Debra Pickett

And -- gee, just look at us! -- we're even sticking to our budget by purchasing in-stock stuff like the two bathroom vanities, sinks and faucets. No fancy custom-ordered items for us; we're low maintenance.

This smug self satisfaction carried us through Sunday, when we went up to Highland Park to visit some friends who'd bought a house up there and listened to their horror story of (seriously) having to have the entire house lifted off its foundation and put on blocks like an old Trans Am. Our renovation project seemed, by contrast, entirely modest and totally hitch-free.

But today we hit some sort of psychological wall.

R. had done a lot more to earn the right to freak out than I had, since he's been working from home during almost all of the work and had run out to at least one home store at least once to pick up supplies every single day. (Not to mention the two disastrous trips to the Ikea warehouse when he arrived to discover that, oops, they couldn't find our stuff.)

My threshold of tolerance is apparently a lot lower than his for this sort of thing.

Most days, I've been waking up just before our early-bird handyman arrives, throwing on my workout clothes and heading to the gym, where I can get ready for work in relative peace and quiet. (Sometimes, I even work out.)

But, today, R. asked if I could stay home. He had a client meeting out in the suburbs and someone needed to be around to meet the guy who was taking final measurements for our already-long-awaited kitchen countertop.

I knew there was some modest fibbing involved in this request (i.e., the meeting wasn't until noon), but, the truth of the matter was that he'd more than earned the right to take his computer to Starbucks and have a morning away from the hammering and general commotion.

So I made myself generally presentable at an early hour -- although the "plan" was for work to be going on only in one (of two) bathrooms at any one time, this has not quite proven to be the case and, anyway, our place is really not big enough for it to be OK to be naked in any part of it while a stranger is working there -- and hunkered down in our home office, which, except for being filled with boxes of stuff we had to remove from the kitchen, is the one room in the place that is untouched by the renovation project.

Being there meant being on call for consultations with the handyman (my standard response: "uh, whatever you think is best") and ready to break the news to our upstairs neighbors that we need to turn off the water for a few minutes.

Greeting the countertop guy meant answering several impossible-to-decode countertop-related questions [Him: "Is the backsplash supposed to be a 3 or a 4?"; Me (with completely false confidence since I have no idea): 3, definitely.] and reminding myself to sign all the forms with my husband's last name because otherwise the paperwork gets misfiled (see also: Ikea warehouse).

In between, there was the noise and dust kicked up by the removal of the ancient tile floor in our master bathroom and the long, animated conversations the handyman was having, in Polish, with either a cell phone caller or the AM radio he brought along.

By lunch time, my nerves were totally frayed.

And, by late afternoon, when R. got back with the car so I could run over to the WTTW studios for my taping, I was ready to run away for good.

I dawdled for as long as possible at the studio and then on a visit to my friends the Sambolas, wherein I decided it was an important cultural learning experience for me to hang out with the girls while they did laundry. I didn't make it home until after 7 pm and was ridiculously crushed to see the handyman's truck still parked out front.

It's American and horrible to complain about someone working a 12 hour day on my behalf, right?

Yeah, I thought so.

Still, as pathetic as this sounds, it was weirdly oppressive to come home and find him still working there and poor R., still in his business clothes (because he, too, feels weird about the whole nakedness with other people in the house thing), holed up in the office, waiting for the work day to end.

We walked down the block to get a(nother) pizza for dinner and quietly admitted that we both just really, really want the work to be over.

The bathrooms should be done this week. Which leaves the kitchen countertop and tilework, plus 3 more rooms to paint, two rooms of carpet to replace and the wood floors to refinish.

I suppose it's not really possible to characterize this as the home stretch quite yet, is it?