way, Travis picked up a sledgehammer and prepared to get demo sta
rted. Brandon grabbed one too, and went to town on the kitchen cabinets. Travis couldn’t help but watch as Brandon’s muscles rippled.

  But then he spent the rest of his time being called in to monitor problems. There was water damage from a leaking pipe in one bathroom, ductwork in a weird place in the kitchen, and they uncovered all kinds of shoddy wiring and outdated plumbing. Anytime they found something, Travis had to track down Brandon and a cameraman to explain the issue. Travis could see that Brandon was growing more panicked with each new discovery.

  Toward the end of the day, Travis tracked Brandon down one last time to close out for the day. “I hate to be the bearer of more bad news.”

  “Then just don’t tell me.” Brandon ran a hand through his already disheveled hair. “I can’t take much more.”

  Brandon was joking, but Travis was not amused. “The termite damage in the kitchen is pretty extensive. We may have to do some work on the exterior wall.”

  “Geez. This house doesn’t even have good bones, does it?”

  Travis stopped himself from laughing. Because yeah, someone should have torn this whole structure down. “Not really. But everything is fixable… for a price.”

  Brandon blew out a breath and put his hands on his hips. “All right. We’ll figure it out.”

  “I think that’s a good place to leave it for the day,” said Erik.

  While the TV production crew started packing up, Travis walked over to Brandon. “I hope you don’t think I’m deliberately causing problems.”

  Brandon shot him a sidelong look, then let out a long breath. “I knew going in that this would be a huge financial undertaking.”

  “I realize your budget has some limitations, so maybe we can compromise on the design. If we don’t take down every wall on the first floor—”

  “Modern buyers don’t want a boxy old house.”

  Travis knew that wasn’t true; he’d had a client the previous year who had asked him to add walls to his brownstone. But he wasn’t about to argue. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  Brandon rubbed his forehead. “I know you aren’t trying to undermine me or the production when you point out issues with the house. But I know what I’m doing with design.”

  “Have you ever flipped a house in this neighborhood?”

  “No.”

  Travis paused for a moment, trying to decide if he really wanted to go in on this or not.

  “Just say what you want to say,” said Brandon, a little impatient.

  Travis let out a breath. “I want the show to succeed. I want this project to succeed. I hope it’s enormously profitable. So please know that this is coming from that place. And ultimately, this is your project, so if you want to make everything in this house look sleek and modern, that’s your call. My point is just that, given the history of the neighborhood, it makes more sense to take a preservationist outlook rather than a house-flipper approach. We don’t want the house to be generic. Buyers in this neighborhood want something unique.”

  “It won’t be generic. But buyers who say they want charm almost never do. People don’t like anything too ‘out there.’ They want open concept, they want neutral colors, and they want functional living space. The current layout is not functional. Hell, there isn’t even a true master bedroom upstairs. No one wants to buy a house this size that doesn’t have a master suite.”

  The heat in the room went up a few degrees. Travis disagreed. There was a time and a place for neutral, and some neighborhoods and building types called for that. Travis had worked on many an apartment that had been transformed from a dingy prewar space to something out of a contemporary design catalog. That wasn’t what this house was, though. Travis could practically hear the old rotted beams begging him to leave some of the house’s character. “Obviously. I’m not saying not to do what you have to do to modernize the house. I’m just saying, if possible, you should try to preserve some of what makes the house unique. We’re probably going to have to lose the crown moldings when we do asbestos abatement, but we should photograph and recreate them after we put up new drywall. That sort of thing.”

  Brandon blew out a breath and put his hands on his hips. “Crown moldings, fine. But I still think we should do a modern kitchen. If not shaker, then flat-panel cabinets. Sleek, simple, nothing ornate.”

  “Flat panel? That’s completely wrong for the time period the house was built.”

  “Nobody wants old-fashioned. They want ‘charm,’ by which they mean they want what they see on the Restoration Channel or in interior design magazines. Farmhouse sinks are hot right now in urban kitchens. That’s what counts for charm. Trust me, I’ve been doing this a long time.”

  Travis had no interest in getting into a dick-measuring contest with Brandon, but he said, “I’ve been working on renovation projects in Brooklyn for fifteen years. It’s a competitive market, and it’s a lucrative one, but you still have to make your house stand out. If you want top dollar, it has to be unique. And no one who is buying a 1917 house is looking for something super contemporary. The adjacent neighborhoods are lousy with new construction for people who want that.”

  Brandon shook his head. “They’ll say that, but trust me, I’ve done a couple of these old houses before, and the buyers who think they want antique never really do. People today have certain expectations, especially of a flip, and we have to make it look good on TV.”

  “And you think beige carpet and gray walls will accomplish that?”

  “No, but—”

  “I just hate to see all the charm of the house obliterated.”

  “I’m not planning to obliterate the charm.” Brandon let out a huff.

  The most ridiculous part of this whole conversation was that Travis couldn’t escape the fact that he was super attracted to Brandon. The man was gorgeous when he was worked up, his skin flushed, his hair disheveled. Travis wanted to reach over and smooth those ruffled feathers—but he wanted to make this argument more. Because the odds of him ever getting any part of his heterosexual coworker were minuscule, but maybe he could persuade Brandon to take some of his design ideas.

  Travis continued, “I don’t want to tell you what to do, but please consider revising your design.”

  “I know what I’m doing.” Brandon was prickly now, offended. Damn, Travis had pushed too hard.

  Yet still, he said, “I know you do. But so do I. You keep asking for my opinion, so I’m giving it to you.”

  “Well, maybe stick to giving me reports about asbestos and termites, not design, all right.”

  Travis held up his hands. “Fine.”

  “I gotta get out of here. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Brandon’s tone was placid enough, but he stormed out of the house, leaving Travis alone with the crew. That was okay. Travis still had a to-do list to finish that day, so he got back to work.

  Chapter Five

  “YOU DON’T think the dynamic would be better with a cohost?” Brandon asked.

  Virginia and Garrett Harwood glanced at each other. They were all seated together in the conference room at the Restoration Channel’s Manhattan office because Harwood had called Brandon in to get a status update on how shooting was going. Brandon was starting to wonder if he could really support a show on his own—nearly everything on the Restoration Channel was hosted by a couple or siblings or a pair of people of some sort who could bounce ideas off each other.

  Brandon worried now that he looked foolish on film. Travis kept undermining his design ideas, but Brandon was supposed to be the renovation expert. He’d flipped hundreds of houses on Dream Home; he and Kayla had filmed close to two hundred episodes before those terrible photos of Kayla had hit the tabloids.

  And now Virginia and Harwood were clearly having some kind of psychic conversation, because they kept looking at each other as if they knew something Brandon didn’t.

  “What?”

  “Well,” Virginia said, “we’ve been thinking about giving Travis a bigger role on the show. Not a costar as such
, but we like the dynamic between you.”

  “Dynamic? But all we ever do is argue.”

  Harwood raised his eyebrows, and Virginia said, “Exactly.”

  “What?”

  “You guys make great television. There’s built-in conflict. The way you spar with each other… it’s great.”

  “It’s tense,” said Harwood.

  “It’s compelling,” said Virginia. “It’s like how you and Kayla used to argue over her more eccentric design ideas. Remember that episode when she wanted to put a chandelier in the master bathroom?”

  “Of course,” said Brandon. It was one of the few genuine fights they’d ever had on camera. A chandelier in a bathroom, he still maintained, was a ridiculous extravagance. The six hundred dollars Kayla had spent on the thing would have been better spent on so many better things. Six hundred dollars was a few hundred square feet of flooring, was a bathroom’s worth of floor tiles, was a new window.

  “That stuff is gold,” said Virginia as Harwood nodded. “It creates suspense. Can Brandon and Travis resolve this conflict? Will they meet each other in the middle?”

  “Then they want to see your problem-solving skills at work,” said Harwood. “They want you to compromise and then create a beautiful final product. That’s what keeps the show interesting.”

  Of course. Brandon let out a breath. “Well, fine, so I’ll host, I’ll argue with Travis, but I need some design help, because maybe Travis is right—maybe my original design is wrong for the house and the neighborhood.” In truth, Brandon was nearly persuaded already, but something about Travis made him dig in his heels. And since Travis kept reminding him he was not a designer, Brandon would need some professional help. “I was thinking of bringing in Kayla. Would that be okay?” Because Kayla was a great designer and knew more about things like craftsman cabinets and wallpaper patterns than he did.

  Virginia tilted her head. “That might get some ratings—seeing the two of you struggle to work together.”