Our house is over 100 years old, and it doesn’t have central air conditioning. I realize that this is not a problem on par with, say, being stuck in a hot zone in the Middle East (hi, Steve! How’s that new job going?) but it is vexing nonetheless. I had always dreamed that when I reached a certain income level I would have attained some yuppie creature comforts, but somehow as we moved up the socioeconomic scale, our standard of living seemed to diminish. When we finally bought The Big House, we found ourselves without central air, a second bathroom, or a backyard.

Why no AC, you ask? Partly because people here cling to the quaintly Puritanical idee fixe that “it only gets hot around here two weeks a year, so hell, you don’t really need central air.” This is a base fallacy, as any temperature tables would bear out.

Also, we live in the least affordable, most overpriced county in the country, according to Forbes. Not New York City, not San Francisco: if you take into account not just real-estate costs and cost of living, but also “lack of job opportunities” and salaries, we’re the biggest suckers on the planet. Whoo-hoo! We’re number one!

And being number one means being grateful to get anything remotely affordable, while studiously overlooking the lack of amenities. After all, you can always add a bathroom/install central air/annex a back yard. (Well, maybe not that last one.)

Thus, we are renovating. We’re having our third floor insulated and turned into office space, a playroom, and a spare bathroom, and having air conditioning installed on all three floors to boot. This will free up one of the downstairs rooms as a guest room, so guests will not have to sleep with the baby, and frees up the current office with the Gothic wallpaper for one of the boys. (By the way, you wouldn’t believe how many hits I get for the search “Gothic nursery.” Are there really so many of you out there decorating baby’s room in black? Rock on.)

I’ve read A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun, and I know that renovation tales are supposed to be fraught with drama and cost overruns. A horde of foreign men with charming accents is meant to invade your home, swearing in languages other than English, tearing down load-bearing walls in error, and generally upending your existence, all the while teaching you Valuable Life Lessons couched in the metaphor of construction. I wish I could oblige, but this process has been so straightforward I can’t believe people bitch about renovation.

To wit, we promised to pay a well-regarded contractor an obscene amount of money to install some HVAC and throw up some drywall. Without taking any kind of deposit, or even seemingly confirming our ability to pay, he started work basically on time and has proceeded according to plan without bothering us too much. Periodically, we go up to the sweltering attic to check on the progress with our expert eyes (”uh, looks OK!”). The men all have New Hampshire accents — not so charming — and they swear in English. Today, one of them was bitten by a tick! And bled all over the place! I gave him some nail polish remover to flush the sucker out. And that’s about it for the life lessons.

There was one small delay while the plumber was MIA for a few days. If we hadn’t suffered that setback, the AC might have been operative before the Great Heat Wave of Ought-Six, and I may not have sunk into the depths of despair when one of the unit air conditioners crapped out in the middle of the night and all five of us (Dog included) were forced to spend two days confined to the TV room. But the guys have been installing ducts all morning, just as promised, and Minor has decided that all the drilling, pounding, and shouting will not interfere with his newly-instituted three-hour morning nap, so all is right with the world.