Our little guesthouse nightmare!

So you know how on those home shows where they intend to fix one small problem but more problems emerge, eventually requiring the owners to completely gut their house?  Yup, that is happening with us, except with our guesthouse.

When we moved into our house, we noticed that the guesthouse had a funky smell to it.  Bry thought it was cat urine.  So we replaced the floors with wood laminate and that seemed to largely fix it.  However, we noticed the smell had returned (not as strongly) a month later and so we thought maybe it the walls were affected, too.  Our friend who is renting the place was out of town last week so we thought it was a good time to fix the problem-- treating the walls with a solution and then painting it.  Should take no longer than 3 days.

When Bry removed one of the floorboards to help prep with the treatment, he discovered many more problems.  So this resulted in ripping out the newly installed wood floors, ripped out the laminate that was under it, pouring boiling water all over the studio to loosen the adhesive, ripping that out, etc.  All of this required taking out the entire kitchen, which resulted in more problems being found, so we have to replace some of the cabinetry, sink, faucet, etc.

To make matters worse, he is working in 90+ degree heat in one of the worst droughts in California history.  Surely, it would not rain on all of the furniture and boxes that was outside.  Well, it started to inexplicably sprinkle today, and so he had to move everything back inside, even though the sprinkling only lasted 10 minutes.

We had a flooring specialist come out and the problems seems to be some kind of moisture problem that was deep under the flooring, so now we have to have a mold specialist come tomorrow.  The whole floor is going to be re-cemented and then we'll have to do the wood floors again.

It has pretty much been a nightmare- and a very expensive one at that.  Our friend will be staying with us in our house and we're hoping the whole project will take no longer than 2 weeks.  We're also trying to prep the place to rent on Airbnb (since our friend is only there half the year) and so we're buying furniture, light fixtures, and updating some things so that it looks like a vacation rental.  Usually I am so excited to do anything interior-design related but this project has been pretty stressful.  You would think I would learn a thing or two from design shows about unanticipated problems, resulting in going way over budget, but it it's all still pretty distressing!