The question the contractor asked

A couple renovating their first flat in Dokki are asked one question by the contractor, and both of them go quiet.

What is your budget?

It is not that they have unlimited money. Nobody does. The silence comes from what an honest answer would require of them.

To give a number, they would have to understand the job well enough to draw a line around it. Kitchen, yes. Bathroom, yes. The balcony they keep talking about, perhaps next year. If they do not understand it that well yet, they would have to admit what they still need to find out.

A number also makes them responsible. Once they say it, they are the ones holding the work to it, choosing the plainer tile when the dearer one tempts them, trusting the man they hired to do what they asked inside the line they drew.

And it ends the fantasy that the flat will be perfect. Every renovation has a corner nobody is proud of. A budget is an agreement, made in advance, about how much imperfection you can live with.

The easier reply is the vague one. We will know it when we see it. It is our home, we do not want to cut corners. Surely the point is that it turns out well. Every one of those sentences sounds like caring about quality. Every one of them leaves the contractor guessing and the couple living in dust for a year.

The flats that turn out well are rarely the ones with no limit. They are the ones where somebody named a figure, then did the harder thing and stayed inside it.

A boundary is not the enemy of good work. It is usually how good work gets finished.