Trae looked stunned. “You’re telling me there’s no en suite bath for the master bedroom?”
“That’s right.” Hattie walked into the room and pulled open a narrow closet door. “This room backs up to a sort of mudroom on the back porch. But I was thinking, we could steal some square footage from that, and do away with this closet. The bathroom on the second floor is directly above here, so there’s that. We squeeze in a shower stall, commode, and sink, and voila, that gives us a master suite.”
“No closet?”
“It’s a beach house,” Hattie told him. “We’ll put a row of pegs on the wall. And if absolutely necessary, I bet we can find an antique armoire to fit between those two windows.”
“I guess that could work,” Trae said. “Let’s see the other bathroom.”
Mo and Hattie exchanged a meaningful glance that didn’t escape notice from the designer. “What?”
“It’s uh … pretty bad,” Hattie said. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”
* * *
Trae backed slowly away from the bathroom, squarely bumping into one of the kitchen counters. “Who puts a bathroom in a kitchen?” he sputtered. “And then decides, ‘hey, let’s put the washer and dryer in there too.’”
“Don’t worry, it’s all going away,” Hattie assured him. “We’ll move it to a new laundry room on the back porch and bump the kitchen into this space.”
Mo sensed Hattie’s growing impatience. “Any thoughts about the kitchen, Trae? We’ve got an advertiser that’s a cabinet manufacturer. They’ll supply all the cabinetry as a trade-off, and we’ll get the appliances from Build-All. They’re a big chain of building suppliers in the Southeast. So we’ve got a little room in the budget in here.”
“Offhand?” Trae flicked a bit of plaster from the yellow Formica countertop. “A stick of dynamite and a match is the only thing that can help.”
“That’s it,” Hattie huffed. “Mo, you can show him the rest of the house. You two don’t need me.”
* * *
She was picking at a salad in the craft services tent when one of the carpenters appeared at her side. “Hey, Hattie, there’s a guy here from the city who wants to see you.”
“What about?”
Joey, the carpenter, pointed toward the front of the house. “I think he’s a code cop.”
“Shit.”
She hurried out of the tent. Sure enough, an older white man was pacing back and forth in front of the front porch, a clipboard tucked under one arm, visibly agitated.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Hattie, the owner of this property. Is there some kind of issue?”
“Howard Rice, Tybee Island code enforcement.” He tapped the badge pinned to the front of his starched uniform shirt. He had one of those tiny Charlie Chaplin mustaches. “Yes, there’s a problem. Who’s responsible for cutting down all those old-growth trees out here?”
“Old growth? They were palmettos and scrub pines and a couple of scrawny magnolias and half-dead crape myrtles.”
“No. I saw for myself. I saw the photos before you people hauled away the evidence, plus you left the stumps. There were at least three protected tree species that you people cut down. In clear violation of the city’s tree ordinance.”
“We didn’t haul away any ‘evidence,’” Hattie protested. “We didn’t even know the city had a tree ordinance. The whole driveway was blocked with a bunch of trash trees. We had to cut our way through just to reach the house.”
“Ignorance is no excuse,” he said, shaking a finger in her face. “The city’s tree ordinance is posted on the Tybee Island website. I suggest you familiarize yourself with it, before I issue you another citation.”
He ripped a piece of paper from the clipboard and thrust it at her. “That’s a thousand-dollar fine. Payable by cash, cashier’s check, or credit card at city hall.”
“What!” Hattie stared down at the citation. “That’s insane. You people condemned the property because neighbors complained that it was overgrown. Now you wanna penalize me for cutting down the overgrowth?”
“Those were mature trees,” he repeated. “I saw the photos. I saw the tree stumps and measured them for myself. And you should know, if I find another code violation like this one, I won’t hesitate to issue a stop-work order. Television show or no television show.”