After five years of false starts, promises, two years of expired permits, the landlord began the unthinkable project. Yesterday he and a small construction crew—my first floor neighbor, a carpenter by trade, among them—started ripping down the old and busted porch and replacing rotted out columns with temporary metal strut supports. Long a scourge of the neighborhood, I often cursed this eyesore. It’s been a joke among the long term residents in passing.

When it rained, more often than not, water saturated the wooden planks so completely that walking across the surface felt like forced baby steps across a twenty by forty foot sponge. It has been a home to at least two raccoons, gophers, and the Bumblebores of Doom—bees so large that I offered my wallet up to them, no questions asked. They refused my pleas for mercy.

And ugly, man. Bad aesthetics are one thing, but the crumbling porch gave the entire home—a meticulously maintained older mansion converted into apartments—an urban renewal project gone terribly wrong look. Prospective tenants stood up the landlord at scheduled walk-throughs, without explanation, because they spied the porch from a block out and kept driving once they realized that it was the right address.

The landlord says the new porch will be done by Thanksgiving. Let’s translate that number with a landlord labor output theorem. The formula rests on five years of observing his work habits. Six week estimate x Unknown number of distractions + Cold weather fronts = Multiply original estimate by three and add two weeks.

My birthday is in February. His crew might make that date. Maybe.