by Matthew Batt
Despite that, I love this work because I love the tools. And no tool enjoys a greater marriage of form and purpose than a hammer. It looks precisely like what it is. You pick it up and your hand knows just what it’s for. The smooth, shiny, slightly aerodynamic face and the claw on the back resembling an arrow’s fletching—it’s so beautiful you want to swing it hard and hit something again and again and again, pock pock pock, until the nail is driven home and the timber tight and your point well made. It’s brutality at its most elegant. In my hands, sadly, it is as useful as flaccid asparagus for driving long, sixteenpenny nails into fresh wood.
Still, still, I am doing it. I am framing walls, studs sixteen inches center-to-center. I am sistering weak, compromised beams with fresh, good wood. I hang brackets and pressure-fit everything the way Erik said, so that when weighted with a new slate floor and a full forty-gallon-capacity washing machine sloshing around with jeans and corduroys in it, the floor will hold steady. I go the extra distance and drill four holes through stone and bolt a bracket to the cement floor for a four-by-four-inch beam to take the majority of the weight off the weaker perimeter and distribute the load more evenly.
It is tedious work that, if I do it right, no one will ever even think of. If I do it poorly or if it fails in some catastrophic way, all the blame will be mine. I understand now why Stanley had cut so many corners, but I can’t permit myself to do the same. I want to do the right thing for us and the house.
It just deserves to be done right.
I move the washer and dryer into the kitchen and hunker down to tear up the old linoleum and subfloor in the laundry room. I dread the prospect of another tedious, all-day job, the way the kitchen floor had been, but instead I find that the linoleum in the laundry room wasn’t even fixed to the floor. I simply pull up at a corner, peel it back, roll it up as if it’s some foul yoga mat, and chuck the thing out the door.
I am not disappointed in Stanley anymore, nor am I surprised. I am just relieved that the bad job he did this time didn’t manifest itself in that sorry mix of haste, thrift, and the wanton use of industrial adhesives he’d employed before.
I am so smug. I’m sure the neighbors are talking. The home-and-garden folks will be by any minute. After that, maybe a quick interview with Tommy Silva on This Old House and a cameo with Norm Abram on The New Yankee Workshop. Even though I am not much of a finish carpenter, when it comes to renovation per pound, I think I can weigh in with the best of them. At the very least, I can joke about that double-entendre “finish carpenter.” Maybe even triple-entendre, if you mess with the spelling and capitalization.
I get a couple of pieces of plywood measured, cut, and screwed down. Before the drill is even cool, I have laid out the backerboard and fasten it into place. I butter up and seal the joints and am ready to lay some slate. I spin out the tiles like a blackjack dealer, figuring out what I need to do for the cut tiles on the border and around the ductwork. Next I go to Home Depot, have a little chitchat with my boy Glendon, rent the saw, make the cuts, return the saw (“Whoa, buddy,” Glendon says, “already? Did you even leave the parking lot?”), go back home, whip up a bunch of thinset, slather it on, and lay out the tiles. I am ready for my Blue Ribbon of the Pabst variety by nightfall.
I crack open a beer and go around back to admire my work from outside, only to find a little problem.
I didn’t do a thing with the stairs.
The critters in question are a set of L-shaped stairs with only ten treads, total, but they have a landing interrupting them where they meet the back door. So if you come into the house from outside, you’d turn immediately left and hike up three steps to the laundry room. Or, back at the door, you could go straight down seven treads and you’d be in the basement. The landing between them is about three square feet, just big enough for your boots and the decision you have to make, whether it’s straight down or left and up.
They are stable now, to be sure, but they’re as ugly as hell. Especially since they are the first thing you see when you come in from the backyard. I didn’t notice them before because the floor was so bouncy it kept your vision dodgy. But now that we have the slate down, it runs right up to the edge of the back stairs and it is impossible not to see the paint and grease all over them, not to mention the errant hammer blows and pulverized nail heads and exposed joints.
Ideally, I could dismantle the stairway and build a new one— make the treads, say, and calculate the right rise and run so that people wouldn’t concuss themselves on their way to the basement. Bang that sucker out in an afternoon and have it all tiled up by the time it was beer o’clock.
The problem with stairs, however, is that there is no room for guesswork, particularly where I am working. And, of course, this is the kind of structural carpentry you need a license and a permit for, neither of which I am likely to get in this lifetime.
I decide then and there, sitting on my crappy back staircase drinking cheap domestic mule piss only someone from Milwaukee can pretend to enjoy, I am going to pull a Stanley.
I try to forgive myself before I commit the sin upon which I am intent, but I know full well that trying to preempt absolution implies premeditation, and thereby secures the cardinal nature of the sin.
Because I have already dumped out the last of the thinset, I take the remaining slate tiles and slather them with the only adhesive I have left: caulk. I don’t know why I don’t wait until the next day and go to the store and get more thinset or Stanley-strength Liquid Nails and do it right, or at least right-er. In the big picture, I have already spent hundreds of hours on the renovations; what will another hour or two matter? As reasonable as that argument goes, nothing can persuade me to do it right and not be finished with it tonight. I want to be done with this job at any cost, even if it means never really being done, because I do it with the wrong materials at the wrong time of day on surfaces poorly prepped—and as a result I am left with a staircase that Stanley would have been proud of. It is done, but ugly, and whoever wants to do it right knows just where to start.
3
Rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings.
—Thoreau, 1854
Watershed
WE ARE DONE. Not finished, as my high school English teacher would remind us was correct, but done—as he would say, like chicken. We own a house we fixed up ourselves, and somehow we haven’t fucked it up. It is miraculous.
Every morning, I get up and walk Maggie to the dog park down the street while Jenae gets ready for work. I let Skillet out back, and he will almost always climb too far up a tree and end up meowing pathetically to be rescued. Jenae works at the theater and I teach a few classes and wait tables, so our evenings and weekends usually involve sometimes fabulous and sometimes horrifying civic- and art-oriented duties. When nothing grand is going on, I cook our dinner of kabobs, a Mexican-ish thing, or any number of dishes with meatballs. Jenae walks Maggie and tries to teach Skillet how to use the toilet while I putter in the kitchen, and then we sit down in the family room to eat and watch a little TV—invariably, it seems, something involving impossibly witty cops, sanguine robbers, and hot, well-endowed scientists. Jenae reclines on the big red couch with Skillet, and Maggie corkscrews herself in the armchair, leaving me to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her. It is perfect.
Above the TV we hang an old schoolhouse map of the United States, and in between bites of food or conversation, I stare at the faded primary-colored states, thinking about all the places we’ve been and where we still have friends, and I imagine where we might possibly end up and whether it will even be on that map. Utah is beautiful and austere, but like most other places, it’s not for everybody. Moreover, in my line of work you don’t get to stay where you go to school unless you don’t mind using your degree to sling steaks. So, to give the thing a shot, on the job market I go. I know it will be years before anything like a real position comes our way anyway.
Or, as it turns out, not. We haven’t been in the house three years
when I get an offer from a bunch of midwestern expatriates teaching creative writing at a state school in Nacogdoches, Texas. I wouldn’t have accepted so readily had not the town been mentioned in songs by both Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, as well as in Cormac McCarthy’s cheery gorefest, Blood Meridian. It’s only a couple of hours away from Bruce in Houston, too. On top of it all is the fact that you never know whether you’re ever going to get another job offer to do what you’re trained to do—not even in the darkest depths of Texas.
What the hell. We’re going to give it a shot.
Before we get ready to sell the house, we discover that Stacey, Jenae’s roommate from Boston, is living in Sugarhouse, just three blocks away. (Sugarhouse really is one of only two possible neighborhoods for non-Mormons to live in the entire state, so it isn’t really that unusual.) She actually just sold her house, in fact, and recommends a realtor whom she found easy to work with. He sold her place the day it went on the market. “It was too much money,” Stacey says, still stunned. “Too much.”
The realtor’s name is Bob Plumb, and I ask Stacey if he is for real. “Bob Plumb, as in the reverse of a plumb bob, the thing you use to check if something is vertical?”
“With your name,” Stacey says, “I wouldn’t think you’d want to be casting any stones.”
We’ve seen the Plumb For Sale signs around our neighborhood and up in The Avenues too, usually on homes we weren’t qualified to clean, never mind own. We expect Bob to hand us off to some slobby, mouth-breathing underling, but he is the one who shows up in the requisite white luxury sedan (an unlikely Acura) to see the house.
“Hey guys! What’s up, what’s happening, what’s going on?” he says, fast as a weed whacker. “You must be Jenae and you must be the guy and what a great location and man, that rose bush I remember this house when that was a tree—I grew up a few blocks from here and I’ve always liked this place. What did you say your name was?”
I say Matt Batt.
He pauses, making sure I am not fooling with him, perhaps affording me the space to explain that no, my parents weren’t trying to set me up for a life of despair, it was just that my mom’s second husband adopted me and so on and so forth. He thinks better of it, and we proceed.
He is a short man in his late forties or early fifties. He wears a lilac polo shirt, pressed khaki pants, and shoes with tassels. I don’t need to see his credentials.
He holds out his hand. “Bob Plumb,” he says. “And yeah, I’ve heard ’em all so give it a shot if you need to, but the bar has recently been set at ‘Plumb Bob Scary Pants.’ You either get it or you don’t—I see you don’t—anyway. Call me Bob.”
I don’t really need another Bob in my life, but what choice do I have? I shake his hand.
“I know, right,” he says, “I get it. Slow down, Bob, right? It’s okay, man. Matt, you said? Okay. Slowing down.” It is like watching a hummingbird on amphetamines.
We go inside and Jenae gives Bob the tour as I trail behind. Since our last realtor experience, I didn’t plan on trusting anybody farther than I could throw him, but I have to admit that Bob is kind of a little guy, and I might in fact be able to toss him farther than I expected.
“Hey, holy cow,” he says, turning around to keep me in the fold, “you guys did this work? You’re kidding, right? You must have had a lot of help, right? Holy cow, the colors! And good gravy, this hardwood floor, I mean, I know it’s old and beat up, but they’re paying fifty grand up in Park City for people to make new floors look like this one.”
I notice, much to my chagrin, that the collar of his shirt is up. It could have been an accident—the wind, say—but still.
We sit down at the dining room table and talk about our plans and the market and what we are hoping to get out of the house. Bob laughs and rambles with Jenae as though they’re old sorority sisters, but he keeps trying to draw me into the conversation too, not by being smarmy but by addressing as directly as he can my transparent mistrust of realtors.
“It’s okay, Matt,” he says, “I get it. You’re nervous. You should be. Maybe not nervous—how about cautious?—because I know better than anybody lots of realtors are schnooks and shysters. But give me a chance, okay? Don’t be a hater.”
Jenae and I look at each other.
“My boy, the Lizard King—that’s his skater name, not mine, but I kinda like it, nice throwback to the day, you know, the Doors?—anyway, my kid, LK, he came up with that one last night at the Spaghetti Factory—I take the whole family out, dad, granddad, all the kids—even the Lizard King’s new girlfriend who was clearly a little freaked out by all us Plumb people and LK told her, ‘Hey, baby, stop hatin’ on us. Don’t be a hater. Be a lover,’ and so come on you two—I can see plain as the shine on my shoes you’re lovers. Why you gotta be hatin’ on Bob?”
He stops for just long enough to raise his eyebrows.
“Seriously,” he says, “this is a great market and a great house and you guys are going to kill it. What do you guys want to get out of it?”
Jenae and I haven’t really decided. I know she was hoping, in her heart of hearts, to get a quarter of a million dollars from some nut job who loves everything about the house and is willing to pay nearly double its market value. I am hoping to make a significant return on our investment and am willing to wait to hear what that is. But a couple houses in the neighborhood have recently sold in only a couple of days, like Stacey’s, and they went for more than my imagination could grasp.
“What do you think about two-ten?” Bob asks. He clearly is starting low, but not too low to know his figure hasn’t rounded the next big hump in the sixth-digit place. “Good return on your investment, sort of right in the middle of the comparables I looked up. Nice tag for a two-bedroom tract house, don’t you think?”
Jenae is crushed.
“I think that’s a good bit lower than we were thinking,” I say.
“I want a quarter of a million dollars,” Jenae says.
She isn’t joking.
“All right,” Bob says, “all right. I ain’t hatin’. You tell me.” He reminds us that we can put whatever price tag we want on it. We just have to remember that a house priced too high can sour fast, no matter how nice. “There’s a house over on Thirteenth South,” he says, “by that fancy Liberty Heights grocer there—Liberty Heist, am I right?—and that Japanese restaurant? The guy did a bunch of junky work on it himself and he’s asking for about fifty grand too much. People won’t even touch it. I show folks the place and they like ask for those paper surgeon’s booties to wear ’cause they don’t want the bad mojo on their soles, get it? All right. So. What do you think?”
We push around some figures and begin to sweat, sitting at our dining room table with Bob. We know he is right—we have seen perfectly good houses in our neighborhood rot on the market for months. They would cycle through different, increasingly pathetic versions of their signs and agents until they ground down toward entropic death and simply put up a For Sale by Owner sign in the window—grim as a toe tag—like our own house when we bought it. But we don’t have a year or two to sell it, as Stanley did. We need to get out in a couple of months and maybe turn a profit so we can make a down payment on a house in Texas.
“Come on, guys,” Bob says. “It’s important, but it’s not the secret code to the reactor.”
We look at each other and name a figure, splitting the difference between Jenae’s goal and Bob’s initial proposal.
“Little high,” Bob says, scratching his neck. He chips away at the price until it feels both reasonably lofty and modest, we imagine, to people who have dramatically better jobs than ours.
We agree.
“Sweet,” Bob says. He claps and rubs his hands together like a genie. “Here we go.”
We have about three weeks to get things together before the sign goes in the yard. We are shooting for the weekend after Easter, right at the beginning of the season—three years almost to the day after Gram died. There is tons
to do to get the house ready, but we have a timeline. I am in charge of finishing up work on the baseboards in the living and dining rooms, and Jenae is going to take care of the yard and the flower beds. She has already done a heroic job of planting the bulbs in the fall, while I was mired in job-search junk. She has planted more than a hundred tulips, dahlias, poppies, and irises, all according to a thoroughly planned flower map that she drew up. Some of the daffodils and tulips have already started to come up, but so have a lot of weeds. Bob has told us not to worry about the yard, though; he’s going to send somebody over to clean the windows and take care of our lawn.
So while Jenae is at work, I get set to finish the baseboards. It isn’t the kind of carpentry I know anything about—not that I know anything about any real carpentry—but this sort of work is what people actually see, and so, to a big extent, it matters.
It’s a pretty tricky enterprise, I learn, to make a floor and a wall meet. Take the molding and baseboards. They exist to extend the foot of the wall cosmetically over the edge of the floor, like the hem of your pants. I suppose baseboards do other things—they look nice and give you an extra surface to paint and keep clean—but for the most part they’re just window dressing, or in this case, floor dressing.
