Alrighty, we’re going to fix this kitchen. We’re going to fix it but good. We’re going to fix the plumbing. We’re going to fix the electrical. We’re going to fix the floor. We’re going to…
Hmm. “Going” is a verb. I think it’s a future tense of the verb “to be.” It’s good that it was in the future tense, because it fit in with our circumstances perfectly. In the future, we’d all be richer and smarter and more popular. Hell, the way our minds work, in the future we’d be younger, too, you just wait and see. And we’d have a great kitchen to be younger in.
But we had to live in this house right away. To quote those famous philosophers, The Outsiders, time won’t let me wait that long. And we couldn’t live in it the way we found it. We’re daft, but not daft enough to cook on a stove with a wood shingle backsplash. So my wife and I gnawed it over a bit, and decided what we could and should do right off. Non-negotiable stuff.
You’d be surprised how well you can adapt to your circumstances if you have no other choice. I also was kind of lucky, in that I’ve renovated lots of houses while the owners were still living in them. Experience in these matters helps. Some of these customers were, how can I put this delicately, demanding. They weren’t going to put up with much of any discomfort or mess. My family would be easy compared to them.
I remember one customer from way back in the day. She was some sort of harpy from Greek mythology. Her husband, while leaving for work, actually said, “Good luck” to me when he passed me in the driveway. I took it as an ill omen. I wasn’t disappointed.
One of the renovations on the agenda was redecorating their master bedroom. It was chock-a-block full of expensive furniture, and lots of bric-a-brac I couldn’t afford to drop without getting backing from a hedge fund first. I had a smallish crew working for me at the time, and I cautioned them over and over not to make a mess or break anything. We removed pictures from the walls, and stripped off wallpaper to begin. Then we patched all the plaster, because the walls would be changed to paint, and we prepared and primed the wood trim.
I covered everything in the room with brand new, sparkling white, padded canvas dropcloths, because I had an inkling how this job was going to go. At the end of the day, I took out Polaroid photos I’d taken before we began, and we put everything back precisely where it was before we started. Then I sent the crew out of the room, and slowly crawled backwards out of the room on my knees, wiping the floor down with a sponge as I went. It was immaculate. We’d have to move and cover everything again the next day, but the customer specified that she wouldn’t put up with any disruption of her normal routine.
She wasn’t home when we finished, so we locked the door and I drove the 45 minutes home. When I got there, I was greeted by several VERY AGITATED voicemail messages indicating that the house was a mess, and I’d better get back there pronto, or go to my lawyer’s office, my choice. I drove back.
I stood in the bedroom with the husband and wife, and I tell you that place was cleaner than an operating room. I was flummoxed.
She said, “Well?”
“Well, it looks pretty clean to me. Can you give me some idea of the problem you’re seeing?”
“It’s obvious. Don’t play dumb.”
I almost told her it wasn’t an act, but thought the better of it.
“I don’t get it.”
“You forgot to hang the pictures up.”
“Er, ma’am, we’re going to be painting those walls tomorrow, and the hooks you used to hang the pictures were adhesive strips, stuck to the wallpaper we removed.”
“You didn’t bring hooks?”
“No, I didn’t bring hooks.”
“Typical.” She stomped out of the room.
The husband got interested in the ceiling all of a sudden, and other things other than looking at me. At that moment, I looked down at the night table, and noticed one of those orange plastic containers that prescription drugs are dispensed in. I’m used to seeing regular sized containers, tiny little cylinders with white caps and a typed label, but this one was the size of a can of motor oil. The cap was off, and there was a pitcher of water and a glass next to it. I’ve never seen that many pills in one place outside a pharmacy.
The husband must have noticed a modestly horrified look on my face, and said, “That’s my wife’s prescription for valium. But honestly, it really doesn’t matter which one of us takes them, as long as one of us does.”
It took all my strength not to laugh like a hyena until I was safely in the truck with the window rolled up.
So I do know how to work around people, even people I’m married to. We decided on the bare minimum we could accomplish right away. The most bang for the buck, as it were. We demolished the baseboard heat, to cut down on cut ankles. I cut the power to the knob and tube wiring, and my wife made do with a torchiere in there. We removed the shingled backsplashes, and then made temp backsplashes with cheap shelf paper stuck on cheap unfinished hardboard. I went to the hardware store and bought a random assortment of plastic parts, and made the sink drain a bit better. We ran pex plumbing to the sink, the second of many such runs in the house. C’mon, you know the toilet was first.
I demolished all the unsafe plugs and wires, and put cover plates on all the boxes. We bought a bunch of extra cover plates and screwed them over the largest holes in the floors, which inconvenienced the mice somewhat.
A neighbor came by and told us one of their relatives was throwing away a dozen vinyl windows. They were replacing them with other vinyl windows because Ricky Roma sells windows in Maine now, I guess. Anyway, would we like the old ones? Hot damn, yes.
The donor house was as old as ours, and may have been built by the same people in 1901. The windows were exactly the same height as ours, although slightly skinnier. Fool luck is the best kind. I could pad out the frames a little in width, with no adjustment for height, and pop them in. Fantastic. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but people in Maine are nice, present company excluded.
The spare heir steamed off the hideous wallpaper border. It was winter, and we fought over the steamer job to keep warm. I’m meaner than him, but his elbows are sharp and he won out.
Then I went rooting around in the basement and found some kind of yellow wall paint, and we gave the place a coat to take the curse off it.
We painted right over the paneling, because I was too afraid to look behind it without a stash of valium of my own. Please note that the ceiling molding was installed upside down. It made my eye twitch every day I entered the room until we finally got around to really fixing the kitchen. We’ll show you that, starting tomorrow.