Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (17 page)

“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.

1. Pick the straightest line in the room to establish the floor.
   
2. Lay out all the tiles dry and then make all the cuts at once.
   
3. 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 roofing 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.

Yanking up the old flooring is not the job I imagined. We begin pulling and tearing at the old vinyl only to find it glued to itself in the most onerous ways. A big sheet will come off with a tug, but then we spend forty-five minutes peeling away a particularly tedious section the size of a ham sandwich. All the books we have suggest it will be fairly easy work. Just take a flat-bladed hoe or a spreading shovel and scoop it on up.

While I am hacking one stubborn piece to smithereens with a box cutter, Jenae tells me to look up.

The light in the kitchen glitters with linoleum motes.

“Pretty,” I say. “Wonder what makes it shimmy like that.”

There is a pause. Even the linoleum stops shining for a second.

“There’s no asbestos in this stuff, is there?” Jenae asks.

I say I don’t want to know and just keep at it.

“Try not to breathe,” Jenae says. “You know. More than is absolutely necessary.”

Finally we get down to the subfloor: a layer of plywood on top of the joists. Because we’re putting down the mass equivalent of a Nash Rambler in slate tiles, we need to gird things so we don’t end up with a two-story basement kitchen. This is surprisingly quick work. Take a few four-by-eight sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood, and before you know it you’ve got a new, solid floor. Add to that a layer of backerboard—essentially a thin board of cement woven with fiberglass—and Bob Vila come smack my ass, you are ready to lay some tile.

In the space of a day, we have torn out an old floor—or seven— and put down two new layers of subflooring. We are doing it fast and we are doing it right (with the notable exception of having possibly contracted septum cancer via asbestos poisoning). Given the odds, however, I’d have bet against us long before now. It’s not that I was hoping we would fail, it was simply that I had never known we could succeed because we knew we had to. It isn’t about entitlement or vanity. We are doing our homework. We ask embarrassing questions. And we aren’t afraid of the work. Nonetheless, given our friends’ and families’ recent track records, it seems like the perfect preface to disaster. But despite it all, we are pulling it off.

And then we rent the diamond-bladed masonry saw.

I am no longer feeling quite so jaunty. After all, you don’t have to be a master of logic or physics to realize that that which can cut through rock can also happily make its way through bone.

The last time I rented heavy equipment like this, Glendon wouldn’t allow me to get the sander I wanted. This time, when I go to rent a piece of machinery that could cut a hole in a bank vault, he simply asks if I plan on using it for more than a couple of days.

“Save a bunch of money in the long run if you buy it outright,” Glendon says.

I shake my head. I don’t want this thing around for any longer than necessary.

“Don’t put your hand under the blade when it’s running,” he says helpfully. “Or in the bucket of water when it’s on.”

“Bucket of water?”

All I see is a portable tray and a table saw.

“BYO bucket,” he says. “For the water. Gotta keep the blade wet or it’ll seize right up and, you know, fly off or something.”

A blade that is tipped with diamonds. Has potential to fly off. I am taking careful notes. These are good things to know.

“Also, the pump thing?” he says. He picks up a black plastic square attached to a clear hose that runs to the saw and an electric cord to be plugged in. “It gets clogged easy. Use lots of fresh water.”

“And the hand thing?” I have not forgotten his initial warning.

“Just common sense,” he says. We’re standing in front of the rental door of the store, next to a cannon-size chainsaw mounted on the back of a trailer.

“Common sense?” I say, as though it is a phrase I’ve heard before but can’t remember what it referred to or how one employed it.

“Don’t stick your hand in the bucket of water while you’re operating the saw,” he says. “You won’t get electrocuted or nothing—it’s got a good breaker built in—but it’s hard to handle the slate if your hands are all wet.”

“Common sense,” I say. Not exactly what I had in mind.

While I was picking up the saw, Jenae laid out the tiles. Our plan was to position them first, cut everything that needed to be cut, then slap them down, grout, seal, and call it a day. Ambitious, yes, but things have worked out well so far.