Do Your Best, With What You Have, Where You Are, Going as Fast as You Can

So you’re like me. You’re fixing an abandoned house in the butt end of nowhere. The question is not how good a job you can do. That doesn’t enter into it. The only question is how good a job you can do, with what you have, where you are, going as fast as you can. I know it’s a riff on Teddy Roosevelt, but he’s a fellow traveler for me, not the inspiration. I figure no one should judge anyone else using any other slide rule. It’s the question I’ve been answering for over ten years in this house. Maybe my whole life.

I’ve had my fingers in all sorts of construction projects over the years. Some vanishingly small, some pretty big, and lots in between. I’ve performed ridiculously fussy work, for substantial sums, and barbaric constructions where that was required. Our current house is a very particular kind of project for me, one I’m not sure I chose, but don’t mind that it was chosen for me, really. How good a job you can do, with what you have, where you are, going as fast as you can, between snow-shoveling sessions and firewood stacking interludes and scratching out a living is more accurate. The length of time it’s taken to turn this beat around bugs me. It punched me in the face to see a time date stamp from ten years ago on the house lifting pictures. But I was going as fast as I could, where I was, with what I had. I may be disappointed, but I’m not sheepish about the whole thing.

Readers are always curious about these sorts of projects. Home Improvement, they used to call it. What is it now? I’m not sure. I need a consultant to help me buy $35,000-worth of kitchen counters. My god, have you seen Pinterest, or egad, Houzz? Have you watched This Old House in the last decade? The question seemed to be how exacting a job can you expect with an unlimited budget and an army of workers in zip codes where I’d be arrested for trespassing if I got out of the car. Finished immediately, while being documented like a WPA project, by the way.

So I’m doing my bit by writing about making a hellhole into a livable home in a downscale, somewhat wild, faraway place. I’m not pretending to be a farmer or a rancher or whatever to cadge internet attention, either.  I see many younger people on the intertunnel longing for something like that, although their image of it seems to be glamping more than real homeownership to my eye. In the same way that going on vacation isn’t the same as traveling, looking longingly at pictures of log cabins in trackless forests on Tumblr won’t give you a real idea about how the domicile world works out where the roads only have one stripe on them. I live in a regular (Victorian) house in a village. Get your yurt fetishes and tiny house dreams elsewhere, I don’t mind.

But I’m telling you kids, you could do it. Give me an hour on Zillow and I’ll find you seventeen houses for fifty grand or less that need less work than mine did, sprayed all over the map. If I can fix a house, you can, because I’m not born to it any more than any of you. I just got interested in it early on, and kept going. You could too. Kids spend four years in college learning nothing and borrowing a hundred large for the privilege. You’ll get a better education and a house without a mortgage for the same money and time invested with my method. Find a place and fix it. You can do it.

So my readers will have to look at pictures from years back for a while, until I catch up with real-time and you see the other seventeen projects I’ve gotten up to recently. And I’ll look at the few pictures I have, trying to illustrate what I was doing with words, because I was going as fast as I could and didn’t have time to take many pictures. I’ll fib about some stuff, and guess about other things, because I moved on to the next thing too fast to remember what I just did. You’ll wonder how thing went from demolition to cabinet hardware without enough steps in between, and I’ll shed a tear over images of my children with childish faces that have disappeared into the calendars.

I was writing that that line, Do as good a job you can do, with what you have, where you are, going as fast as you can, referring to fixing a house, but it occurs to me it applies to most anything, especially raising children. And upon reflection, it’s the part about going as fast as you can that really matters. If you have big time resources and lots of help and plenty of time to think and plan and worry about your children, and oodles of free time to spend with them, you have a leg up on the average parent. But the speed is the same for everyone, I think. You better not hesitate, or linger over a single aspect of parenting, or the whole thing will disappear down a rabbit hole before you know it. You’ll be standing there blinking, with adults staring at you, wondering where did it all go? You’d kill to get down on the car carpet and play Matchbox cars with them one more time, but they want the car keys. Go big, go fast, or go home. A rest home. One of the ones they feature on Sixty Minutes.

I used to make a kind of joke at work, but it wasn’t really a joke, it was wisdom in disguise, though I didn’t realize it at the time. “I can do it faster than anyone who can do it better, and I can do it better than anyone who can do it faster.” It’s the kind of invincible stupidity that you need to tackle a home improvement project. I have it in spades. Get some. You’ll be glad you did.

[I’ll get back to pestering the side porch tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who reads, comments, buys my book, or hits the tip jar. It is greatly appreciated]