Background

Background

Following is a mostly day-by-day account of a home renovation, a reworking of the kitchen and bath and other rooms to update them from the nineteen-fifties era to current standards of livability. I’m someone unaccustomed to such work, knowing a little about it, but not enough to make me terribly skilled or even particularly adept. I just plod along. Sometimes I don’t even do that; I may stop altogether for a good long while. Maybe scratching my head, or going outside to scratch my cat’s head.

The goal is to get the house into livable condition, and to do it as quickly as possible. However, there is a built-in hurdle to this equation: I don’t work quickly. I don’t move quickly, don’t think quickly. I mostly excel at things that require extremely slow movements.

The work I am undertaking, the stuff that will take place in the house, is a fairly major project, and it is being done by someone who is mostly comfortable reading a book or driving around looking at things, or taking walks—always on the lookout for the odd cat lurking here and there. You see, I will be completely demolishing a bathroom, a kitchen, possibly some other rooms if I have enough energy left, and reassembling them in a new configuration. Also, I would like to add a whole new bathroom upstairs, where one does not currently exist. Things like sinks, toilets, tub and shower will be relocated, the walls will be torn down to the bare studs, the floor will be ripped up and discarded, leaving a clear view into the basement. That kind of thing. Believe me, there are things I would rather be doing. But view it this way: Here is your chance, to experience vicariously, all of the horrors of this kind of work, the stuff you dread, but that needs to be done in your own house. Envision yourself taking on all of the projects at once, and then not having to do them. Let someone else immerse himself in the agony, the frustration, the fruitless wranglings with a variety of materials and tools.

Would I rather be walking around the neighborhood looking for cats, or driving out into the country to photograph old tractors and pumpkins? Yes, I would. I would opt for those things before the home renovations. Besides, you might find stuff while walking around; sometimes people give things away, leave them lying out by the curb, and you can just make off with the unwanted items, bring them home and put them around in the yard. There’s always that.

So why go about this at all, you might ask? Why not just walk around the neighborhood looking for cats? I have two houses, see. One of them I live in, and the other sits vacant. This is by choice; I had renters living in the hideous place, their stay lasting almost four years, actually. I’d slapped together a few repairs to make it livable back then, had mostly forgotten what kind of condition it was in, then decided to visit one day. It wasn’t too far, as the place is just next door. I had them move out.

“Sorry! House need big work!” I yelled, waving my arms in the yard, doing my best imitation of a foreign landlord. I ran back and forth a few times for added effect. I felt this would be more dramatic, although the two tenants knew me to be mostly an American hick. Never would they have suspected I was from a foreign shore, wouldn’t have particularly cared if I were. They had a cheap place to live, and now that phase of their life was over.

So it has been vacant for a while. A few months, actually. During that time I have been reading my books, looking forward to another trip abroad, working at the odd things that put bread on the table. I haven’t even gotten out in the neighborhood much to look for cats.

Some days no work whatsoever will take place; don’t think this is going to be a frenzy of activity, wielding one power tool after another, an epic adventure carved out with a reciprocating saw. On those work-free days I may get up late, hitting the snooze button until around ten a.m., the classical music doing its best to rouse me. Maybe an early offering from Haydn, followed by a lively snatch of Mozart, then—when it’s past any reasonable hour for facing the day, the inevitable chorus from Bizet’s Carmen, hollering to just please get the hell out of bed, which is what I always hear when they start singing the boisterous “Toreador.”

Get of out bed, now!
Please get out of bed!
Get out of bed,
Get out of bed!
If you can hear me,
I said please get out of bed
Get out of bed RIGHT NOW!

So there will be days like that. There will be days when I shudder at the thought of immersing myself in the grit and the white powder of pulverized walls, of endless nails and splintered wood, of going and facing a project that looks as if it will never end or come to fruition. For all I know, it might not. On those days I’ll think over to Iceland, vacation destination of practically no one. I’ll daydream of stepping out of my little rented car, standing alone on a volcano-blasted plain, the huge boulders and glacier-strewn rocks a jumbled landscape. Some days I’ll actually BE in Iceland, the house alone and cut off from the world, the things that make it livable no longer a part of its fabric. I won’t care much, because I’ll be in Iceland—land that I love. I’ll be sure to let you know when that happens.

The first phase has started, however. But first, let’s meet the neighbors. They are the half-wit and her husband, an elderly couple who live just next door to the place that has become my albatross. They eye it constantly, wondering what the hell. Can one of our kids, our many kids with their kids—just move in there? Please? We don’t care, it’s a house—how bad can it be? The half-wit works at burger joint, used to work at McDonald’s. Overall she has about thirty years in the business. Her job there is to straighten up the tables and mop the floors, make sure there is enough ketchup and so on in the little condiment bins.

She had the grandkids one day recently. They were out in the driveway, having a good time. They were playing a game whereby they would climb up on a pile of gravel with their little bikes, then ride down towards the other one waiting at the bottom. I thought maybe they shouldn’t to that, since it looked like they were going to kill each other, and –of course—the pile of gravel was mine.

“Hi, kids—why don’t you go play over in your driveway? You’re going to get hurt here.”
The older boy, an exceptionally dull young man, responded, “Huh?”
But then he asked this, as his grandmother, who had been spraying water onto her car, told the kids to move away from the gravel.

“Is wat wer huse?” He has something of a speech impediment. This translated to:
“Is that your house?”
Yes it was, I told him.
“Whey qho fose othrs how ive there?” Understandably, he was asking why other people lived there. Fair enough. This was when the place was still occupied.
Without going into the complexities of the adult world of rents, tenants, landlords, civil law, and so on, I told him simply:
“I can’t live in two houses, so I let them live there.”
“Huh?”

I returned home. The half-wit asks, from time to time, how much rent I’ll ask for when I have it finally fixed up. I name a figure that would probably be exorbitant for the Taj Majal. “It’s going to be pretty nice,” I say.

Her husband, a man who is forever praising God, works for the county. No need to elaborate, just working for the county is enough; the security and safety of a job from which you can’t get fired, the satisfaction of knowing you can go into the office and do any damned thing, sit and stare, stupor-like, as a thin line of drool pools on the desk in front of you, and probably get a promotion next week. He pointed to a shiny white car in his driveway one day: “The good lord sent us that car,” he said. He is forever saying that the good lord sent him this and that. I believe, implicit in his bringing a higher power into the picture is this message: “The good lord don’t take too kindly to you and your empty house. I don’t see him sending you any shiny white cars or even coming ‘round to mow the lawn once in a while. No sirree. Guess the good lord knows who he likes in this neighborhood.”

I was painting the place one day, slapping a thin coat on the one exterior wall that needed to be finished. I’d taken a long break from the job, lasting a little over a year, and now the paint that was going on was a completely different shade from the parts I’d already covered. Oh well. After time, it too started to fade into the uniform color of the rest of the house, making the difference not so noticeable. You are starting to get an idea of the pace I usually accomplish—or try to accomplish—things. I am typically in not much of a hurry. One of the half-wit’s grown children was there, helping her grown child move his things into the house. He’d just been evicted from his apartment, his young child and wife, too. Things were in flux, but he didn’t seem to mind so much.

The grandson showed me a lamp, holding it up proudly for me to see. He’d made it himself.

“You have any idea what one of these costs new?” he asked expectantly.
I told him I did not. From his tone, I gathered that this was a lamp that would fetch a handsome price in a store, should you even be able to find one like it.
“A hundred and fifty bucks,” he said triumphantly. He then detailed the prices of the different components that went into the making of this lamp. I did some mental calculations, rounding off the figures and adding them together. He didn’t appear to have saved so very much by making the lamp himself. It was, nevertheless, a nice lamp, really a string of lights on a strip, plugged together to create a track-lighting effect.
“That’s a nice lamp,” I said.
He beamed, then tossed it into the pile he’d been making, along with the other things he’d cleared out of his apartment.

Presently the woman I believe to be his mother began to speak, while the young man, recently de-housed, put some order into the little pile. She and her boyfriend were painters, she said, indicating that I could call on them to help with the painting I would need done while the house underwent renovations.
“I can’t work for real long; I need breaks on account of my back, but my boyfriend will keep going—even if I have to stop.”
I told her I would be happy to give them a call, and would accept their help with the understanding that she wouldn’t always be able to paint, but that her boyfriend would.
“I just need breaks every now and then, you know. But my boyfriend—he’s a painter—he just keeps going.”
“Everyone needs a break now and then,” I told her.
Then she volunteered that her husband had been killed.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.” There seemed to be more there, so I asked:
“Was it an accident?” I realized that it was none of my business, but at the moment didn’t care.
“No,” she replied, “He was shot in the head.”
She said this with the combination of regret and matter-of-factness a waitress might display in an all-night diner, delivering the news to a hungry customer that there was no more buttered toast. I had to get back to my painting. It was hot, I hadn’t accomplished much, I’d indulged the young man and his lamp, had listened to the woman’s stories about painting and her back, and now was hearing the distressing news that her husband had been shot in the head—and she apparently didn’t care one way or the other, delivering the news to a stranger holding a paint brush next to a run-down house. The half-wit’s household and its assortment of characters is a never-ending carnival of fun. The woman carefully wrote down her number and handed me the little slip of paper. I told her I would call when it was time to paint the interior.

The half-wit herself, matriarch of this clan of dunderheads, is always generous with her advice and questions.
“You should cut them bushes back.”
“This house got you beat, ain’t it?”
“You ain’t got nothing stolt, are you?” This question, which I understood perfectly, was meant to inquire about having things stolen from my porch. I’d in fact had a bike stolen.
In the days before I’d dug out the driveway extension and had it paved over, there was a constant mud puddle in the lawn, made worse by cars driving over that area.
“Why don’t you throw them weeds in the mud-hole?” she’d ask.
And on and on like this. One day recently she came over, with an important mission to execute. I was working out in the front yard when she approached.
“Them folks across the street.” She pointed to the apartment complex for elderly people. “They tolt me to tell you not to park over there no more or else they’ll call the police.”
Years ago, I’d occasionally parked my car in their lot, because space was tight in my driveway and I was sharing my house at the time. I hadn’t parked there in probably four years.
“I don’t park over there,” I told her. “Never have,” I lied.
“Oh,” she was unconvinced. A great big apartment complex, with lots of employees, surely held more sway in her world than a tee-shirted, whiskered man making noise in his yard with power tools because he was too cheap to hire someone to do the work.
“I’m just sayin’,” she said. “They tolt me they was gonna call the police if they see your car there no more.”
I bid her good day and fed more branches into my chipper/shredder. When she first approached, she’d commented that she thought I’d been crushing rocks with the machine.

THE HOUSE

The house itself is from the same era as mine—built around 1928. It is a Cape Cod style bungalow, I suppose, with—at one time—cedar shingles on the exterior. Those shingles were covered during the huge asbestos-shingle craze that swept these kinds of neighborhoods in the past. Salesmen would come around, tout the benefits of the ugly shingles, and a crew would set about covering the attractive wood exterior after the homeowner signed the paperwork and made some kind of down-payment. The results were nothing short of hideous. In addition, the asbestos shingles are brittle things, much like covering a house with cheap china or porcelain dinner-plates. Strike the things and they break. Obviously, a house covered in cracked and broken pieces only adds to the distressing effect of this material.

So the house has been around for some time. I have borne witness to its history these past ten years. Abandoned by the neighbors who once lived next door to me with their young son and two daughters, it passed through several renters. The family, relocated to someplace in the Midwest, still owned the house, couldn’t really sell it, so they tried their luck at getting different people to live there. The most recent renters were a young man and his common-law wife and their daughter, a little girl of about four or five. The little girl was an unwanted child, mostly screamed at by her mother from dawn until dusk, and the young man went off in search of work, returning at the end of the day to the endearing cries of his child, who called out to him, “Daddy!” They lived in a tangled mess of unmowed grass, the tinny and underpowered lawnmower no match for the knee-high greenery that surrounded the house. I watched one day as the young man, in misery, pushed the reluctant machine through the verdant lushness, a wobbly wheel impeding his progress, and the thick greenery clogging the machine in the sticky heat, making it necessary to stop and get it going again.

The woman, in agony with the unwanted little girl, afflicted with a house that was neglected and not in the least improved by her living there, complained about my thick-furred grey cat. I saw a note one day as I returned from work. It said:

“Your cat is knocking over our trashcan, creating a huge mess. Please keep your cat away from our trash.”

I would not for one minute dispute that my grey cat was actually EATING her trash; she is not in the least bit proud, and—as long as the trash is fresh—might wander over to see what was there to supplement her regular menu. However, this cat was in no way responsible for overturning the trashcan—she simply arrived to pick through the interesting mix after some other critter did the heavy-hitting. I know this to be true, for on many occasions my own trashcans were knocked over, their contents spread around the driveway. There is a healthy population of raccoons in the area, and they were most likely the culprits. They can make quick work of a trashcan full of pizza leavings, eggshells, old bacon, and the like.

I explained this to the frazzled young woman, felt that she was just overwhelmed with her situation, the constant screaming at the little girl, her young man who cursed and sweated with an underpowered machine out in the tall grass. The cat, delicately nosing through the scattered garbage, was just one more thing. She accepted this, said that she’d had a bad day. I can only imagine.

So they moved out--had not actually been paying the rent for some time, as it so happens. For over a year they lived there, the owners out in the Midwest waiting for rent payments that never arrived. Along with the young couple was an assortment of friends, live-in houseguests, and their beaten and battered pickups and sedans, mostly parked all over the front lawn. The last evidence that the man and his wife and young daughter had been there was impressive: Almost all of their belongings were piled here and there on the front lawn: Sofas, stereos, cheap furniture, the little girl’s clothes and toys and other playthings. For a week or so it remained there, while the weather changed, the rain and the sun coming down on the sad collection. The house had puked it guts out onto the front lawn.

I helped clean up this mess. After making a deal with the owners, who were now back in town, I got much of the stuff picked up. They had rented a trash container, a big steel vessel that would be picked up by a truck and carted away. In the meantime, the house’s contents were piled onto the front porch to get the stuff out of the immediate view of passersby. Someone had complained to the authorities, it seems.

Unable to pass up a bargain, I bought the house. Mostly uninhabitable--even though people had just been living there--I had to get it cleaned up and in reasonable condition fairly quickly. I did this in a month or two, hiring a young man to help with the painting and install some floor coverings in the kitchen and bathroom. I ripped up all of the purple carpeting and threw it away. It was stained in many places, and—besides—it was purple.
For close to three years, my tenants, two men who had previously been unknown to each other, lived there. Now it is time for the modest, two-story house to undergo a renaissance.

NEXT: Demolition work begins.