Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (25 page)

“Don’t worry,” Erik says. “Need another one just a bit longer. Sit tight.”

With a little too much aplomb, he hops on the stairs and climbs up and over my head and the stairs I am supporting.

“Dude,” I say. “Dude?”

“Relax,” he yells from outside. “I mean, you know, don’t
relax
relax, but relax.”

I hear the saw spark to life and then the wail of the blade on wood. I know he is working fast and I know he is doing it right, but it takes a lot more than that to make somebody feel at peace while he’s holding up the better part of his house.

Erik walks back over my hands and drops down into the basement. “You’re not getting tired, are you?”

“Seriously,” I say.

With a few swift strokes Erik fits the other support in and I feel a little less stress on my hands.

He smiles and looks at me. “How long are you going to stay like that?”

“I mean,” I say, “I can still feel a little pressure.”

“Baby,” Erik says, “that’s homeownership.”

He shrugs and starts measuring the remaining two-by-fours to frame in the rest of the job. We have the other three walls to reinforce, and perhaps a central beam to add, but we (Erik) have strengthened the weakest part of the structure.

“I feel pretty good about it,” Erik says.

“Pretty good?” I say. Travis, a climbing buddy of mine, had once called a piton he found “marginal”; nevertheless, we clipped into it and descended a few stories back to earth. About a month later, the piton blew and I heard a couple of good climbers ended up dead. Coming out of Erik’s mouth, “pretty good” inspired even less confidence than “marginal.”

“Check it,” he says. Out of habit, I am still sort of holding up the ceiling. Erik drops his hammer and jumps back up above my head. “Ready?”

Before I can say “For what?” Erik hops up and down on the landing above me. The floor flexes and shakes as dirt and rotten wood rain from the beam in my hands, but miraculously it doesn’t give.

“Yeah, not bad,” Erik says. “I gotta get to work, so, you know, you might check out a laundromat until we finish this thing off proper.”

No argument ensues.

Erik has his own work over the next few days, but he assures me that I can do the rest myself. All I have to do is get a couple of “hanger brackets” to nail into the existing “support beams,” “pressure fit” new “treated two-by-fours” into them, set up a couple of “headers,” “frame in” the rest of the walls, and then I’d be set. Of course, first I have to figure out how to take the quotation marks off all the directions I wrote down from Erik.

Bolstered by our initial success, I go back to the store by myself. I march in, with what might as well be a Hello Kitty tape measure on my belt, and go straight to the stacks of two-by-fours. I imitate Erik’s process of selection as best I can, sighting down the lengths of boards as though I am blowing glass. I am just glad nobody in double-wide suspenders is lurking about that day to test my resolve.

I get back home and begin the measuring and cutting without any trouble. Then again, you can measure and cut wood all day long and unless you sever a digit you’ll never know you fucked up until it comes time to fit the pieces into place. Erik had cut everything so quickly and then poetically toenailed the boards together—getting nails to bend as if by volition alone. When I get downstairs, however, and begin to see how ragged and inaccurate some of my cuts are, I feel it’s too late to do anything about it. I am mad and want to be finished with this damned project, so I pick up a heavy, waffle-faced framing hammer, thinking that with its additional heft I should be able to drive nails as easily into lumber as into sponge cake. But this hammer is a professional’s tool, and I am as prepared to use it as a Red Rider–wielding seven-year-old is a twelve-gauge shotgun. I brutalize the wood and the nails alike. One particular nail takes me ten minutes to drive because I can only reach it upside down with my left hand—I may as well have tried to push it in with my tongue.

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.

Rescue the drowning and tie your shoe-strings.

—Thoreau, 1854

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?”