Remodeling – Page 2 – the Dig and Flow

Old Pines Learn New Tricks

Once these were trees. They must have grown slowly, with lines layered more closely together than the pine boards we purchase today. One board near the kitchen stands out as extra finely-grained, with lines just millimeters apart. This board might be ponderosa pine, Andrew guesses, and I trace it with my fingertips, transported to high forests near the Grand Canyon, hiking in grasses among thick trunks.

2015-03-15 16.40.56 I think of loblolly pines growing fast in Alabama and Georgia, cut with machines with giant insect-like pincers that grasp their trunks and snip them like weeds. I wonder who felled the trees under my feet, with a saw or an axe? Who milled them into boards?

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I have never spent so much time scrutinizing a floor. It began with cleaning. We traced the shop vacuum along each crack, then washed the boards. With a rented sander, Andrew buzzed back and forth for about fifteen hours, interspersed with more vacuuming. With a hand sander, we addressed edges, corners, and stubborn spots left by other people being careless. Finally satisfied, we vacuumed again and wiped with a cloth.

Five coats might seem excessive, but some determination seized me, as if a strong coating on this floor would protect the whole property from crumbling, would keep us all safe.

So at 11 pm, I sponged on the polyurethane, ending at the bottom of the stairs. Then I packaged everything and went straight to bed. The next morning, I began to scritch the floors, sanding over the boards for hours. Then another vacuuming, wiping, and the next coat before bed. A week tumbled past in this rhythm.

Now these old pine trees glow. The house feels clean for the first time since we arrived. We sprawl across the floors. Stella lounges on her belly reading books; Sam cartwheels like it’s a gymnasium. Now we are moving in.

A Fresh Angle on the Project

In the glare of construction lights, I dance with a pole. On the end of the pole, a paint roller spreads white primer across a mostly white ceiling and walls. I spin and dip it towards the tray on the floor. The lights make me feel famous.

Last week, I swung a vacuum hose around, sweeping white powder from ceilings and walls. That dance partner weighed more, awkward and noisy, chasing the kids upstairs.

Stella returned when it was quiet, jutted out her hip, and pointed my phone around the rooms, clicking the shutter fast like she was photographing glamorous models—shop vac, buckets, chairs. She zoomed into the pith of the project, giving me a new angle.

Now there is music playing and an audience—the kids, the cat. I am calm in this work. Like shoveling, painting invites thinking. I smooth the walls and my jumbled brain, creating blank surfaces. These surfaces become a canvas for beauty and creativity and home.

I want color. I’m hungry for any green, deep orange, blue-greens, rich browns. In the drywall mud-white and primer-white rooms, paint cards stand in stacks and litter walls and windowsills. In the bedroom, I force myself to tone down from “wild life” blue to “rocky shelter” gray. For the kitchen I choose “natural soap,” a color with less vibrance but more longevity than “subtle glow,” which is not subtle.

The kitchen ceiling, since I have washed off its decades of soot, seems the right kind of gold-greenish-beige to be retro, instead of just outdated. It appears to be old milk paint, which doesn’t contain lead. But it’s peeling, and the ceiling boards required some patching, and, in the end, I will paint over it.

I can nearly see the final products: a living room with a real sofa for crashing at the day’s end, a room with a large bay window and light pouring in onto the rug, a downstairs guest room in restful colors with windows facing south to the mountain and east up the hill.

The Bones Are Just Bones

Reaching behind the baseboard heater under the bay window, sweeping my fingers between studs, I discover bones. I am scooping out plaster chunks and piles of old insulation churned into nests of mouse droppings. The new insulation can then fluff into the whole wall space, trapping baseboard heat inside the house. To this end, I excavate.

I might be starting to feel a little grumpy about it—this cloying gray dust, these insidious pink insulation fibers, mouse turds. The mess comes in waves, never fully receding. I lift crunching fistfuls from inside the walls. There’s no shortcut to doing this work right. Except that we have shortcut this project, hiring an excellent guy named Jimmy, and the walls will soon be finished.

New sheetrock, skillfully smoothed with mud, will hide this house’s secrets, discovered as we have stripped off layers. In one seemingly solid wall, a window still hung, covered by a plastic blind, then old sheetrock, then faux wood paneling, then paint. Surrounding the bay window, the studs dangled in mid-air—a floating wall, left unsupported when someone chopped a hole to add the large window. And between the studs once lived metropolitan numbers of mice.

From among tufts of insulation, I extract the skeleton. It is headless, but exquisitely intact. The spine remains whole; each caudal vertebra stacks into a long curving tail, dwindling to the last eyelash-sized bone. One leg is separated at the knee, but not broken, and each tiny digit still hinges on the complete foot. On my next cautious dip into the wall, I retrieve the skull. Curved incisors, miniature molars.

Now I arrange it in the morning light, clearing a space among tools on the bay window ledge. Breath held, I watch it curl there, a small life that passes behind a wall. How is it possible to be so fragile, yet remain nearly whole, even among the rubble?

Near where the skeleton emerged, I find a papery section of snakeskin. Another life passes through the wall, outgrowing itself, stretching and splitting open, leaving its own evidence of survival. I place the thin layer of snake beside the intricate mouse. The sun, lifting well above trees now, warms the dust around them.

Kneeling in the light, I succumb to the details for long moments. This does not complete the job very fast, but I am doing my work.

I will keep this skeleton and shard of skin to show the kids, who seem only politely interested. Later, 3-year-old Stella will announce calmly, while eating a turkey leg, “The bones are just bones.” And I will think that she is right, and finally toss both mouse and snake into the compost, to start over.

How To Make a Big Hairy Mess

Crowbar in hand, mask over nose and mouth, climb the stepladder. The ladder should straddle a combination of tarps and plastic sheets, which will scootch and fold over so that nails and plaster fill the baseboard heaters despite your best efforts. Take a hammer up the ladder, too.

Give the plaster wall a few experimental hammer whacks, because you can. Learn that this will not remove the plaster. Apply the crowbar to the wall edges, still testing to see what makes it come apart. Peer closely at the small hairs protruding from chalky grey plaster. Real horses grew those hairs. Wonder about the people harvesting horse hair from manes and tails of all those horses.

Consider the person who nailed up each lath, then mixed horse hair and plaster to spread so it oozed between the wooden strips, locking the other plaster layers to the vertical surface—keying it in place. In 1890, as someone plastered these cracks, early cars were emerging onto roads, traveling at about 5 mph, and telephones were beginning to arrive into homes. The Wright brothers were tinkering with bicycles and dreaming of flight. Women would not be able to vote for another 30 years, and black voting rights wouldn’t be a reality for another 75 years. The year ended with the Battle of Wounded Knee, and floral wallpaper was chosen to cover the imperfections in these walls.

Realize you are not getting the job done. If you have gorilla-strength arms, cram the crowbar into the wall and yank off the wooden lath strips and plaster all at once, with terrific crashing noises. If you are me, wiggle the crowbar under the plaster, peeling it off in chunks. Let the chunks fall and explode in loud billows of dark grey dust. Watch the dust dance in winter sunlight reflected brightly from the snow into the bay window.

Then wedge the crowbar under each lath, prying them one by one from the uneven wall studs. The nails will be square and irregular, and you will later pluck a handful of the straightest ones from the wreckage to keep because they seem to tell a story. The lath boards will sproing from the wall in your hands. Yank and twist them free. Remember how to use your gross motor skills, developed in childhood and ignored by us adults who rarely get to use our whole bodies for a task. Let your arms be strong; release your inner gorilla.

Now the air will become thick with dust. Warm to the work, finding your rhythm up and down the ladder. Watching your feet to avoid nails, move the ladder without removing from it your hammer, which slips and bounces off your surprisingly strong glasses, and for a moment, think the ceiling has fallen. Recover, unharmed, and, crowbar in hand, mask over nose and mouth, climb the stepladder again.