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by
bud simpson |
September
20, 2006 |
D.I.Y.
Urban homesteaders filled with optimism, some
done-it-myself wisdom
It was
about this time of year, but long enough ago that it was in
black and white, that the first Mrs. Budzilla and I took possession
of our very own piece of Flyover real estate. It was on Topping,
a stone’s throw from what is now the grand edifice of
this very newspaper. A stone’s throw, provided the stones
are small, the wind agreeable, and I that could find a place
to stand a hundred yards closer to St. John Avenue. Northeast
was just Northeast back then. It was not yet historic.
The house, a standard white-clapboard Northeast bungalow, had
been the residence of a friend’s late grandfather. We
bought it for the princely sum of $9,600, signed the papers,
took the keys and prepared to show the world what a groovy bungalow
should look like. I had been working in Colorado building expensive
new homes and had what I thought were considerable skills to
draw on. Sure, the house needed a lot of work, but it would
be no match for a pair of gritty, young urban homesteaders.
It is this level of giddy overconfidence then, as now, that
invariably leads to unimaginable crises for the typical homeowner
being blinded by confidence and dreams of a tidy bungalow in
the city.
We started by attempting to strip 75 years’ accumulation
of wallpaper from the plaster. This should have taken most people
a week or so. Three weeks on, after attacking the walls with
steamers, trowels, chisels, putty-knives and chain saws, we
decided that a couple of good coats of paint would look really
nice on top the wallpaper.
Score: House, 1; Urban Homesteaders, 0.
Next, the kitchen. It was a perfect example of Depression-era
utility. Translation: nothing worked. We ignored the larger
issues of infrastructure and utility and decided to tile the
countertops and paint the cabinets. It was as the paint was
beginning to dry on the cabinets that the kitchen sink faucet
sent forth a spewing geyser of not just water, but scalding
hot water. The paint fell from the cabinets in large, elastic
sheets and, by the time we figured out how to shut off the water
and drain the kitchen, the paint had adhered to the quaint Depression-era
linoleum and the equally quaint non-functioning stove.
Score: House, 2; Urban Homesteaders, 0.
The house had a small barn-doored garage that opened onto the
alley. When a friend asked if he could lock up his motorcycle
while he went to Europe, I told him to come on over. “Mi
garage es su garage.” He rolled his Triumph Bonneville
into the weathered old garage, covered it with a tarp, and we
locked the door. We sat on the back step in the afternoon sun
and drank a beer or two as we talked about his trip. A sharp
“snap” echoed off the house. We watched in helpless
terror as the garage started to collapse toward the house. Slowly
at first – so slowly that we thought we could rescue the
bike – but with the first creak of collapse, the doors
were rendered unusable, and we just stood there, slack-jawed,
and waited for the carnage to end. By the time my friend returned
from Europe, I had replaced the seat, tank, fork and front wheel
on the bike and had what was left of the garage hauled off.
Score: House, 3; Urban Homesteaders, 0.
About this time, the ex-Mrs. Budzilla informed me that she didn’t
think she really wanted to live in Northeast in the first place,
and how about a nice apartment in Shawnee instead. Or else.
Never argue with a girl raised in the Kansas ‘burbs. Final
score: Not sure, we
lost count long before we threw in the towel and trowel. We
never spent one night in the Nightmare on Topping.
In all situations like this, from great adversity comes great
knowledge. Factor in a few more decades of learning experiences
like these, and a set of hard and fast rules start to take shape:
•
Home ownership is expensive. Anything that can fail will fail
when the rocket scientist required to fix it is just starting
overtime or is vacationing in Belize.
• Allow three times as much time and four times as much
money as you think a project should take. This will not be nearly
enough.
• You can’t repair just one thing. Anything that
breaks is connected to three other worn out things that no one
makes any more, in a size that hasn’t been used since
Biblical times, and of a material that is now illegal to possess,
much less hammer a nail into.
• If your project requires a special tool, you won’t
have it, nor will any of your friends, relatives or any store
within fifteen hundred miles. There is one store in Sao Paolo,
Brazil that might have one, but the instructions are in Portuguese.
• A project started late in the day or on a Sunday will
go belly-up the minute the stores close. You will almost certainly
spend the night without water, without electricity or in a motel.
• Home centers – the modern amalgam of the hardware
store, the lumber yard and the garden center – should
be avoided at all costs. They pump mind-controlling chemical
vapors into the store’s air conditioning system. This
gas seemingly makes the most impossible project look like Lincoln
Logs.
• By association, people who work at home centers are
part of the conspiracy. They know all too well that if you plan
to replace a faucet in your bathroom, you will, on average,
make six trips to the store, not counting the original faucet
purchase, to buy the stuff you didn’t know you needed
in the first place, or that you broke taking out the old faucet.
The home center guy that knows all about the stuff you need
doesn’t work on Wednesday.
• If you buy six matching anythings from anywhere, the
moment one of these things breaks, they will have been long
discontinued and a matching replacement will be unavailable.
Buy 12 to start with.
• The relationship of do-it-yourself shows on television
to situations in reality is an empty set. These psycho-renovation
zombies are from the Moon. In a single half-hour, they can raze
a Victorian mansion, replace it with a larger Victorian mansion
and decorate it, all for under a hundred dollars. They then
gather together in front of the shining new house, look into
the camera and giggle like schoolgirls. They know you don’t
have a clue.
• If you’re of the married persuasion, any home
improvement project should be preceded by a discussion in which
you accept, in writing, all responsibility for the massive failures
that are sure to follow. This will save a lot of steps later
on.
• When you finally, in desperation, call a professional
plumber, carpenter, electrician or other tradesman to finish
your failed project for you, don’t lie to him and tell
him that water just suddenly started coming out of the fuse
box all by itself. Chances are good he’s seen this all
before. Just write the check and don’t look back. In a
few weeks, you’ll forget all this ever happened, and you’ll
be standing at the home center looking at the patio doors and
thinking to yourself, “I bet I could install that.”
Bud
Simpson is a member of the infamous Northeast High School Class
of 1968 and a professional photographer. Learn more at www.budzilla.com.
