Thursday arrived with a sky the color of wet slate. The inspector, a soft-spoken man named Gerald with a clipboard and sensible shoes, walked the space in silence. He tapped the new beam above where the wall used to be. He squinted at the electrical outlet Hector had moved six inches to the left. He wrote things down.
It had seemed so simple. A non-load-bearing partition separating the old storage room from the kitchen. Her cousin Hector, a contractor from Durham, had looked at it, laughed, and said, “Mari, this is a handshake job. We’ll have it out in an afternoon.” And they had. The bakery suddenly breathed. Sunlight from the small back window poured across the new open floor plan, dancing over the secondhand mixers and the century-old brick. city of raleigh building permits
Delia laughed. “Sounds expensive.”