Please note, the apartment dweller has hired someone to move her belongings, not clean up her mess. And if you’ve ever had to perform work in the home of a deranged person, you’d understand that the slightly lighthearted way they treated her is the correct approach. If you behave as seriously as a footman in a palace, they think you’re putting them on and are actually just killing time until the black helicopters filled with lizard people that you summoned with your mind powers arrive.
This is going to sound outrageous, but here goes: I’ve seen a lot worse.
I renovated things of one sort or another for a living for a long time. That rental house was no picnic, don’t get me wrong, but there were no corpses left in it for a while. You never forget that smell, no matter how long you live, believe you me.
I’ve painted apartments that were occupied by people who did nothing but smoke cigarettes for thirty years, never cleaned. We had to scrape and peel the resin off the walls with a drywall knife. It peeled off in big sheets, like nicotine wallpaper. I’ve seen animals slaughtered for a ritual and thrown under a bed. Straight-up hoarders barely merit a mention. Neatly stacked newsprint and egg cartons are a breeze to lug out, no matter how much of it there is.
Back to the subject at hand. It’s plenty bad. Why would anyone act like that?
I’m going to rule out “crazy.” The term is entirely misused these days. I’ll accept that the person in the house was “acting crazy,” but acting crazy isn’t the same as being crazy. You’ll notice that the person was obviously fastidious about their own clothes, hanging neatly in the closet. They were fussy about what they were eating, after a fashion. A truly insane person would eat sand or the shrubs, and be as likely to wear a trash bag as a turtleneck. They’d listen to the moonmen through their molar fillings, not watch cable TV. The person in the house was acting badly, and knew it, but didn’t care anymore. We call any kid that fidgets in class autistic nowadays, so I’m sure there will be a lot of takers to explain that house as mental illness, but like I said: I’m not buying.
The person went feral. Back into a state of nature. It’s the hunter-gatherer Eden ruined by Western Civilization that we’re told we need to go back to that’s on display here. She was living off the land. When the land is covered with stripmalls, pizza and Diet Pepsi represents the nuts and berries. She grazed, and discarded the hulls right where she stood, just like all our neolithic ancestors might. Slept in a nest. Pooped in one spot. When finally challenged for possession of her particular midden, located by the sylvan glade of Pizza Hut and the 7-11, by a member of a more prominent tribe — the landlords — she went off to make a nest somewhere else.
She wasn’t crazy. The landlord’s crazy. He could be put in jail for allowing his tenants to live in squalor. His jailer would pay that woman to live like that. The world is like that now.
She knew someone else would have to clean it up, and that she’d move on to a new paradise. This is civilization, when the veneer is stripped off, and the particle board shows.
I was once at the top of a forty-foot ladder, laden with tools, with the ladder leaned against a house where one rake board transitioned into another rake board at the spot an addition met the main house. Forty feet is plenty high to be lethal, and give you the feeling it’s lethal, too. Without any warning, a bat — one bat — came out of the seam and hit me square in the face, thrashed around a bit, and fluttered off.
In theory, no matter what, you’re never supposed to let go of the ladder. Earthquake, fire, gunshots, surprise parties, whatever — your natural inclination to wave your hands around must be countered. It’s hard to override a bazillion years of fight or flee, but it’s easy to see who can manage it. They’re not blogging just now.
The bats are just a lark for these fellows. Watch out for the histoplasmosis, guys! It’s more painful than marriage, but less deadly in the long run.
It has rained most every second since I finished re-roofing the desolation that the non-hurricane Irene visited on my roof. It’s as if Divine Providence wished me to know that my mad-scramble efforts weren’t in vain. Or maybe is was just water falling out of clouds. I’m not sure which.
I’m wearing my best trapeze outfit.There’s a buncha straps that go here and there and hither and yon and constrict and befoul your motions and efforts and the end result is a kind of safety. You’re too exhausted from donning the stuff to climb the ladder and do anything, and so are protected from harm. In the first picture you can see the big metal ring on the middle of your back that you attach via a lanyard to a the rope you see trailing down over the plank. The lanyard has a kind of removable brake/ clamp on the end that slides up and down the rope if you squeeze it, but brakes hard if you yank on it, like you would if you heard the noontime whistle and forgot where you were for a minute. It works like a more elaborate version of the retention mechanism in your seatbelts. There’s a problem with this contraption, which I’ll get to in a minute.
That’s our “before” picture, of course. It was plenty difficult to reach, and I had to do a good portion of it while hanging upside-down like a vampire bat or a congressman. The lump you see there in the “after” picture below is either the spot where I just yanked out the roof jacks, which are flimsy metal plates you nail to the roof to lay a 7-1/4″ wide plank atop and then tell other people to go ahead and work on it, or maybe it’s a squirrel, I don’t remember. The jacks have angled slots on them and hang on three spikes you pound into the roof. When the sun hits it full, the shingles heat up and get as flexible as a crooked judge, and they lie down real flat of their own accord, just like the roofer does.
Here’s another “before” picture. My house is one, big before picture.
And the result. Only cost me a couple hundred dollars in materials, and four years off my life. I would have felt stupid, lying in a bed, dying of nothing anyway. Now someday I can have a doctor look at my vital signs while I eat a puzzle my grandchildren just brought me in the rest home, and he’ll say, “You used to roof, didn’t you. You’re a goner.”
There’s the problem with your fall protection system, right there. That big, iron ring. It’s attached to the roof deck on a big metal plate that’s attached with dozens of big screws. Someone has to climb up there and install it in the first place. The phonebook says I’m “someone.” This is known in the trade as “your ass in the breeze.” You can generally remove the rings when you’re done, but I leave them for fixing the other 493 things wrong up there in the future. Eventually there’ll be so many of these things here and there that my house will look like it’s wearing chainmail armor and hurricanes won’t bother it.
Roofing shingles cost exactly double what they did a little more than a year ago. They are just little slabs of petroleum emulsions with aquarium pebbles stuck on them, and since our government thinks we don’t need any of that sort of gooey black stuff any more except to put into bulletproof limousines and corporate jets, we’ll have to economize elsewhere. Before you go all Tea Party on the government on my behalf, I suppose I should admit that we probably would have wasted the money anyway, on food for our children or something equally dumb. Maybe a luxurious 9-1/4″ wide board for me to stand on instead of the 7-1/4″. Or Faberge eggs or something.
Roofing is one of those barbarian arts I know about but don’t care for. It highlights an essential truth about a woodframed house, at least a traditional one that’s not all plastic. The proper way to make a house weatherproof was described to me by a man that looked exactly like the carpenters you see in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. He even wore a fedora while he worked in overalls pulled over his street clothes — hence their name, even though no one wears them like that anymore that I’ve seen.
Anyhoo, he told me to picture myself as a drop of water, falling on the highest point on a house. Now picture how I’d get all the way to the ground without getting in. Now make every piece of the house overlap the piece just below it to make sure it happens. When you roof, like most everything on the house, you just assemble it all correctly, backwards.
I never could have managed it by myself. The heir fetched and carried quite a bit, and he took this picture of me with a little Star Trek remake lens flare for effect. I probably shouldn’t wear a red shirt if Star Trek is involved, huh?
It was 75 degrees while I roofed, so the temperature on the roof was about 1500 degrees Kelvin. That’s an estimate; it might be low. But I’m glad we hung in there long enough to finish 3/8ths of the turret roof before it rained. By any measure, the job must be deemed a success. Don’t get me wrong, the roof still leaks; it just leaks somewhere else now.
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