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Authors: Jennie Bentley

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BOOK: Flipped Out
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Anyone who has ever renovated a house can tell you it’s not usually a quick and easy process. As Derek had warned me during the very first conversation we’d ever had, more than a year ago now, it always takes longer and costs more than you think it will.
And that’s OK most of the time. When you’re just working for yourself and not on a schedule, it isn’t the end of the world if it takes you a few extra days, or even a few extra weeks, to finish the job.
This time, that wouldn’t be a possibility. The television crew would arrive in Waterfield Sunday night and would depart again the following Saturday morning, and we’d be expected to finish a whole house by the time they left. They’d shoot “before” footage bright and early on Monday morning, and God help us if they couldn’t shoot “after” footage at the end of the day on Friday. When I’d asked Noel what would happen if we weren’t finished by Friday night, his answer had been, “Just make sure you are.”
“We’re gonna be fine,” Derek said now, in answer to my lament. “Don’t worry, Tink. I’ve got it covered.” He grabbed his hamburger in both hands and took a bite.
We were sitting in a booth at the Waymouth Tavern, a restaurant on the outskirts of Waterfield. An imitation Tiffany lamp burned above our heads, and out the window, we had a view of the Atlantic Ocean and a few of the islands dotting the coast of Maine. Rowanberry was one of them, although it was too dark by now to see anything but a low shape in the water with some lights on one end, where the little village was.
My name isn’t Tink, by the way; it’s Avery. Avery Marie Baker. Tink, or Tinkerbell, is Derek’s nickname for me. It started out as sort of a joke, supposedly because I’m little and cunning—Maine-ish for cute—with lots of bright yellow hair I keep piled on top of my head when I’m working. And also because (Derek said) I pout a lot. At that time, I daresay I did: This was just after we met, and we spent our days butting heads over how to renovate my great-aunt Inga’s house. Derek, being a traditionalist and a restorer at heart, wanted to keep as many of the original features as possible. I—native New Yorker and educated textile designer—wanted to squeeze in as many modern amenities as I could.
He’d won, of course. He’d made a convincing case for preservation and authenticity, and besides, I have a hard time saying no to him. It’s those blue eyes, and that lazy grin, and just the whole adorable package.
I’m crazy about him. That’s why I ended up staying in Waterfield and going into business with him instead of selling Aunt Inga’s house for a tidy profit and scurrying back to Manhattan at the end of last summer.
At the moment, he wasn’t endearing himself to me, however, and yes, I’m sure I was pouting. The one-week time limit for renovating the little cottage on Cabot Street was freaking me out, and he wasn’t giving me the sympathy I craved.
“Derek.” I pulled the plate with the rest of his supper out of reach, thereby forcing him to look at me. “How can you tell me not to worry and that you’ve got it covered? How do you expect us to be able to do all the work in five days and not lose our minds? Just not sleep?”
“That’s one possibility.” Derek reached across the table to put his burger back on the plate before pulling it toward him. He has longer arms than I do. I sighed. He added, “I’m serious, Avery. We’ll be fine. All the materials are bought, and we’ve got a schedule laid out day by day, if not hour by hour. We know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing at any given time.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. We’d spent the past week preparing so we’d be ready to launch into action tomorrow morning, as soon as the crew had arrived and had shot their “before” footage of the cottage.
The house we were renovating was a little 1930s cottage, roughly eleven hundred square feet, with two bedrooms and one bath, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a tiny laundry. The current owner had been using it as a rental, and as a result, it was pretty basic, with few or no frills. It was also a little beat up. But it had lovely oak hardwood floors—or would have, after we had applied three or four coats of polyurethane to them. The ceilings were fairly tall, and whoever owned the house in the 1970s had resisted the temptation to spray them with texture back when popcorn ceilings were all the rage. Scraping texture off a ceiling isn’t a big deal—all it takes is a spray bottle full of water, a putty knife, and stamina—but it’s messy and time consuming, and again, time would be at a premium this week.
In the living room there was a gorgeous natural-stone fireplace that had never been painted—no paint we had to strip, yet another reason to rejoice. It’s a crime to paint natural stone, but that doesn’t stop some people. And there were wonderful casement windows on either side of the chimney. They’d been painted shut, the way many old windows are, but we had taken the time to break the seal and force them open as part of the prep work. The kitchen was original but well made, and as I’d learned when we renovated Aunt Inga’s house and Derek had insisted on keeping the old kitchen cabinets, they could be made to look wonderful. The current owner had covered the outside of the house with vinyl siding, which wouldn’t have been my choice, but it had been done recently enough that the vinyl was still fairly clean, and it meant we wouldn’t have to paint the exterior. A good hose-down with a power washer would do wonders. And the curb appeal was outstanding, with a pretty little porch with stacked-stone pillars and an original front door with matching sidelights. Drab now, but it would be cute as a button when we were finished. All in all, we would have had to look long and hard for a better candidate for a quick flip.
Still, five days wasn’t much time to get the job done.
“We’ll have help,” Derek said between bites of burger.
“Are you sure they’ll come through? Kate’s gonna be busy with the B and B, isn’t she? She’ll have a full house.”
Kate McGillicutty-Rasmussen was my first friend in Waterfield. She owns the Waterfield Inn, the B&B where I’d stayed my first night in town and where the television crew would be staying during the five or six days they’d be here, as well.
“She’ll find the time,” Derek said. “She owes us; we renovated the carriage house in record time last year. And Shannon and Josh are both out of school for the summer, so they’ll be available as well.”
Shannon McGillicutty, Kate’s daughter, and Josh Rasmussen, Wayne’s son, were students at local Barnham College. They were excited about the idea that they could do a few hours’ manual labor in exchange for getting their faces on television.
Derek continued, “Cora said she’ll be on hand whenever we need her, and Beatrice is back in town, too.”
Cora is Derek’s stepmother, and Beatrice is her youngest daughter. Bea and her husband, Steve, divided their time between Boston, where Steve was transitioning out of a job with a big law firm, and Waterfield, where he was starting a small practice of his own. Cora is fantastic in the garden, and although Beatrice is mostly a math whiz, I knew we’d be able to find something she could do to help. After all, another pair of hands is another pair of hands.
“Between all of us,” Derek said, “we’ll get it done.” He took another big bite of burger, seemingly not the least bit worried. I picked at my crab cakes.
“It’s just a very short time and a whole lot of work.”
“Not that much,” Derek said. “It’s mostly all cosmetic. Slapping lipstick on the pig. Dressing it up for the cameras. New paint, a couple of coats of poly on the floors, new kitchen counter, new tile in the bathroom. You’ll be surprised at how fast the work will go.”
“If you say so.” Although I probably wouldn’t feel calm again until next week, when this whole ordeal was over. The house on Cabot was a great little cottage, it would be tons of fun to redo; I just wished we could really do it right and give it the time we should, instead of being in and out in five days flat.
Derek pulled his plate back across the table, put the burger on it, and started chomping on fries. I played with my crab cakes while sneaking glances past him to a romantic table for two where the other reason I wasn’t looking forward to the coming week sat.
Top-producing Realtor Melissa James was currently sharing a toast with Tony “the Tiger” Micelli, ace on-air reporter for Portland’s Channel Eight News.
Melissa is Derek’s ex-wife. They married young, while he was still in medical school. When he decided—after four years of education and four of residency, plus a year of working with his dad, Waterfield GP Benjamin Ellis—that he didn’t want to be a doctor after all, Melissa dumped him. Then she took up with my distant cousin Ray Stenham. That relationship had ended six months ago, and since then, Melissa had been on the prowl. I’d been a little worried that she might want Derek back, but lately she’d spent much of her time in the company of Tony the Tiger, so I was keeping my fingers crossed that that relationship would work out. Given the champagne toast and the steamy looks, not to mention the little velvet box I thought I saw sitting on the table, it looked like the chances were pretty good.
They hadn’t noticed us come in, and I had breathed a sigh of relief, but I should have known it was too good to last. They finished their meal before us, and as they made their way toward the door, Melissa looked over and saw us. And tugged Tony’s sleeve before heading in our direction.
“Oh, hell,” I said.
“What?”
“She’s coming this way. I was hoping they wouldn’t notice us.”
Derek glanced over his shoulder and saw the two of them bearing down on us. “Be nice, Avery.”
“When am I not nice?” I wanted to know.
He opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, a manicured hand with long pink talons landed on his shoulder. It may have been my imagination that turned the gesture into more of a caress, but I don’t think so. Melissa enjoys rubbing my nose in the fact that she spent five years married to my boyfriend.
“Hello, Avery.” She showed me all her blindingly white teeth in a smile of false warmth before she turned her attention to Derek. “Hello, Derek.”
I don’t think I imagined the way her smile changed. Not to mention her voice. She was practically purring.
“Hey, Melissa.” Derek’s didn’t. He doesn’t want Melissa back, and he’s made that clear. I just don’t like the way she’s all over him. He doesn’t belong to her anymore, and she gave up the right to pet him when she dumped him for Ray Stenham.
Derek greeted Tony the Tiger. “Micelli.”
Tony nodded back. “Ellis.”
He’s a good-looking guy. Tony, I mean. Derek is gorgeous: six feet tall, with hair that’s a shade closer to blond than brown, at least in the summer, and those melting blue eyes with crinkles at the corners. But Tony’s quite all right, if you like the type. A half dozen years older than Derek’s thirty-five, and sort of slick. Black hair and hooded brown eyes, olive complexion, always very nicely dressed. My boyfriend is happiest in faded Levi’s and worn T-shirts, while even Tony’s golf shirts are ironed and his jeans have creases down the front. He and Melissa make a lovely couple: She’s always decked out to the nines, too. Tonight’s outfit was a flirty Zac Posen skirt and blouse, with gold sandals and matching jewelry. Including the obscenely large stone weighing down the ring finger of her left hand.
“You two all ready?” she wanted to know, absently massaging Derek’s shoulder and making the lima-bean-sized diamond sparkle in the light from the Tiffany lamps.
“We’re ready for an offer on the house on Rowanberry Island. Any activity?” I smiled insincerely.
After our usual Realtor, Irina Rozhdestvensky, had married a few months ago and become too busy with her new husband to tend to her career, we’d had to fall back on Melissa to market and sell our latest renovation project. It was over my strenuous objections, since I had spent the past year actively trying to avoid doing business with her. But she
was
the premier real estate agent in Waterfield, and probably in all of down east Maine, and when she cornered Derek and told him we needed someone with real experience to handle the sale of what had turned out to be a halfmillion-dollar historic waterfront property, he had been unable to say no. The house had been on the market for a couple of weeks now, but she hadn’t pulled a buyer out of a hat. I couldn’t resist bringing it up, even though I knew it was unreasonable to expect to get an offer so soon.
Melissa widened her fabulous violet blue eyes innocently. “I told you it would take time, Avery.”
She had. I guess buyers with that kind of money don’t grow on trees.
“What I meant,” she added, “was whether you were ready for tomorrow.”
The house we were flipping for the cameras belonged to Tony Micelli. When Melissa found out about Noel and the TV show, and that we needed a project to work on for a week, preferably without having to actually buy it first, since most of our money was tied up in the house on Rowanberry Island, she’d suggested Tony’s place. He’d owned it for years, had in fact grown up in it, and had been using it as rental property for a while now. The tenants—a couple of students from Barnham College—had graduated and left town at the end of the semester, and now Tony recognized the opportunity to give his property a cheap facelift before cashing out. Having the house featured on television would likely bring any selling price up, and he had a girlfriend who could market it for him. Besides that, he’d probably enjoy having Derek—his girlfriend’s ex-husband—doing the manual labor.
The sticky “ex” situation had been the biggest consideration in whether or not we wanted to take on the project. I’d wanted to say no when Melissa came to us—to Derek—with the idea of using Tony’s house for our project. I didn’t want to deal with her any more than I had to, and the idea that Tony would be hanging over our shoulders, making condescending comments and ordering Derek around, seemed reason enough to stay clear. But Derek said he couldn’t care less what Tony did; he liked the house, he thought it would fit our needs, and besides, he was used to dealing with demanding personalities—after all, he’d been married to Melissa for five years. And it was just for a few weeks: one before the shoot, one during, and one after, to tie up any loose ends. So I’d relented. I still wasn’t thrilled about having to deal with them both, but I could cope. At least I thought so.
BOOK: Flipped Out
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