James Fox-Smith
It is nine o-clock on a Tuesday night. I’ve just climbed down from a ladder. I’m covered with paint and the middle finger on my right hand has a blister the size of a quarter on it. My left thumb is throbbing because I’ve hit it with a hammer. The lights I’ve been trying to fix for an hour still aren’t working, and my wife is shouting at me. This August issue of Country Roads goes to press tomorrow and despite being one hundred words deep I’m still not sure what this “Reflections” column is going to be about. The completion of my latest project, a bedroom renovation that began as a father-son bonding exercise supposed to be completed over the Memorial Day weekend, seems to hover both close enough to touch and perpetually just out of reach. Once again I am caught in the self-inflicted trap of the do-it-yourself project. Charles and I should just have gone hiking.
Something I’ve noticed about the coronavirus pandemic: our ability to ignore the many shortcomings and deferred maintenance issues around our old house has decreased as the amount of time we spend here has grown. For someone with an inflated sense of his abilities as a (pick one) carpenter/plumber/electrician/arborist/farmer/mechanic; a barnful of cheap tools; and a chronic inability to estimate how long a project will take, this is a dangerous combination. With the increased time at home, the variety and complexity of handyman projects into which I have flung myself has grown. First it was a vegetable garden. Then a refortified chicken house. Then the resurrection of a long-dead 4-wheeler. Now—and this really is the gift that keeps on giving—a down-to-the-studs renovation of our fifteen-year-old son Charles’ room that has been going on so long I think Sisyphus mightn’t have had it so bad with his rock after all. Admittedly Charles’s room was awful—the poorly constructed remnant of a nineteen-seventies-era renovation done by a former resident with a Roy Rogers fixation. With its Western-themed woodwork and dinky hardware, and now bearing the scars of fifteen years’ inhabitation by a baby-turned-toddler-turned-small-boy-turned-large, it was an eyesore badly in need of an overhaul. But it wasn’t falling off like the back porch, or rotted through like the floor of our daughter’s room, so it probably shouldn’t have been at the top of the ‘to-do’ list. On the first day, Charles and I took to it with hammers and pry-bars, tearing out the old paneling, closets, and molding, evicting multiple mouse colonies and discovering the source of various persistent smells along the way. With this satisfying work done the real challenges began. Among things we learned is how hard it is to sheetrock a room with four doors but not a single right angle. We learned that one thing you can not learn from YouTube videos is how to successfully cut crown molding into non-ninety-degree inside corners. And we learned that if your house has electrical wiring that dates from the Great Depression you’d best leave it alone, or for God’s sake call a real electrician. The other thing we—and indeed the rest of the family—have learned is that, when you tear out a room that despite its many flaws contained almost all the storage space in your house, you not only consign its occupant to sleeping on the couch for two months, but you also relocate all of his belongings, plus everything you as a family have stuffed into those closets during the past twenty-five years, to teetering piles throughout the rest of the house. Although my wife has been a good sport, the cracks are beginning to show. This week she has started referring to herself as a “carpenter’s widow.”
It’ll be done one day, I suppose. And when it is I can’t deny the satisfaction we’ll feel at having built something decent-looking with our own two (or four) hands. But to prevent my gloating from going too far there is this: During the midst of this project our daughter put her foot through the rotten floorboards of her room—an emergency that compelled us to hire actual experts to come in and deal with it. A local contractor sent out a couple of guys who not only fixed the rotten floorboards but also replaced the falling-off back porch so well that it is now the sturdiest piece of the whole house. It took them about a day and half. Will I consider this before tackling the bathroom? Only time will tell.
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