Chapter 2

END COMMERCIAL BREAK #1

The team from Nelson Treehouse and Supply was making good time on the treehouse Paul and Paula Harris had commissioned for their daughter’s sweet sixteen. There was much use of pulleys, nail-guns, and human muscle with an occasional break for coffee or to talk to the Animal Planet production crew.

Suddenly Paula came running up to the base of the tree.

“Pete!” she cried out, “Pete, I’ve got bad news. I just got a notice from City Hall. You can’t build this design!”

Pete was horrified. He shouted back, “We had approval for ... wait, let me come down there.”

Pete scurried down out of the trees as all work came to a halt. He was soon standing next to Paula, reading from a slip of paper in her hands. The Animal Planet microphones couldn’t pick up more than an occasional word as the carpenter read the words which could end the project so soon after it was begun.

“ ... City Ordinance number... [unintelligible] ... come to our notice... [unintelligible] ... not to exceed two kitchens ... OH!”

“The over-the-garage apartment,” Paula informed him.

Pete looked around the property. He thought he understood what was going on.

“So you have a kitchen in the house, and then you have an apartment over the garage, with a kitchen there.”

“Yes,” the woman nodded. “The apartment is for when my parents visit, or Paul’s parents, or his brother, or my sister. That’s why we didn’t just move Julie over the garage: she’d have been kicked out of her new room every two or three weeks, for a week or two at a time. Better for her to have a place that’s just hers.”

“OK. Well...” Pete breathed a sigh of relief. “This doesn’t have to be a deal-breaker; we just can’t build her a kitchen. We’re not that far along yet anyway, so we just ... yeah, we can handle that.”

Paula seemed equally relieved. “I think I’d rather she take most of her meals with us still anyway. She can order pizza or something if she’s having a party.”

Pete nodded. As a father, he understood what this mother was saying.

“You know,” he told her, “it’ll knock a few thousand off the budget for you to not have a kitchen.”

Paula got a gleam in her eye. It was something Pete Nelson had seen before, in other clients. It was a gleam which usually spelled trouble.

“Maybe,” she suggested, “you could put that saved money into a bigger bathroom? Women like their bathrooms.”

Pete was nervous, and it showed.

“Or not a larger bathroom, really,” the woman continued, “but an extra toilet? I’m thinking a half-dozen girls, all eating pizza or sushi and drinking Cokes or Red Bulls or whatever, and only one toilet.”

Pete still wasn’t sure. It sounded reasonable, but they would have to change the design ... Well heck, they’d have to change the design anyway! They had to take out the kitchenette.

“Let me check and make sure you don’t already have too many bathrooms on the property...” he started.

“We have two in the house,” Paula told him, “one in the over-the-garage, and then if we have two in the treehouse ... we have a neighbor with six.”

Pete could tell this was important to her.

“Er ... give me an hour and I’ll see what we can do.”

Paula smiled and left Pete to his work. The first order of business was to re-check regulations to make sure the new plan was still permissible. It turned out that it was. The Treehouse Man breathed a sigh of relief and then called his crew together.

“Because of the local building codes,” he told them, “we can’t build another kitchen on this property. I don’t know why: it’ll make the Kitchen Gods angry or something. But there are fewer restrictions on how many bathrooms, toilets, or showers we can have. So we change the design.”

Conferencing on the new plans, sketches, blueprints and so forth took over an hour. AP would condense that into another bit of animation with Pete’s voice-over.