New Driveway. Some Assembly Required

That’s not really a driveway. Here in Maine, we call that a dooryard. Maine has different terms for many everyday things. Then again, not many other places pave their front yards and park on them, and save the garage for socializing and working on motorcycles and snowmobiles. Our dooryard was a patchwork quilt of ad-hoc pavement, concrete, and dirt, seasoned with moss and dandelions. The pavement was just dumped on the earth many moons ago, and then subsided a lot. When you pulled in, your front tires would eventually drop into a gully, and your bumper would flirt with the spidered pavement in front of the trench. We decided to finally do something about it.

Pavement has a hard time here in Maine. “Frost heaves” doesn’t refer to indigestion after you eat a banana popsicle. In the winter, the ground freezes very hard and very deep. The moisture in the soil under the pavement expands, and it pushes up the pavement, at least until the spring rolls around and the pavement can collapse back into a proper pothole. These frost heaves get very large indeed, like impromptu speed bumps. They are generally ministered to by crack road crews who scramble out as soon as a frost heave is reported, and put up a sign placed just after it to warn you about the frost heave you just went airborne over.

So here at the Cottage we’re the usual amount of broke and can’t afford to hire a paving contractor to come and install next year’s frost heaves in our dooryard. We’re going to have to rely on our wits and mettle to end up with a blackish patch out front. We’re going to start with Plan B, and work down from there.

We bought a plate compactor. It’s a gas-powered sledge with a heavy steel slab for a base. It vibrates, and compacts soil, or pavement, or paving bricks, or your foot if you’re not paying attention. We bought it at the Orange Place and had it shipped to us. The FredEx driver showed up and informed me that plate compactors are heavy, so stand back, let a girl that knows how to lift heavy things handle this. She tried and failed to budge it, and then dropped it out the door onto the sidewalk. I was grateful that I didn’t have to drop it myself. Luckily, it’s not possible to break a plate compactor. Bang on it all you like, but it’s like trying to break a panzer tank with an upholstery hammer.

We called the semi-local materials dudes and ordered 10 cubic yards of recycled pavement, which people call RAP around here. When you see those huge grinders peeling up (scarifying) roads, it all gets reused. Some recycled pavement gets mixed back into new, hot asphalt pavement. Stuff like we bought gets crushed and mixed with sand and maybe some aggregate, and sold as RAP.  Most people just use it for a sub base under hot asphalt paving, but you can spread it and compact it,  and get a fairly durable almost-pavement. They use lots of eco-type adjectives to make you feel better about avoiding tarring Gaia with your driveway, and perhaps feathering it, too, if you don’t shoo the pigeons away first. I’ve never gone in much for that sort of foolishness. The stuff is just cheap and effective and available. Funny, that would probably make a better sales pitch, but it’s never been tried, so there’s no way to know.

I love the local folks. I had to give directions to my house, and they instructed me to institute a fail-safe, foolproof method to locate the property for the driver. Google Maps? No. Satellite location? hardly. They asked me what color my house was, and told me to put a bucket out front.

That’s 10 cubic yards. If you’re unfamiliar with material estimating, it’s either way too much or not nearly enough for the job. You can’t order extra, because what the hell are you going to do with it if you’re done and there’s still a heap of it? Halloween isn’t for months, and filling up baggies with it and handing them out is a lot of work, anyway. And missing on the low side is deadly. The materials yard has a 16-yard minimum, and I had to talk pretty fast to get them to bring me only 10. Asking them to bring me 2 more would have resulted in a request for me to memorize their phone number, and then throw away my head.

I estimated the amount by tying a string to a couple of bricks, pulling it taut, and measuring the gap between the string and the slumpy dooryard it was supposed to fill in. The shallowest measurement was 2″, and the deepest was 6″, so I averaged it out to 4″. Multiply the length in feet by the width in feet by 1/3 of a foot for depth, and then divide by 27, which is how you speak cubic yards. Then check your math because grammar school was a long time ago.

So sane people rent a bobcat (skidsteer), a sort of miniature front end loader, They spread the stuff around and backblade (drag the bucket while going in reverse) it to the proper grade. Then they rake it out a little, and get a big roller and ride up and down to flatten and compact the RAP. However, I don’t know many sane people, and don’t count myself among them. I’ve got a wheelbarrow, a shovel, and a gravel rake. It’s only like 12 or 14 tons of shoveling. I’m not sure what that works out to in snowstorms, but I think it’s only approximately half the weight of Rhode Island, so, no biggie.

I spread some out and revved up the compactor. Those wily Chinese like to play tricks on gweilus like me. After assembling the compactor and running it back and forth for a minute, a big, shiny nut appeared on the pavement. I spent ten minutes trying to find out which bolt had let go, cursing myself under my breath for not tightening them properly, before I realized it was just a spare nut someone had dropped in the factory between the bottom plate and the engine. Good one, Won.

You spoon the mix into the wheelbarrow, spread in in little heaps where your driveway is supposed to be, but isn’t quite, rake it flat, and then run the plate compactor over it.

The plate compactor is pretty lightweight, despite the FredEx driver’s lament, so you have to put the deepest parts in using “lifts.” That’s excavator lingo for thinner layers that you build up. The shoveling and raking is demanding work, but if you’ve ever worked the Irish banjo before, you learn how to move material without expending more effort than you need to. And walking behind the compactor is restful after shoveling for a while. You always wear ear protection. It muffles the sound of your neighbors complaining about the compactor noise.

So how far can one man get in a day? Well, about 2/3 of the pile is gone, and wonder of wonders, you can park a car next to the house again. Not bad. Alas, I won’t be able to finish tomorrow. I have to go to the mental hospital, to ask for an estimate. Maybe Wednesday, if they let me out.

It’s How You Push the Rock That Matters

I’ve been remodeling a bedroom in our house. It’s in a turret on the second floor. It’s my son’s bedroom, and was my other son’s bedroom before that. It makes an excellent defilade position for covering any invasions from up or down the street. The topic doesn’t come up all that often, though.

The ceiling was spangled with brown blobby spots from the ghost of roof leaks past. There was an abandoned light fixture in the middle of the ceiling, formerly serviced by the original knob and tube wiring, which has long since gone the way of congressional probity. The walls are still wallpapered from a century ago. They’ve been painted over numerous times, so I left it in place. The floor is all marked up from a million kid feets, but it’s plenty solid. The windows and doors had a spartan head casing made from two plain, square blocks in the corners, with a flat casing in between. I yanked them off and fabricated a four-piece head casing out of lumber yard pine.

The walls were dirty off-white and spidered with cracks from the house settling. I beefed them all up with quick-setting drywall compound and paper reinforcing tape. The ceiling cracks got the same, and it looks vaguely flat and smooth again. I had to hit the brown spots with two coats of shellac primer, and one of Kilz oil-base primer, to get the stains to finally shut up. Water filtered through a hundred-and ten-year-old attic gets evil indeed.

The ceiling is now spanking white. The walls are — well, I don’t know what they are. I mixed all the odds and ends of paint in the basement together to make a sickly blue and then squirted in some raw umber and raw sienna and got that green. The doors and the floors are orange-y colored and complement it nicely.

We’ll touch up the scrapes in the floor with some yellowish dye I made for some tables a decade or so ago, and put a coat or two of clear gloss varnish over the floor, because I’ve been looking at the can on the shelf for twenty-five years and I’m getting tired of it.

I made that dresser about twenty five years ago for my older son, and now his little brother stows his rags and bones and feathers in it. It’s made of curly birch, a wood that’s as hard as Chinese arithmetic. I don’t really remember making it, exactly, but I remember distinctly that after I ran a drawer front through a shaper that the edge of the board was so sharp that it cut my hand like a razor. I used to make six of those shelves at a time about thirty years ago, and still have a few of them kicking around. They were probably the first woodworking projects I ever tried.

While I was working in the room, I was in a dreamlike state. I went back in time, like paddling up a stream, past the hundreds and hundreds of rooms just like it I’ve painted or banged nails in or whatever. It was all so familiar that it started to feel strange to do it again. The restoration of rooms like this one feels ephemeral at this point, and nearly useless to anyone but me. People do not value what is in my head or hand or heart the way I do.

Sisyphus is cursed to push a rock up a hill every day, and every night it rolls back to the bottom. But no one much understands Sisyphus. We’re all cursed to push the rock of life up a hill we can never surmount. It’s how you push the rock that matters.

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]

All He Needs Now Is a Manifesto

A fine effort. I gave it a solid 6 out of 10 on the Dick Proenneke scale of bushcraft. Then I discovered he’d disabled embedding on websites other than YouTube, so I knocked it back to a 5. The insulated, “captured” floor is the shizzle. I love the auger holes and the wooden pegs. The whole thing is a nice, quiet job. He knows enough to come in out of the rain, too, which is not usually a distinguishing mark of the outdoorsy breed. The door hinges are pretty slick, too. Even Proenneke waterproofed his moss roof with a layer of plastic film, so we’re not going to fault him for that. And his foldable rocket stove is fantastic.

Of course, if I received a package from a guy like this, I’d put it in a bucket of water before I opened it. Just sayin’.