Indoor Camping: Fixing Up the Fixer-Upper

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Overheard Under the House

We plan our days around when the Country Boy doesn’t have school and can do our work. Between him, the subcontractors and a whole lot of Peet’s, Charlie and I are feeling better about getting the house done. We have no problem starting projects; we’ve done that in every room of the house. We’ve figured out it pays to pay someone to finish our messes.

Charlie’s been sick so he’s especially vulnerable to distraction. He could have finished the deck, but why finish something when you can start something else? The something else he found to do was sanding and texturing the bedroom ceilings. This is why nothing’s finished and we live in a dump. We have fixer ADD.

I don’t have the excuse of being sick. Once I saw the bedrooms ready to paint, I forgot about finishing the outside. Okay, I didn’t forget; I made excuses. So what if for three years there’s been graffiti on that side of the house and all it’d take to reach middle-class anonymity is half a can of paint? There are obstacles. I’d have to dig around the garage and find ladders. The bedrooms aren’t so demanding.

I used to have discipline. I used to schedule everything and rigidly stick to my plans, especially when fixing up houses. When the vegan was in first grade, he and his brother were playing in the garage. Somehow a spikey lawn sprinkler landed on his forehead. We got him stitched up and back to normal, then returned to our kitchen remodel. We worried while we assembled cabinets, but we stuck to the schedule.

Now we’d probably whine at Peet’s and take the rest of the weekend off.

It’s a Country Boy work day. He’ll be working, the subcontractor downstairs will be working, and the roofer will be working, too. We’ll think about working while we’re at Peet’s. The roofer had already started when we came outside.

“Where’s your crew?”

“That’s a good question,” he said. “I’d like to know that myself.”

“Hard to get good help, isn’t it?” Charlie spent the last ten months trying to fill his lowest-level position at work.

“They’re all on meth. Instant feel-good and wreck-your-life.”

“We in Oregon have the most meth addicts per capita. It’s cheap and it rains a lot. Not a good combination.”

“I don’t know where they are,” the roofer says. He climbs up and gets started.

The Country Boy came over when we returned from Peet’s. His job is to lay plastic sheeting in the crawl space. He’s not excited about this. If it were fun, we tell him, we’d do it ourselves.

“There are going to be a lot of spiders,” he says. “Have you seen how big they are down there?”

“You can do it when it’s cold and wet if you want instead,” Charlie says.

“I’ll pay you a spider hazard bonus,” I say.

He disappears into the crawl space. “Yell if you need anything,” Charlie says. “Yell loud. We’ll be at Home Depot.”

We come back and he’s above ground with wet hair. “I took a shower,” he says. “It’s dirty down there.”

“Did you finish?” Charlie asks.

“No.”

“Go finish.”

“I got frustrated because there’s crap all over the place.”

“Oh that’s too bad,” Charlie says. “Do you want me to get you a tube of vagisil? Will that make you feel better?”

“Maybe.”

Charlie teases the skaters in his own special way. It’s way past the point of me paying attention. If I listened, I’d see how good the skaters are at returning insults. It’s a guy thing.

“Too many spiders?” I ask.

“No spiders at all,” the Country boy said. “There’s stuff I have to wiggle around, like a bunch of concrete blocks.”

“Oh, that’s where I left them,” Charlie says. “I need those. Let’s bring them out back.”

I went upstairs and reprimed around the doorways. I asked Jenn to do this, but I also said I’d give her however much money she needed, no matter what she did. She wasn’t so motivated after that. I won’t make that mistake with the skaters.

I hear Charlie downstairs saying, “Finish something.”

“You finish something,” the Country Boy says. “You’ve got one window left to replace. Why don’t you do that?”

”I think I will,” Charlie says. I think the deck won’t get done today.

Charlie puts in the window then comes upstairs to call the Doctor. I can hear the kid rolling plastic sheeting underneath. He comes upstairs, finds the roller and starts priming. He’s so fast, he’s rolled a wall before I’ve finished cutting in. He isn’t even listening to country music.

“Did I tell you I have to go to court October 29^th?”

“For your ticket?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Eighty-five in a thirty-five mph zone.”

“I’m changing your name to Speed Racer,” I said. “You’re speeding through the paint, too. You're getting a lot done and you’re not even listening to Country music.”

“You’d leave. I don’t listen to Country music that much. I did listen to Charlie talking to the Doctor when I was under the house.”

“You heard that?”

“I was taking a break, lying there underneath you guys. I heard everything. You said, ‘How are you feeling, Charlie?’

“He said, ‘Blood’s coming out of my . . .’”

“I had to hear it once,” I said. “That was enough.”

“You told him, ‘I thought you just had a cold,’ and started laughing.”

“Okay, stop.”

“He said he was worried because he still couldn’t . . .”

“Stop!”

“He said he didn’t have hemorrhoids. He knew what they were because he . . .”

“Oh, for the love of God, stop!”

I’m going to have to give him more than a spider bonus for this, I just know it.

A little help? [] 1:58:10 PM