I Think I’m Supposed To Pony Up Before And After Photos

Maybe it’s just me, but perhaps instead of painting bizarre hedrons on the walls, maybe they should have opened that little door and noticed that rodents had eaten all the insulation off the wiring for that electric radiator, like I did

Ah, beloved of shelter shows, fave of DIY videos, the inamorata of second wives that just shooed the last disreputable contractor off their property after the granite countertop/laminate flooring/stainless steel appliance remuddling orgy was over in their snouthouse kitchen: Before and After Photos.

But I’ve already shown you before and after photos. You just weren’t paying attention. It’s not your fault. I’m weird and broke, so my After photos are really all During photos. There is nothing permanent in your house. Your house is a direction, or more accurately, it’s one of two directions. Getting better or getting worse. There is no stasis in houses. Nothing is “modern,” or “updated.” Newly installed, maybe. But the hideous stuff you ripped out, usually barely a decade old, was all modern and updated when they put it in, too. What it really was, was a fad.

Fads rule in everything in American public life. There used to be fewer choices for everything you used or owned. There were only three TV channels when I was young, and yet people had a more varied outlook than they do now, even though basic cable has three hundred. Everyone had to have Corian counters when Clinton was President. Everyone had to have granite counters when Bush was President. Everyone wants repossessed granite countertops in Obama’s second term, which is almost continuity, but my point stands. In two years every one will sniff at your granite and say quartz is where it’s at, dahling, and you’ll tear it all out again.

I didn’t do anything in particular to my $25,000 house, though I’m always doing something. A Home Depot brochure didn’t explode in there. I really only did one thing: I reversed its direction. The period before 1968 is shrouded in mystery, but I know pretty much what’s been going on here since then. It was all bad. Everyone had their own version of  bad to visit on the sticks and bricks, but like most people, they were all human termites. They ate at the fabric of the house, and pooped in it. The poop of a human termite isn’t sawdust. It’s ceiling fans and wallpaper borders and sheets of paneling and dozens of tin barnacles on the window headers for curtain rods and shutters and shades and drapes and sheets of plastic and venetian blinds.  I began to suspect that this house has only had one direction since it was built, and then, in a moment of inspiration, looking at some substandard thing or another, I wondered if it was going down the shitter even before it was finished. Did the original occupants move in before it was completely built and start the cavalcade of entropy before the paint was even dry?

It’s very likely. The house was built in a very unusual way for 1901. It’s timber framed. The outside is standard-issue Queen Anne, with wrap-around porch, a curved and a turreted roof, a mix of siding textures, big windows, public rooms enfilade. But it’s framed like a barn: big timbers socketed into one another, and not enough framing between them. I would have expected balloon framing, maybe, and there is some mixed in, but this house wasn’t a palace, ever. It was for regular folks, or the just slightly better off than regular folks, and it was built by people that were used to having horses for customers. It’s a testament to their innate good sense and the quality of even below-average building materials and methods from the turn of the twentieth century that the house is still standing after a century of people trying to wreck it.

When we moved here, I think I spent over two hundred dollars on window glass. Window glass is cheap. If I gave you a bag of baseballs and a half an hour, I doubt you could break two hundred dollars-worth of window glass. But when the direction of a house is south for a century, all sorts of tabs can be rung up. All I did was stop this Lusitania of linoleum and turn it around. I try not to make anything worse, and if my wife and I ever lay our hands on twenty-five dollars and thirty minutes, we can improve our lives in a demonstrable way, just by pushing the shingled rock up the entropy hill one more inch.

So here’s a picture of our dreary living room, leading into our shabby dining room, just as we found it, replete with a moronic ceiling fan where a light should be, purchased with money that might have fixed — oh, I don’t know, a broken window– in a room that faces north in a climate that has shown me twenty below zero in recent memory:

But you’ve all already seen the After, er, I mean During photo. It’s a video, though. The Heir and The Spare are in it:

Remodel your house in the only meaningful way possible. Turn that ship around. Turn that frown upside down. Find a mate and have some kids and put some life back in your house. But Just between you and me, I’d skip the trombone. It’s like brass bagpipes.

(You can see more Unorganized Hancock videos here. The drummer’s only nine years old in that video. He’s ten now, and a lot better. No, really)

 (to be continued)

Praying For Anti-Freeze

Our bathroom, just as we found it. I think that’s anti-freeze in the toilet. I mean, I pray that’s anti-freeze in it.

I’m a fairly effective forensic carpenter.

There, I lied again. I’m a really good forensic renovator. I’ve had as much experience with old homes as four Bob Vilas. I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time reading about old homes, especially American versions of old homes, because I’m profoundly strange, so it’s hard to spring anything new on me. I’m a little sketchy below the Waffle Hut/IHOP line, it’s true. But then again, there wasn’t much down there in the first place to miss out on. It took air conditioning to get people living down there in big numbers, and air conditioning for the masses is a recent development. Besides, Sherman burned everything else down, anyway.

By “forensic renovation,” I mean that by taking a house apart, or better still, looking at the benighted surfaces visible to the naked eye after generations of neglect and visits to Home Despot, I can usually tell what used to be there, or at least make an educated guess at it. My current house in western Maine was really easy in this regard, and really hard at the same time. It was really easy to tell what the original roofing from 1901 was, because it was still on the roof. It wasn’t doing anything rooflike up there on the roof, but I could look at it if I wanted to. The original service entry for the electricity was there, the original electrical wiring, flooring, door and window trim, window sashes — where they weren’t removed entirely and boarded up, anyway. Hell, when I repaired the central stairwell and upstairs hallway, every single layer of wallpaper going back to William McKinley was still on the wall. The original was beautiful. It was a rich green, flecked with a bronze-y tone in metallic ink. The layer over it was a less fine but still nice 1940’s block print in a sort of classical revival motif. There was a fifties chinoiserie attempt on there after that –not bad. There were two or three more layers of meh. The room got bigger just by removing the wallpaper.

Three of the bedroom ceilings still displayed their original coatings on the ceiling, two of the three completely untouched, the third on patchwork display after sleeping under a 1970s attempt to put textured paint over calsomine. Calsomine paint — isn’t. It isn’t paint. It’s paste, like something Tom Sawyer would con you into painting Aunt Polly’s fence with. People tried painting over calsomine paint for decades back in the day, and it would peel forevermore, because it’s essentially a coat of chalk, and everyone got disgusted with trying, some putting in asbestos tiles, others drop ceilings, desperately trying to keep the lead paint chips out of their Wheaties. That usually worked until they were able to solve the problem once and for all by burning their house to the ground. They often accomplished this by plugging in their leg lamp and their Christmas tree at the same time, using that socket that already had the radio, four other lamps, and an extension cord for a toaster in the next room. The lamp was a major award, so you just had to plug it in. It wasn’t their fault.

Just because I’ve been tasked with (unsuccessfully) repairing calsomine ceilings a couple hundred times in the past, doesn’t mean I was ready to see one essentially fresh off the brush. It wasn’t like unearthing a triceratops skull — it was like finding an actual triceratops rummaging through your trash cans. It was a wonder to me. The ceiling in what’s now my older son’s room, the nicest room in the house, was a lovely canary yellow color. In the Spare Heir’s room the ceiling was a delicate robin’s egg blue. The decrepit room where the kids play music had a yellow ceiling too, slowly exposing itself like a hobo in the library as the crust of pointless attempts to cover it up sloughs off.

All the woodwork in the public rooms is oak. Big, blocky, oak. Barbarous oak. Ropy, solid, Arts and Crafts oak. Like so many houses built early in the twentieth century, it straddled the line between Victorian and Arts and Crafts. Most of the houses in my neighborhood are like that, or were, before the owners decided they’d prefer to straddle the line between Home Depot and Lowe’s instead. My neighbor across the street lives in a four-square house that would look at home in the midwest, if it wasn’t half taken with old Yankee Victorianism, too. He keeps his house in good repair, which is not easy. He’s a hell of a guy, and a great neighbor.

He was born and raised here, and his father worked in the big mill that squats over the river in the center of town. He moved away, then came back and bought the family homestead back. I told you you could buy any house in town any time you wanted to, but you didn’t believe me. Anyway, wonder of wonders, he was poking around his house and found pictures of mine — in 1968. Awesome!

Before you go off on a jag, making fun of me for living in an arctic wasteland, I’d like to double down and point out that these pictures are taken in the autumn, at least a month before winter even begins. Snerk. But there’s my house, halfway between being built and having us infest it. My neighbor Rich pointed out everyone in the photo by name. They all still live around here. The dog is dead, though.

This is Rich’s brother, standing on his lawn, looking down on ours. Rich still looks down on us, every which way, and with good reason. And to give you some of the local flavor, Maine in the sixties, let me point out that Rich’s brother is casually holding a hatchet.

If you look at the first picture, you can see a catwalk with a railing that led to a screened-in kitchen entry at the back of the house, which was a 16 foot plunge to your death without a railing when we moved here. Don’t worry, I instructed my children to play in the street, where it’s safe, and stay out of the yard. We’re devoted parents in such matters.

Look even closer, and you’ll see a Zenith sign on the front roof. A previous owner fixed and sold televisions and radios out of the basement here. I work down there now, and find evidence of his labors here and there from time to time. There’s a basement under that basement, too, about the size of a two-car garage. The fellow had a nifty Dodge delivery van parked out front.

When I said the forensic carpentry was both easy and hard at the same time here, I told you all the easy stuff. Hell, nothing’s easier than looking at pictures of it. Now the hard part: Everyone destroyed everything else. Ripped it out, tore it up. Sold it into slavery, I think. Hell, down in the basement basement (that’s not a typo) they tried to burn it to a cinder to put me off the scent. There were at least five doors gone from the first floor alone, and I counted eleven (eleven!) windows that had been removed and boarded up. In the infinite wisdom of people who board up windows, all those windows faced South. They boarded them up because someone told them that windows leak heat, so they took out the ones facing the sun, their only hope of any real comfort in this climate, and installed ceiling fans in every room, figuring the heat must be in this house somewhere. Maybe it’s up by the ceiling, refusing to cavort with us down on the floor.

We moved into the house without any central heat in it, and not even any decentralized heat for the first week. Trust me, if there was any heat in there, I would have found it.

(to be continued)

I’m Fixing A Hole Where The Intertunnel Gets In

I fear I must go back to the beginning.

It wasn’t my intention. I started writing about fixing the foundation I keep under my money pit in western Maine, because that’s what I did this summer, but one thing led to another, and people got interested in the birth of the baby, even though I was trying to talk about junior high school, as it were. The public is demanding the bathwater, too.

I’m familiar with one thing leading to another. After all, I have two children. House purchases and babies often happen under the same kinds of circumstances. Bad lighting, slightly inebriated, running up tabs you really can’t afford, being shown strange people’s bedrooms, that sort of thing. Well, if it wasn’t for bad judgment, I’d have no judgment at all, so why should a house be any different? We were supposed to live in Turner.

Turner’s over an hour closer to, well, everything. We’d gone on Zillow and Google Earth and MLS night after night, looking for the cheapest nearly habitable place we could find. We thought we found it in Turner. I talked a few times with the realtor, and they were as helpful as realtors usually are: not helpful. They couldn’t answer any important questions for me, because realtors don’t know anything important about the properties they sell. Well, that’s not entirely true. They often know very important things about the properties they sell. Those are invariably the things they’re hiding from you, hoping to entice you into standing in the decrepit shack they’re listing while they perform their Svengali perorations about its potential. Weave a tapestry of possibilities in the air that’ll have you frisking yourself in no time, looking for your checkbook before that handyman that’s interested in the property snatches it from under your nose.

Oh, I know that handyman. That guy gets around. I never learned his name, but he seemed to be interested in every property I was interested in Maine. No matter where I went — Turner, Cornish, Peru, Livermore Falls, Norway, Rumford…

Anyway, that polymath handyman with the lead foot and the nose for diamonds in the rough was always one step ahead of us, ready to stuff our defeat into the jaws of his victory. He was very interested in Turner, I hear.

I had one request for the realtor on the phone, and by email, and then by the phone again, and by email some more, unrequited. Go to the house. Stand outside. Take four photos: North, South, East, and West. Show them to me. That’s it. I’d researched the house to a fare-thee-well already, knew every owner it had ever had, what the taxes were. Hell, I even had the septic plan for it on my desk. Just take the the pictures, willya?

Well, that realtor must have been the most notable realtor since the Algonquin Century16 office did that handshake deal with the Dutch. She was always too busy to travel the 5,000 yards from her office to the house and take the pictures. My, how busy some people get.

We drove the four hours to get there on a weekend. We had an appointment with the realtor at 10:00 AM, which I gather is considered 3AM on Christmas in realtor time. We decided to go early and drive by the house alone first. It was a three-bedroom, end entry, Greek Revival farmhouse, with an attached ell and a barn attached to that. It looked like Dresden, 1945, but nearer a fire hydrant. And about fifteen feet from one side of it was another house, which appeared as if someone with the decorating chops of Ed Gein owned it, but rented it out. On the front porch, which was really just some crumbling concrete steps, was a man that looked like he had just cooked and eaten his entire family, and was still hungry. He was smoking a cigarette, standing outside in the snow — in his socks.

My wife told me to keep driving, because my wife likes to tell me to do things I’m already doing. It’s like a hobby with her.

We kept driving, following signs to one strange place after another, until we found the house we live in now, with a For Sale sign standing drunkenly on the lawn. We stopped and stood on the Queen Anne porch, and peered in the windows. The house looked like it had been picked up six inches and dropped. It had been decorated by someone that didn’t like their customer, or human beings in general, very much. There was ice — not frost; ice — on the inside of the windows. We were looking as best we could into a triptych of windows in a bay, under a sort of turret, and my wife said, “That’s where our Christmas tree will go.”

The rest was conversation. We bought the house that winter, snatching it from under the very nose of that handyman, the dastard, but the For Sale sign stayed out front until June, because it was frozen solid into the ground. Now I’m the only thing that stands drunkenly on the lawn, and that’s the way we like it.

(to be continued)