Homes And Other Black Holes

by Dave Barry

  Anyway, the way I erected the basketball post was, carefully following the instructions that came with it, I dug a hole three feet deep and thirty inches wide. The instructions said I was supposed to put the post in the hole and fill it with concrete, only I had no concrete. I had never, until that moment, given much thought as to where concrete even came from. Large oceangoing freighters was my best guess.

  So I looked in the yellow pages, and lo and behold, there was this place that sold concrete in special trailers that attached to your car. I called them up, and they told me each trailer held a “yard” of concrete.

  “A ‘yard’?” I said.

  “Yes,” they confirmed. “A yard.” Whatever the hell that meant.

  Well. It turns out that they use the name “yard” because this is enough concrete to cover North America to a depth of three feet. I had a very adventurous drive home from the concrete place, propelled by a trailer that weighed far more than my actual car, a trailer with no respect whatsoever for the tradition of stopping at red lights. But finally I made it, and I positioned the trailer over my basketball hole, and I opened the little gate at the bottom, and in one second the hole was full of concrete, using maybe one trillionth of the available supply, which I needed to find a use for pronto, because the burly men back at the concrete place had made it clear that if you bring them back a trailer full of hardened concrete, their policy is to roll it back and forth over your body.

  This is when I came up with the idea of making a lump. I backed the trailer over to a section of our yard that had always looked like it could use some perking up, landscapingwise, and I created this free-form pile of concrete that is not only attractive, but also very durable. If, millions of years from now, when all other man-made structures have disappeared, intelligent life forms from other galaxies visit the planet Earth, they will find this lump, and they will wonder what kind of being created it, and for what purpose. I bet basketball will never occur to them.

  And the hell of it is, the concrete lump was one of my better projects, in the sense that I also got a working basketball POst Out Of it. Most of the other ones turned out much worse. The full impact of this was driven home to me forcibly when we decided to sell the Pennsylvania house, and we paid several thousand dollars (I am still not making this up) to two men, both named Jonathan, to come over and eliminate all traces of all my homeowner projects—bookshelves where you could see the shapes of dead insects under the paint, paneling that looked like it had been installed by vandals, etc.—in an effort to make our home look as nice as it did before I started improving it. After the Jonathans took out all my projects, the house mostly consisted of holes, which they filled up with Spackle. When prospective buyers would ask: “What kind of construction is this house?” I would answer: “Spackle.”

  So to get back to my original point, I am now violently opposed to doing anything myself. I think there should be a federal law requiring people who publish do-it-yourself books to include a warning, similar to what the Surgeon General has on cigarette packs, right on the cover of the book, stating:

  WARNING: ANY MONEY YOU SAVE BY DOING HOMEOWNER PROJECTS YOURSELF WILL BE OFFSET BY THE COST OF HIRING COMPETENT PROFESSIONALS TO COME AND REMOVE THEM SO YOU CAN SELL YOUR HOUSE, NOT TO MENTION THE EMOTIONAL TRAUMA ASSOCIATED WITH LISTENING To THESE PROFESSIONALS, AS THEY RIP OUT LARGE HUNKS OF A PROJECT, LAUGH AND YELL REMARKS SUCH AS: “HEY! GET A LOAD OF THIS.”

  So now you are asking yourself: “Okay, if I’m not supposed to do anything myself, how am I supposed to get my house fixed?” The answer is: contractors. A contractor is a man with a pickup truck and a set of business cards that say something like:

  ED BROGAN Inc. General Contractor

  All Types of Construction and Repair—30 Years Experience—Quality Work Fully Bonded and Insured Free Estimates—Reasonable Rates

  “We Never Show up”

  No, I am of course kidding about that last line. They won’t tell you that they never show up; this is a secret that they are sworn to uphold during the graduation ceremony at the Contractor Academy, where each man receives his Official Contractor’s battered toolbox, which contains, not tools, but thousands and thousands of traditional handcrafted contractor excuses for not showing up, such as:

  “I strained my back.”

  “My truck has a flat tire.”

  “My wife is having a baby.”

  “My uncle died.”

  “My wife strained her back.”

  “My uncle has a flat tire.”

  “My truck is having a baby.”

  These time-honored excuses have been handed down through many contractor generations, dating all the way back to ancient Rome, where the original contractors built the ruins. Contrary to what historians will try to tell you, the ruins were never finished buildings: they were always ruins. The Romans kept trying to get the contractors to come back and finish them, but the contractors kept coming up with excuses, the oldest recorded one being “Quid vox probenium est” (“My wife strained her uncle”). Eventually the Romans simply had to learn to live in the ruins. You, as a homeowner, will have to do the same thing.

  The Basic Contracting Process

  The contractor comes to your house and strides around in a confidence-inducing fashion, taking measurements and writing things down on a clipboard. What he is writing down is the batting averages of the 1978 Boston Red Sox, which he will multiply by the relative humidity to come up with an “estimate,” which is legally defined as “the amount of money you will ultimately spend on phone calls in a fruitless effort to locate the contractor.” Once you have agreed to the “estimate,” the contractor will leave, telling you that he will come back and start work on “Thursday.” Four to thirteen weeks later, the contractor shows up with two workmen selected on the basis of owning T-shirts festooned with photographs of rock bands with names like “Death Penis.” The contractor leaves the workmen behind and informs you that he will be back on “Thursday.” Then he disappears. The workmen take all of your furniture and put it out on your patio, then they knock down a wall. Neither of these steps necessarily has anything to do with the job at hand. This is just basic contracting procedure. Having completed these tasks, the workmen take a well-earned “lunch break.” They will never come back again. There is nothing you can do about this. You can search all the way through the United States Constitution, and you will find a great number of statements in there about unimportant issues such as the vice president, but you will find nothing about getting workmen back to your house. What we need is a constitutional amendment. It would say: ARTICLE MXLICBM: If workmen come to your house and screw everything up, they shall either (a) have to come back and at least try to make it normal again or (b) be subjected to powerful electric shocks in their private parts.

  Interesting Sidelight:

  Modern science has been unable to determine where workmen disappear to. At one time it was believed that they went to other jobs, but we now know that there are no “other jobs,” because if there were, then eventually, somewhere, some homeowner’s house would actually get worked on, and you would read about this astounding event in The New York Times.

  WORKMEN WORK ON HOME, the headline would say, and huge crowds of worshipful homeowners would flock to marvel at the worked-upon home, similar to the way the religious faithful sometimes flock to rural communities when somebody has discovered a bale of peat moss shaped like the Lord.

  Approximately six weeks later, the contractor returns and notes with displeasure that the workmen have failed to disconnect the plumbing and electrical systems. “Always disconnect the plumbing and electrical systems, even if you are merely building an outdoor deck!” is a rule that is stressed repeatedly at the Contractor Academy. Angrily, the contractor performs these vital tasks, then, assuring you that he will be back “Thursday,” he disappears. You cannot grab him. A skilled contractor can actually cause himself to dematerialize, into hyperspace, right before your eyes.

  What ultimat
ely may happen is, you’ll get so desperate that, despite my stern warnings, you will attempt to actually do things yourself. One Saturday morning you’ll get up bright and early, and you’ll go down to the Homeowner Hell. This is a nationwide chain of stores, each of which is approximately the size of Indonesia and is filled with billions and billions of random and obscure hardware objects such as “toggle bolts,” which are packed inside special plastic blister packs, which you cannot open except with special razor knives sold only inside blister packs at Homeowner Hell. It is a comical sight indeed to see hundreds of homeowners peering at these objects with a total lack of comprehension, like fish examining a nuclear submarine. The contractors love to watch this via closed-circuit television from the Parallel Contractor Universe. It is their favorite show.

  Chapter 7.Redecorating For Under 650,000 Dollars

  The best way to get decorating ideas is to buy several glossy interior design publications such as Architectural Digest (“The International Magazine of Homes Much Nicer Than Yours”) and cull through the articles to obtain useful tips. The main tip you will pick up is that if you want your house to look really nice, you do not necessarily have to have professional training or even a special “flair” for design; all you need is more money than the human mind can comprehend. You will learn this from eight-page color photo spreads featuring homes the size of Baltimore—always called “villas”—situated on dramatic mountain-side real estate accessible to ordinary citizens such as yourself only by telescope. The accompanying articles sound like this:

  The owners—he, a prominent industrialist neurosurgeon and president of four major investment firms: she, a bestselling novelist and Queen of Belgium—knew exactly what they wanted when they decided to build the Villa de Mucho Simoleons. “We wanted,” they said, in unison, “the kind of informal and inviting home where we could entertain our friends and, if we felt like it, play polo in the foyer.”

  Their design consultants, Wilmington A. “Bill” Sashweight IV and Marjory “Pookie” Westinghouse-Armature, sought to create a “fun” motif by decorating the ceilings in the master bath with frescoes done originally for the Sistine Chapel by Michel “Michelangelo” Angelo and importing a working Hawaiian volcano to heat the pool, which was originally a lake in Switzerland. For the owners’ two children (originally the children of a Nobel prize-winning physicist and a world-renowned ballet dancer), who sleep in their own wing, (originally Versailles), the designers chose ...

  And so on. After you have read a few articles like this, you should have plenty of nifty ideas for the kind of furniture you want, although of course, given your price range, you will have to buy it at a store with a name like Big Stu’s Discount House of Taste, where the dinette sets are made from compressed oatmeal.

  Besides money, the other thing you need is time. Nobody has ever come up with a good explanation as to why this is, but it takes longer to obtain a piece of furniture than to construct a suspension bridge. My theory is that furniture is not actually built by human beings, but rather is grown, probably in some intensely humid Third World nation where they have giant furniture trees that can take years to produce a single ottoman. When you place your order for, let’s say, a teal love seat, the order is mailed via boat to a furniture plantation, where a worker, who speaks little English, frowns at it, wipes the sweat from his brow, straps on his machete, and walks into the jungle. He halts briefly as a ripe armoire thuds into the earth ahead of him, then he continues along the narrow path, squinting upward into the dense mass of vegetation overhead. He spots a dark shape far above him in the gloom; it could be a love seat in the early stages of formation. Or it could be a coffee table, or a Barcalounger, or a gorilla nest. “Who knows?” the worker thinks to himself “And what the hell is ‘teal’?”

  So we’re talking about a slow and inexact process, with one piece arriving years after another, which is why most people go through their entire lives without having all their furniture look nice at the same time. My advice is, order your furniture now, even if you don’t even own a house yet, even if you are in fact an unborn child, because if you are lucky, the last piece will arrive just in time for your great-great-grandchildren to spill Zoo-Roni on it. Not that you will care: you will hate it anyway. This is because of

  NEWTON’S FIRST LAW OF FURNITURE BUYING:

  The amount you will hate a given piece of furniture is equal to its cost multiplied by the length of time, in months, it takes to arrive.

  I recall the time my wife, Beth, finally got fed up with the brown sofa we had for many years, which looked like a buffalo that had staggered into our living room and died from a horrible skin disease. So she decided, the hell with our son’s college education, she was going to get a new sectional sofa. She took many measurements, then she went to many, many furniture stores, then she ordered the sofa, then we waited through several presidential administrations for it to arrive. And finally it did, and it was exactly what she had ordered, and so naturally it made her almost physically ill to look at it. I told her it looked fine to me, but it was no use. When she was looking at this sofa, she was looking at Jabba the Hutt. She would lie awake in bed at night, thinking about this thing squatting out there in her living room, and it was only a matter of time before she went insane and attacked it with a steak knife. So I was very relieved when she decided to sell it through a classified ad, which was a pretty interesting experience in itself because of the call she got from the sex maniac. This is the truth. First he asked her a bunch of questions about the sofa, which he seemed sincerely interested in, and then, lowering his voice about two octaves, he said:

  “Are you wearing loafers?”

  Beth failed to notice anything particularly unusual about this, which shows how crazed a person can become when she is desperate to get rid of a sectional sofa.

  “Yes,” she said. “Now, the sofa ...”

  “Are they brown?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “But about the ...”

  “Do they smell bad?” he asked.

  At this point Beth, even in her furniture-induced derangement, realized that this person was not a Hot Prospect, and she got off the phone. Eventually she sold the sofa, so it wasn’t such a bad experience after all, though it probably would have been easier and more relaxing if we had just gone out into the backyard and set fire to a small pile of hundred-dollar bills.

  Of course there is a way to obtain nice furniture without the frustration and high cost of buying it new, provided you are willing to put in a few hours of honest “elbow grease” and possibly suffer permanent disfigurement. I am referring, of course, to the time-honored Thrifty Homeowner art of ...

  Refinishing Furniture

  No doubt you have at one time or another visited the home of people who have a number of nice older wooden pieces, and you have said something complimentary, and your hosts said something like: “Oh, thank you, we bought them all for a total of $147.50 at garage sales and refinished them ourselves in the garage and now they are worth, we conservatively estimate, nine million dollars.” They are lying, of course. They stole all this stuff from the Museum of Nice Old Wood Furniture. Nevertheless, it is inevitable that at some point you will get the notion that you can have nice furniture via the refinishing method, so you might as well know the correct procedure:

  1. You go to a garage sale and you find a bureau covered with hideously ugly orange paint.

  2. You call your spouse over, and you say, in a quiet voice so the garage sale person can’t overhear you: “Look at this! You know what this is, under this paint? This is (CHOOSE ONE): ... solid oak!” solid bird’s-eye maple!” ... solid walnut!” ... solid oaken maple eye of walnut!” (It makes no difference what fine hardwood you claim the bureau is made of, because it will forever remain an elusive dream that you never actually lay eyes on, similar to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.)

  3. Your spouse, shocked, whispers: “Whoever would be so foolish as to cover up such beautiful wood with paint!? With a min
imum of effort, this could be

  a lovely piece!”

  4. Feeling like thieves in the night, you pay twenty-five dollars for the bureau and scuttle off with it. You do not hear the cynical laughter of the former owner.

  5. You go to the hardware store and purchase some steel wool and some refinishing product with a name like “Can o’ Poison” that has skeleton heads all over it and a prominent Consumer Advisory like this:

  WARNING—DO NOT LET THIS PRODUCT COME IN CONTACT WITH YOUR SKIN. DO NOT BREATHE THE FUMES. DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN AFTER USING THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT EVEN READ THIS WARNING.

  6. You go home, put on some rubber gloves, and start scrubbing the paint with the toxic substance. It is hard work. It is dirty work. The gloves dissolve quickly, and it is clear that large patches of your skin will have to be surgically replaced. But it’s all worth it, because after just a few hours you have scraped away a small patch of that hideous orange paint, and underneath it you find ... a layer of hideous green Paint!

  7. You repeat this process for two, maybe even three more layers of paint, and finally the truth dawns on you: This is not really a bureau. This is an enormous, bureau-shaped wad of paint.

  8. You decide to hold a garage sale.

  Interior Design Hints From Top “Pros”

  To make a dark room look brighter, try turning on the electrical lights. A small carpet stain where the cat vomited in 1979 can be made to “disappear” when company comes by having a predetermined family member stand on it and refuse to move. Squares of corkboard stuck on the wall will often turn an “ordinary” room into