Chapter 22: Renovations

Joe awoke in a crowded bed Sunday morning. Marjorie was half on him with an arm across his chest. Her head was snuggled into his neck and from the soft inhalations he could tell she was still asleep. Beyond her, he saw Stacy’s nude body, and next to him he could feel his daughter’s equally naked body tight against him. The bed and room smelled like sex – the best kind of aroma to discover upon awakening when you knew you’d been part of it all only a few hours earlier.

Joe smiled to himself. He’d satisfied all of them the night before when they’d been in the living room in the midst of the group orgy with all the other residents of Colburn House and a couple of other guests – Mike Wolf and Dennis Sulks, both professors in the college. Altogether, there had been eleven women and eight men. There were many more orgasms doled out across the group.

Joe squirmed out of bed amidst some grumbles from his wife, but his warm spot was quickly claimed by Emma as she snuggled against her mother and Stacy.

Joe slipped on some running shorts and a t-shirt and left the apartment after using the bathroom. Outside his door, Alisha and Katie were setting up the breakfast buffet on the sideboard. Mike and Dennis were sitting in boxers and t-shirts with cups of coffee at the dining room table with a bunch of pencil sketches in front of them.

“What are you doing?” Joe asked after greeting everyone – kisses for the women, and visual recognition for the guys.

Mike explained, “Dennis and I want to move in with you here in Colburn House. We’ve been through the house and have some ideas. Of course, we need your approval.”

“Show me,” Joe said in a curious tone.

Dennis said, “Downstairs is more than just crappy basement. For one, given the way the land slopes towards the parking lot, there are windows on three sides of the foundation on the south end of the building. Moreover, when they built the addition to connect the two old houses, they gave it a complete foundation that connects to both old basements. We figure we could put two apartments almost the size of yours at the south end, and then probably five to eight studio apartments in the space. All the stuff that’s down there could get crammed into the basement on the northern house and still have room for the gym, but most of it is junk that could be tossed.”

“Bathroom?” Joe said.

“There’s one there, but it doesn’t have a shower. We’d have to jackhammer the floor to put in sanitary lines for each unit, but the feed lines can all go overhead after they tap into the existing lines. The electrical panels all have space on them. The HVAC might take some tinkering, but neither of us are that smart about that end of things.”

Joe said, “Each bedroom would have to have a window to get out of the building in order to meet fire code. I’m not sure what else.”

Mike made some notes on one page. “If we could replace some of the small windows with larger ones, we could be sure that worked. In most cases, the more north in the house you go, the more below grade level you are. Here, look at the floor plan we were homing in one – no dimensions.”

Joe looked in amazement at the layout the men had some up with. The two apartments were only one-bedroom units, but if it were Mike or Dennis, they wouldn’t need a guest room. The configuration they had indicated eight more studio apartments along a hallway from the larger apartments – four on the front and four on the rear of the large home. Stairs to the main floor were central to all units.

Joe posed, “This may be an obvious question, but why do you want to move here?”

Mike and Dennis looked at Joe like he was an idiot. “Duh! We’d just like to be near each other and this seemed like a good place to do it.”

Joe laughed, “All right, I get it. Have you talked to your serious girlfriends about this?”

Mike said, “It was Gail’s idea and Katie leapt on it, too. They’d love us to be around here. It’d be the best of all worlds. They’d be near their colleagues in the MBA program and us at the same time, and we’d all be here at ground zero for all the open sexuality.”

Joe laughed, “I don’t ever recall listing ‘open sexuality’ as one of the selling points of the Residential MBA program. So, you guys like the free pussy?”

Dennis laughed, “Fuck, yes. If you did add it to your brochures, you’d probably be sifting through a couple of hundred thousand applications for the next class.”

Joe questioned, “Do you think you could get the college to pay for the expansion?”

Both men nodded. “These would be cheap spaces to renovate – wood, insulation, drywall, paint, PVC pipes, a few wires, and so on. There are no serious structural additions. A little HVAC, electrical and plumbing, too. We’d even do some of the work, including getting the permits and being sure everything went to spec. We’d put tile, industrial carpeting, or manufactured flooring down and wall off the storage part of the place. I bet the whole job could be sold on the increased revenue of the students added in the program.”

Joe mused, “Except for me, all the other units but mine would have to be available to students.”

“Upsell the idea of having other faculty living among the students.”

“Would you keep you other homes?”

Both men nodded. “Yes, just in case we did want to move out. Right now, that seems unlikely, at least for a year.”

“These quarters are probably a lot smaller than what you have now.”

Dennis laughed, “I was in the BOQ in an apartment when I was in the military, if you want to talk about small.”

“OK, let’s talk to the dean and see if he has money. We need a bit of a cost-benefit analysis before that, though.”

“We’re on it.”

At dinner that night, Dennis and Mike showed up with smiles from ear-to-ear.

Joe asked, “All right, what did you do?”

“We have a six-week program to renovate the lower floor of Colburn House signed, sealed, and just about delivered by Harbridge College Building and Maintenance Division.”

“What?”

“Work will begin on Monday, but the serious stuff can’t start until the Town of Dillon issues the building permits. Those come pretty quick for the college; almost upon request we’re told. We have to clear out the basement in the entire area under the addition and at the south end and middle basement where the new rooms will be. Moreover, after going over our sketches and getting them laid out on the computer they have, we’ll be able to add two apartments and eight studio apartments just like our sketch this morning. Only one of the studios will require cutting into the foundation for an adequate size escape window, but B&M can’t wait to try a new toy they bought over the Spring – a large concrete saw.”

“And you did all this since breakfast?”

The two men nodded. Dennis said, “The Dean of the business school could care less. He told us to do whatever we wanted. He even made the call to B&M and told them to ‘lend us a hand if they had the time’. We sold the idea of faculty interacting with the grad students, and that went over well in part because the American College Accreditation Council just blasted five other business schools in the state for having their faculty ‘aloof’ from their students.”

“I heard about that,” Joe said. “I wonder what they’d say about forging ‘intimate’ relationships with them, on the other hand.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Mike said.

Dennis said, “I have a high school buddy who works for the ACAC. If they’re going to show up here, he promised a call at least a few days ahead of time so we can prepare a little. No orgies, at least.”

Joe put his hands together in prayer and looked at the ceiling, “Oh, Lord, please don’t let anything happen to my friends, my students, or Harbridge College.”

Dennis smirked, “That should fix that part of things. Thanks.”

The three had an animated talk over the meal, including going to the basement and walking the space involved in the renovation. Joe was amazed at what they wanted to do and how little time it would take. Fortunately, the only other renovation projects on campus were already bid out to outside contractors, so B&M had workers available.

Dennis talked about how the campus had electricians and plumbers on staff hopeful that something would break that they could go and fix it. They were salivating at doing this job. One guy called it real work. The same with the carpenters.”

“What are they going to start with?” Joe asked.

Monday will be heavy on being sure all this junk is cleared away. They’re bringing in a dumpster. Also, there’ll be a lot of measuring and marking off new walls and so on. They want their own measurements and want to see how to work around some of the support columns.

“Will the pool pumps and such be too loud down here?” Joe pointed to a corner of one basement area where some of the pool equipment resided to protect it from the harsh New England winters.

“They noticed that and recommend a soundproof wall between that part of the basement and the living quarters. I don’t think we’ll hear it. The pumps aren’t used most of the time, anyway, so won’t likely be a problem except over a summer when the pool is open. We can just make sure they cycle on in the daytime.”

Over the rest of dinner, Joe had Dennis and Mike talk about their summer project in the basement. Everyone got excited about having them live in the house, and the possibility of having additional students. Joe already had the idea that Lauren should get one of the studios. He then began to wonder about the other seven studio apartments.

Saturday afternoon, Joe held a discussion group with all ‘his’ students in the program. They were in the living room so they could be in an air-conditioned space. Outside was hot and muggy, although everyone looked forward to the evening beside or in the pool.

The discussion consisted of reports from each of the eleven students about their internship and their assessment of their company. Mark and Dennis sat in on the discussion and took notes. Joe especially pushed them on some of the points he’d gotten them thinking about months earlier in the discussion about innovative companies.

At the end of period, Joe gave them all something to think about, but urging them not to act. “By the start of the fall semester we’ll have up to eight new studio apartments downstairs. Right now, there are none spoken for. I was thinking of Lauren in one, unless Beth wants to keep her roommate, but we have no plans for the others. I’m open to suggestions. Also, temporarily, you need to bring up your empty luggage and boxes from the basement so the workers have room to move around starting Monday. Thanks.”

Mark spoke to Joe at dinner. “I was thinking about new students in the rooms that’ll be built downstairs. I don’t know how to put this, but they’ll need to fit in with the rest of us ... How do I say this... ?”

Joe interrupted, “You mean they’d have to like to fuck?”

Mark thought and responded, “That’s the shorthand version of just what I was trying to say.”

“And how do you propose to establish that fact? Oh, and in general they would have to have some relationship to the Residential MBA Program. So, there’s two requirements. I know how to test for the second. Think about testing for the first.”

Mark nodded and rolled his eyes. “Got it.”

Monday morning a dumpster was offloaded onto the grass just below the pool deck and adjacent to an exit door from the basement. A work crew from the college of three men started some demolition work of some ancient shelving and other minor structures inside the basement. Some old broken chairs and other decrepit furniture was also discarded by the end of the lunch hour.