My husband and I had hired a builder several years ago to enlarge our house when he and I got married. Since I had 4 kids from a previous marriage, we needed at least another bathroom and 2 more bedrooms to accommodate everyone.

Sadly, the builder went bankrupt somewhere near the end of the project leaving us in a difficult situation. Almost four years later, we are still finishing and fixing the house as time and money allow. In the beginning, it wasn’t too difficult. My 4 children are old enough to know to stay away from nails and not to eat spackle. They don’t have a desire to pick up a hammer and see what they can smash either. We didn’t have to worry about baby-proofing our building projects.

Then we had our son and life changed slightly. When it was time to do very dusty projects, we’d take him to our neighbors for a few hours until we could clean things up. Otherwise, it was simple to put him in his playpen with a few toys and do whatever needed to be done. It was slightly challenging to baby-proof our work projects and supplies, but we managed.

For a while, our project stalled due to lack of time and finances. This weekend, we decided to tackle a few building projects when the children were out with family members. It was then that we realized that remodeling with a toddler is not an easy thing to do!

Our son can now crawl out of the playpen and he’s curious. While my back was turned, he played in the paint. After a bath, he discovered a dust pile. After another bath, he discovered it was fun to play with the wall spackle. After another bath, I put him to bed and we worked furiously to finish what we needed to do.

We’ve realized we need a new strategy: we’ll need to do repairs during nap time, or hire our neighbors to watch our son at their house while we work on the house for any extended length of time. Let’s hope that this strategy works!