Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home

by Matthew Batt

  I do so gingerly at first, parceling out the stripper as though it’s expensive mint jelly. I wait a couple of minutes, breathing though my mask like a twerpy Darth Vader. Then, with my little yellow plastic scraper, I go at it.

  I feel a mixture of glee and horror. I have the power to save and restore things, but only if I am willing to sacrifice the environment and any present or future babies at the altar of home improvement. Then I realize it is costing me about five bucks a minute to come up with only a vaguely apt metaphor. For the rest of the afternoon I shake that napalm out faster than Westmoreland over the Batangan Peninsula.

  The English word “pharmacy” comes from the Greek pharmakon, which means both medicine and poison. Likewise, the word “tool” is best defined as something that one uses as a tool. In other words, a hammer is not a tool if we don’t use it as such. If we use a hammer as a paperweight, it’s not a hammer. At the same time, if we use a paperweight in the shape of Liberace’s head to drive a nail into a board, well, then that’s a hammer. The more I work on this house, the more I realize that the world of home construction and renovation is chock-full of hypotheticals and syntactic subtleties. “Plumb,” “level,” and “straight,” for instance, are all abstractions that rarely, if ever, exist in practice, no matter how often evoked in a handbook or blueprint. I came into this fixer-upper thinking that there were going to be categorically good or bad decisions to make, that home improvements would be markedly just so—improvements. What I’m finding is a nebulous world where trying to improve something means implicitly bringing it to the brink of its (or my own) destruction in order to give it a new life. I suppose this is true of everything. In order to perform most kinds of surgery, for example, it’s necessary to anesthetize the patient and take him right to the door of death, press his face against it so his breath shows on the brass of the knocker, then drag him back for a few more years of shoveling snow and cheating on his taxes.

  Thoreau said that we should beware of any occupation that demands a new suit and not a new wearer of clothes. What he meant, and what I’m learning, is that if you want to renovate a house—and if you want to renovate a life along with it—you’ve got to strip it bare before you build it back up. Any fool can take a sheet of linoleum or a roll of wallpaper and slap it over the existing surface, but before long the real thing is going to seethe to the surface.

  I need to figure out, I realize, how to be a better man in order to make this house and our lives in it worthwhile.

  While I work on the floor over the next couple of days, Jenae comes to the house straight from her job so that she can work on refinishing the kitchen cabinets. They are covered with, go figure, the same cheap wood veneer that’s covering the walls, the refrigerator, and most of the appliances. Instead of nailing down the veneer, Stanley had apparently decided to save his nails for the Masonite floor fiasco, so he sprayed glue all over the original solid wood and stuck the paneling up. What ensues is not unlike my proceedings with the Masonite. Jenae would heave at a section of cabinet paneling with a scraper and all that would break off would be the parts that didn’t have any adhesive underneath. On one cabinet, I swear I can read “Stanley” spelled out in glue and broken veneer. Occasionally I can hear her cries over my sanding.

  At first I expect nothing but despair. Seeing her standing on the counter in her hiking boots, ripping at the nasty paneling with her fingernails, her hair sweaty and stuck all over her face, I think she’ll fall and break an ankle, and then we’ll be in the clear to have somebody come in, rip out the cabinets, and put up new ones, all in one day. For that, the average estimate we can find is $15,000—just to nail some boxes to the freaking wall. But she sticks with it and does the same thing I did with the Masonite and linseed oil mess. She strips what she can by hand and then napalms the hell out of it. After that, she uses a hand sander to grind down the cabinets to the real wood. She stains them so that their original grain shows through better, and then she seals them and leaves the cabinet doors off: later, she’ll sew curtains to cover the openings for a kind of café effect. I am in absolute awe.

  I have never been so proud of anybody in my life.

  The remainder of the floor work goes reasonably well, despite my expectations to the contrary. The sanding is slow and pensive, but as relaxing and enjoyable as anything that involves potential long-term hearing loss and nerve damage. It is as close as I’ll ever get to meditating, I think, or to ballroom dance lessons with an automaton.

  The polyurethane goes down easily and dries nicely to an only slightly wonky mirror finish. The floors that began as the arena for a shit-smearing contest come out looking like a suitable dance floor for a church. And the hardwood floor that I so dreaded having to add myself on top of the pine two-by-sixes—it is so easy and fun, it barely deserves mention. Tony’s teaching served me well. The three-eighth-inch pieces of new maple snap together practically on their own. All I have to do is lay them out, fit them together, and nail them down.

  Ridiculous as it sounds, Jenae was right: this house wanted to have a maple floor again. We didn’t do anything but let it. For my money, that’s what a good job is. It’s not about forcing something to go where it doesn’t belong, it’s about figuring out what goes together and then not fucking it up.

  We work and work all day long on the house, and when it gets dark we light every light and keep right on working till midnight. Dust and lumber and tools and stain are tumbled in every room, but from the outside, what a sight—what our new neighbors must see. The crack house that had recently had aluminum foil over the windows is alive with the sounds of industry, the brutal poetry of machines, and from its windows pour forth a kind of light made matter, glowing particulately with sawdust, sweat, and hope.

  Remnants of an Ancient Sea

  WHEN CONSIDERING OPTIONS for our kitchen floor, I think a nice tile or one of those cool industrial-style floors will be neat—the black-and-white floors you see in fifties-style diners. It’ll be kind of retro chic, geometrically balanced, and relatively easy to clean. And if we don’t get around to mopping every week, we can just move the dark dirt to the black squares and the light dirt to the white ones. Make a little game out of it even. Play dirt checkers, pet-hair chess. Also, I love black and white. Because I am more or less colorblind, things that have either no color or all the colors at once soothe me. I never feel quite so irritated as when people show me something that’s a blend of a couple of relatively undifferentiated colors and ask me to tell them what I see. They show me a flower the color of a serious bruise and say, What color is it? No matter what I answer—blue, purple, violet, violence—they just laugh. No! they say. It’s indigo! As though colors exist in a crayon box and have little cardboard fences between one another like solitary confinement cells.

  Sadly, Jenae uses her executive veto on my diner floor. I think she’s just afraid that I’ll beat her at dirt checkers, but she won’t argue.

  “We are not putting any more freaking vinyl in this house,” she says.

  To emphasize her point, she pulls at the top layer of flooring in the corner of the kitchen. It is, I am told, a bright royal-blue-and-kelly-green plaid. Beneath it are what appear to be five or six former floors, all of which are at least as chromatically devastating.

  “I don’t see any classy black-and-white floors,” I say.

  “You can have your squares,” Jenae says. “You may not, however, have your vinyl.”

  For the time being, I decide to forgo the battle for the war. I know, in fact, that I am going to lose, intentionally or otherwise, a series of small skirmishes before I can claim any major victories.

  I don’t mean to put this in overly martial terms—though, of course, the word “martial” is an anagram of “marital”—but I am definitely getting the impression that my opinions don’t matter in the same way hers do. I am beginning to sense that when we bought the house, I got my study, the basement, and half of the garage, and she got, well, the rest, including, but not limit
ed to, the bedroom, the bathroom, the dining room, the living room, the kitchen, the porch, the backyard, the front yard, and all of the side yard that you can see from the street. The rest of it is mine. That space behind the air conditioner—all mine.

  I would never say it out loud to her, but I am beginning to feel that we are designing, remodeling, and inhabiting a scale-model dollhouse. Problem being, the scale is 1 to 1. And we are the models. The dolls.

  “I’m thinking marble,” she says. “For the countertop. In the kitchen. It would be so cool. Imagine how cool it would be. Literally. We could roll out pie dough anywhere.”

  “True,” I say. Marble sounds nifty, though I am pretty sure there’s a reason you see it only in ultra-high-end kitchens and in museums. “Seems like it’s pretty rare in residential applications, no?”

  “You don’t have to be so negative all the time,” she says. “Martha Stewart has it in her kitchen on her set. Why do you think that is?”

  We are standing in our semi-remodeled kitchen. Seven layers of vinyl flooring beneath our feet. Matching avocado-green appliances huddle in the corners. Lovely new finish on the cabinets, thanks to Jenae’s hard work, but everywhere else there is room for, shall we say, improvement. I can’t imagine how we are going to use Martha Stewart as a role model when we first need a demolition expert.

  “I don’t know how fruitful it will be,” I say carefully, “to set our expectations up against Martha Stewart’s TV studio. It’s not that I don’t like Martha. I like Martha as much as any straight guy has any business liking Martha. It’s just that there is a considerable gap between her corporation’s budget and what we can try to chisel out of Grandpa.”

  Jenae crosses her arms and begins to quake. “Are you saying I’m trying to rip off your grandpa?” she says. “Just because I don’t come from his money doesn’t mean I’m trying to take it from you. You know this is your house too, and I was just trying to help make it a place we would enjoy living in and, if we ever sell it, see some of our investment back. I can’t believe you. We may as well just rent again.”

  “Well,” I say, “why don’t we look into marble prices first. Then we can move back out.”

  This is a serious moment. Time for the Defcon 1 pet name.

  “Muffin,” I say, “please?”

  Growling, then glaring. Then we kiss.

  “Let me get my purse,” she says, and with that, we’re off to go rock shopping.

  We pick the first flooring store we see. It’s across the street from Home Depot, and compared to it, this little flooring place looks like one of those roadside sword-and-knife tents outside that Renaissance festival you never quite get to but always go by.

  At the counter at the back of the store, a man and a woman are having a charged exchange. She’s middle-aged and appears to enjoy attracting the attention of workingmen without having to try too hard to get it. She’s sort of NASCAR cute, with tight but not trendy jeans and a tank top with an airbrushed wolf on it.

  The guy has a stringy ponytail, like a roadie for a heavy-metal band, and wears surprisingly clean white coveralls.

  Jenae’s already miffed. We both hate poor customer service, but she especially hates it when it’s due to flirting.

  “This doesn’t strike me as a marble kind of store,” she says.

  But before we can leave, the woman asks us what she can help with.

  “Do you have any marble flooring?” Jenae asks. It is a dare.

  The guy with the ponytail is still back at the counter, but his eyes haven’t stopped considering what kind of help he needs from Miss NASCAR. His gaze moves from cheek to cheek of her butt as though he’s judging a contest.

  “Marble?” The woman glances around the stacks of cheap tile. We may as well have asked for tiles made from the teeth of infants. “For a floor?”

  “Marble,” Jenae says. “For a floor.”

  “Well, we don’t have any,” she says somewhat apologetically. “If you want my three cents, I’m not sure you want to put marble on a floor anyway. It’s real soft, you know.”

  “Yes,” Jenae says, “I know. For rock it’s very soft.”

  “All righty,” the woman says. She puts her hands on her hips and moves her elbows back and forth, a bit like a chicken. The airbrushed wolf wags between her boobs. “You want what you want. We don’t have it. But I’m telling you, it’s real soft. You spill a glass of wine or motor oil or something and you can forget it.”

  I say thank you and steer Jenae outside.

  “Motor oil,” Jenae says under her breath. “Like I would ever mishandle motor oil.”

  After a few more rodeos with recalcitrant clerks and would-be interior designers, we learn that marble is universally reviled as a residential floor. We decide against it, however, because it runs about twenty bucks a square foot. That’s about nineteen-fifty more per foot than we have to spend. The alternatives we’re left with are my diner-style checkerboard, the ubiquitous generic taupe ceramic tile we saw in every half-assed remodeled house, or slate.

  My only previous experience with slate had been the blackboards in school. Because I had spent most of my time in cheap apartments or the houses of friends’ parents, my flooring understanding began and ended with the unfortunate underfoot petroleum products: vinyl and carpet. With the chemical revolution of the fifties and sixties, everybody seemed to decide that it was better to fake it than make it. In other words, natural materials—wood, rock, cotton, wool—became passé. They were so natural. So timeless. You could go to a grand mansion in the British countryside, for example, and they’d have nothing but wood floors with old hand-loomed rugs—you could barely tell which century they were from, never mind which decade. But with the advent of extruded, spun, poured, and pounded-flat plastic, we created a generation of building materials that dated us almost to the minute. None being more fashionable than the flavor of the day; none being more unfashionable than yesterday’s. New was it.

  But real rock is back. The granites and the marbles are still by and large left to the countertop world, but slate is everywhere. It’s cheap, about a dollar per square foot, easy to install (we’re told), attractive, and, most important, it hides dirt well.

  Once we decide on slate, the rest is easy, because now there are only two kinds readily available: really expensive and really cheap.

  We place an order for the cheap stuff at a store that seems to cater more to professionals than amateurs, but we aren’t shy about our ignorance, so the guy helping us doesn’t hesitate to give us some pointers.

  Pick the straightest line in the room to establish the floor.

  Lay out all the tiles dry and then make all the cuts at once.

  Hold on to the store’s phone number, because they have a list of contractors who can finish what we mess up.

  After the success with the hardwoods, I am newly of the mind that perhaps all construction jobs are merely tedious and time-consuming—not actually hard. The hint at how wrong I am comes in the form of a friendly offer from the clerk.

  “When do you want to have the materials delivered?” he asks.

  He looks as official a contractor as my hardwood flooring teacher. Golf shirt. Khakis. Imitation expensive pen. The kind of guy who gets paid because he knows how to get other people to do things that would make him dirty or sore.

  “Can’t we take it today in our car?” I say. I look like a poseur in my Carhartt pants, Red Wing work boots, and ironic/dead serious T-shirt that says, “This Dad Could Use a Beer.” I look as if I might at least be able to handle picking up a couple of boxes of flooring. “I’ve got a truck if they won’t fit in my wife’s Beetle.”

  “Better be a really big truck,” he says. “The gross weight is better than a couple thousand pounds.”

  We agree on the next day for delivery.

  Slate—I had no idea—is mined. It comes from quarries in places like upstate New York, Vermont, China, and Wales. Part of what makes slate a superior material for both flooring and r
oofing is that it is readily split into thin, workable slabs, much like mica or other stratified minerals. Folks in the industry say that slate, especially, has “great cleavage.” Half a billion years ago, what would become slate was a thick layer of mud at the bottom of whatever primordial ooze was around for Dick Cheney’s first birthday party. It gradually became compressed into what we know as shale, and then seismic activity and tectonic compression formed it into mountains of slate. About halfway up Salt Lake City’s Little Cottonwood Canyon is a sign at the base of a huge scree field that contains, among other rocks, slate. “Remnants of an Ancient Sea,” reads the sign, perhaps a little too wistfully, but true. Pretty dramatic stuff for a place to put your feet.

  Slate has been used for everything from cutting tools and weapons to headstones, driveways, blackboards and, of course, the eponymous little squares of rock that schoolkids used to write on. Though slate is roughly 4.5 billion years old, it’s actually a soft rock, so it’s a poor choice if what you want is permanence. Tombstones, for instance. Back in Colonial New England, slate was used because it was readily available and easily mined. But because slate has such an easy cleavage, if you will, time and weather rapidly efface whatever is writ upon it. Be it a child’s primer, poetry, or an epitaph, slate has little interest in remembering whatever it is we have to say.

  When the truck arrives with our materials, I immediately realize the depth of my folly. First of all, it is not merely a box truck, as I expected. It is a tractor-trailer equipped with a forklift. On the flatbed sits a huge lump of boxes, subflooring, and bags of thinset—a flexible, quick-drying mortar—all shrink-wrapped with BATT written on it in red grease marker. I expected a few boxes of tiles and a little stack of drywall-like backerboard—nothing more than would fill the back of my old Land Cruiser. The load on this semi would demolish my truck. There is nothing like the real-life fact of being crushed under a couple of thousand pounds of folly to make you wonder about the wisdom of doing it yourself.