OK, Off To The Store. You Need A Cobweb Rake

I give up. What’s that big, steel girder doing there? It ain’t holding up the house, that’s fer sure

Alrighty then, we’re going to fix the basement. We’ve got the nerve, we’ve got multiple hundreds of dollars at our disposal. We’ve got a teenage boy, or we will when he wakes up. And of course, we have our cobweb rake.

How’s that? You don’t have a cobweb rake? By gad, what sort of toolset have you accumulated? What about a Johnson bar? Howza ’bout a board stretcher? Any left-handed paint paddles lying about? Sounds like you don’t have any sort of good stuff hanging around. But above all, you’re going to need that cobweb rake. You better get a good one. Don’t go cheapskate here. You can use one of those cheap table saws made of lead and plastic by the Chinese low bidder, the ones that sound like a hive of bees and a pound of washers being agitated in a clothes dryer, they’ll do fine. But you need a real, good cobweb rake. Don’t skimp.

I suppose you’ll go to Home Depot, or if you’re a Unitarian-Universalist, maybe you can afford to go to Lowe’s, I don’t know, but when you go to the cobweb rake aisle, don’t just settle for the first one that the cobweb rake salesman tries to palm off on you. I’m in Maine, so I needed the Charlotte’s Web Deluxe Extra-Premium High-Strength Ergonomic Cobweb Rake. If you live in most of the rest of the lower 48, outside of Maine, maybe you can get by with a lesser model without all the features. If you live in Florida or Hawaii, there’s nothing left for you but prayer. Santeria prayers work best on the bugs you’ve got. But none of them can compare with Maine spiders.

What’s that you say? The clerk at Home Depot didn’t think he could find a cobweb rake? You know he’s lying. Guys like him hoard important stuff like that in the back and ease it out the loading dock door to select friends and assorted palm greasers. Go back there again, and lay a double sawbuck across that guy’s palm, and see if you don’t end up out by the dumpster, waiting for your special delivery. It’s not right, I know, but it’s how the world works.

Of course, I’ve owned my own cobweb rake since the early eighties. I’ve put it away every fall, after a generous soaking of tonsil polish, of course, to keep us both withy in the joints. I remember the first time I used it. We were installing hot and cold running potato chips in some rich guy’s house, and I drew the short straw and had to make my way through his root cellar alone. I’ve never forgotten that afternoon — if that’s what it was. It was dark down there — and I was proud that even though I’d just gotten the schematics for the apparatus, I put the hot pipe on the left on the first try.

Say what? The Lowe’s lady didn’t know what a cobweb rake was, either? Well, you can show her a picture of mine:

Remember to buy all your cobweb rakes through my Amazon Portal, I get a commission

Of course, that’s the lightweight one I use for the easy stuff. I’ve got a metal one, too, for under the stairs, where the albino spiders go heavy on the silk. The stuff’s structural, I tells ya.

I’m Fixing A Hole Where The Rain Gets In

Well, this situation looks fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in. The rain, and mice, spiders, stray cats, chipmunks, squirrels, snow, mud…

Now, then. The Point.

I’ve been coming to The Point for quite some time now. I thought I was on its scent about a week ago, but I came up empty when I checked the traps. I put more thesaurus urine on the legholds and put them back in the river of words where I like to go trapping, but haven’t had any luck since, either. I thought I had The Point up a tree a few days after that, but I got cold and wandered off after waiting for it to come down. In my defense, I waited almost fifteen minutes before I got bored. I’m not made of stone, you know. I don’t have a pointer dog to hunt The Point with, so I left my cat at the base of the tree with The Point in it. He turned out as useless as a fat clerk in a Victoria’s Secret.

I thought if I pretended not to be interested in The Point, he might show himself, figuring that he’d outlasted me, so I looked off into the distance a good bit, and pretended to write about other things instead of telling you about how to slip a basement under a house rather than doing it the other way ’round, like God and the building inspector intended. But instead of coaxing The Point out in the open where we could club it to death in the comments, I just ended up with a sort of Dumb & Dumber edition of Palladio’s The Four Books on Architecture.

I don’t know Mr. Palladio; I think he went to public school, and I had the nuns, so we’re bound to travel in different circles, forevermore. Or perhaps he’s full-blown Presbyterian, and no one like me gets to talk to any of those. But I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t approve of me putting out a version of his book with so many fart jokes in it. Worse, after a while I got tired of changing all those Latin “V”s he favors into plain old “U”s, so it wouldn’t be so easy for his publisher to catch on that I was plagiarizing him. So I pried the Vs and Us off my keyboard and tried to swap them, but the duct tape didn’t hold, they all fell off, and now I’m trying to make The Point using only 24 letters, like a drunk reciting the alphabet for a state policeman by the side of the road.

Oh, yeah. The Point. More than a few years ago, I took the Massachusetts Construction Supervisor license test with hundreds of other schlubs at the UMASS Dartmouth campus-cum-abattoir, handed it in, and went outside.  I knew no one there. Once again, I was all alone, because everyone knew each other. They were standing in a kind of park that looked more like a black ops landing strip than a place for humans to congregate, and they were all talking furiously to each other. Right there, I got the only education that I was likely to get from the whole episode.

They all knew each other because they had all been taking that test, and attending those stripmall classes together, forever and a day, over and over. They always failed. They failed long. They failed hard. They failed often. They failed regularly. Miserably. Spectacularly. With bangs. With whimpers. And no one that passed finished before I did. They left forty-five minutes before the allotted time was up because they were only on the second question at that point, knew their answer to the first one was wrong anyway, and figured there was no point in continuing.

I didn’t bother to introduce myself to anyone. I didn’t need to, after all — I was famous. I was the moron or genius without the tabs; a celebrity of sorts. I simply walked up to the closest gaggle of hangdog expressions and they adopted me immediately like a pound puppy. They were all comparing notes on how exactly they failed. I gathered that they met so often that they had formed softball teams and dart leagues and began to marry each other’s sisters. I didn’t quite understand how it could be, I didn’t think the test was that hard, but they all assured me it be.

They were all framing carpenters. They had reached the period of their careers where they had to take over for their old man the framing carpenter, and let him move to Florida with the seven fingers and one thumb he had left and be retired for at least fifteen minutes before he had his complimentary myocardial infarction. Of course their fathers never had to pass the test; they were grandfathered in, and the Building Code was small enough to be printed on an index card back then, anyway. But they had to pass, and they couldn’t. One man, who had the rangy look and laconic voice common among framers I have known, said nothing for a good long time, but when pressed, came to The Point in one, brilliant, heartbreaking sentence:

Unlike people like me, who are inoculated with a phonograph needle, he was prone to saying very few words while stuffing them with meaning. He was right. Dead right, and I mean that every which way. He knew, by instinct, and training, and custom, and experience, intergenerationally, exactly how to build a single-family house in the state of his birth. And that knowledge, experience, and desire was worthless to him, because there’s not a lot of questions about wood on that test.

Listen to me. If you’re reading this, you’re the person that test is geared towards. The meek have not inherited the earth. The meek have been sent home to tell their father that there’s not a lot of questions about wood on that test. The test, and the whole industry, was being geared up to be the province of people that are willing and able to wade through fens of text bogged down with legalese, much of it contradictory, a great deal of it useless, in order to have anything to do with building or altering a single-family home.

No one that reads this blog can’t understand how to build a house, or anything else, for that matter. It’s statute turtles all the way down now. You’re all intellectuals. You’re all used to traversing minefields of legalese to get to your porridge. You’re smart, in a very particular way.

And so, we come to the second part of The Point. As I said, you and I are smart, in a very particular way. And that way of being smart is completely useless to the problem at hand: What makes a good, sturdy, liveable house. Being that particular kind of smart has become worse than useless. It’s become antithetical to good housing. It’s a trifle to figure out the structural problems presented by a single-family house. The things that make a house pleasant to live in are subtle, not complicated. There’s nothing subtle in the CMR.

We drove out every single person that built good houses to live in, guarded by common-sense, not statute; produced by tradition, custom, habit, or by accident –what difference does it make why someone is right? Everyone that knew what they were doing are all gone, driven out in a tide of superfluousness, and we’re going to have to do it ourselves if we want it done at all. I can tell you that “the experts” in these matters don’t know squat about what makes a pleasant place to live in. The “experts” built UMASS Dartmouth, and teach there. By the mark of that beast you should know them. You’ve been told  that building and repairing a house is an arcane, complicated business left to professionals. You’re warned never to try anything substantial to repair your house. They tell you to change out the kitchen counters and the tile like they’re underwear, spending the same money over and over again, but the rest of the house is as complicated as the building code is. No it’s not. In my experience, if it’s in your house, and it’s fussy or complicated, it’s bad and you don’t want it. A good house is simpler than a bad house, and that rule of thumb gets truer every day.

You’re plenty smart enough to know, or at least figure out, everything you need to know to build or fix anything worth living in. The only question is whether you have the sense to know what a dullard used to know, and stop building and buying and living in houses a dumb person, in recent memory, knew enough not to build, buy or live in.

So Me And Paul Newman Walk Into The State House

[If you just came in, I’m explaining how I raised my practically-free house six inches with little money and only a teenager to help. It’s taking much longer to explain than it did to do the work. That’s because a house weighs much less than my ego]

I was, at one time, a general contractor.

They don’t call it that, officially, back in Massholechusetts where I earned the credential. You’re a “Construction Supervisor.” I understand they have differing degrees of construction supervision licenses, but I’ve never met anyone with anything but the “unrestricted” version, me included. I was licensed to pull a building permit for — and bang the nails into — anything from a doghouse to a skyscraper. Whoopty.

I want to share with you, my dear readers, a secret. It’s a secret that might do you some good. It’s a secret that might make you rethink my approach to living in a house that cost less than a Corolla, and perhaps even give it a go yourself. In the story of the license lies the secret.

I didn’t technically need the credential at the time. I thought it would be handy to have. I was rehabbing people’s domiciles, and a lot of times a building permit was required, but I was always working for the owner of the house. The owner of a house can apply for a permit on their own, and then hire someone to do the work whether they have a license or not. That’s how it went for a long time. My expertise, their name on the line that is dotted. The process got unwieldy, so I decided to put a stop to it. I was only doing the work in the first place because the customers had tired of hiring a GC that knew squat and then hiring me to fix everything. They wanted to get rid of the middle man, and so did I, after a while. The middleman was always a rough framing carpenter.

I’m not sure what it’s like now, but in the not-too-distant past, all general contractors were framers. It was the traditional way of life for them and the customers. Deal with a framer. The framer had the most to do with producing the house-y like form of the house, so at one time it seemed to make sense, but it really doesn’t anymore. A general contractor used to employ all the subcontractors and build a house, soup to nuts. Now everyone, including the framing contractor, is just a subcontractor. The subcontractors have subcontractors at this point. There’s no natural center in the general contracting onion anymore.

The framing contractor doesn’t know anything about design, he just reads plans. He doesn’t know anything about foundations, or plumbing, or electricity, or painting or any other finishes. HVAC is alchemy; masonry is a Dark Art. All he knows is cutting bird’s mouths in rafter tails with a skilsaw, and how to get a sheet of plywood onto a roof in a ten-knot breeze. Those are important things to know, but it’s only one or two legs of the housing centipede.

I did not come from the world of framing. I didn’t even know who or what to see or do to get a license. There were courses offered at various Upstairs Stripmall Truckdriving and Mani-Pedi schools, but I had basically stopped attending school after I turned fifteen, so I wasn’t about to submit to sitting at a glorified card table, under a flickering fluorescent tube, with a dull docent reading facts to me off a mimeographed sheet as an adult, either. Give me the book, and butt out, I thought.

Try to find that book. I dare you. This was before the Intertunnel was in high gear, so I had to call and go hither and yon, and no one knew nothing about nothing noplace. Bookstores would try to sell me one stupid International Building Code book after another, everyone else had bupkis. I finally asked a building inspector who was drunk in a bar I was playing music in. Pretty much every third drunk person in a bar is building inspector, anyway. Might as well get some use out of them. He told me I had to go to the State House to get one. It was the only way.

So I went to the same desk in the State House where Paul Newman asks for a phone book in The Verdict, except he’s pretending he’s in a hospital, and I’m pretending I’m in a bookstore. The person behind the counter was pretending to be working in both cases. Only a state worker in Massholechusetts can pretend you’re not there, and avoid eye contact entirely, even though they aren’t doing anything and there’s only 24 inches of formica between you. It’s an astonishing talent.

After they got bored of me, they asked me what I wanted like a forties detective asks a safecracker a question in the movies. I was expecting a hose if I lingered. They sent me away, to another room, to get another non-look from someone for a good long while. I was finally allowed to ask for what I wanted, and wordlessly, the state senator’s good for nothing brother in law, or whatever he was, left the room for two minutes on the clock. I didn’t know whether he went to get what I wanted, or if he had decided that he’d had enough of me, and everyone that reminded him of me, and had quit, and was never coming back, or what. I began to wonder if he was Godot, or I was.

He finally came back, and plopped six hundred pages of  shrink-wrapped drivel on the table, and said, “Fifty bucks.” The pages were originally typed on a typewriter, then mimeographed, and then the mimeographs were photocopied, and then each copy was photocopied from the last copy, so I was looking at the Xerox version of The Telephone Game. You were supposed to figure out what it said back when Jack Hynes’ secretary first typed the thing back in the depression. There was an enormous light blue three-ring binder that went with it, and he plopped that down next to it. I briefly considered asking why he didn’t put the pages in the binder before he handed it out, but I was afraid he’d just say, “Fifty bucks” again, so I left and did it myself on Paul Newman’s counter.

(to be continued)