House & Home

 

 

 

Over time, trial and error with my do-it-yourself home improvements have cultivated my intimacy with our house. Oddly, those errors seem to add to the intimacy even when projects go off the rails. So here’s some of what I’ve learned. Today’s installment features painting, shelving and the plaster that holds them.

 

Before entering a project, I remind myself that part of the satisfaction is literally from seeing our house from different directions. Day in and day out, my line of vision while sitting down or walking from room to room is basically the same. Hidden and peripheral areas become forgotten and so does my perspective. But the physical labor of a project escorts me slowly around the house, affording vantagepoints from nooks and crannies where I rarely venture.

 

I think of the repaint job on the baseboard behind my office desk. From my knees, I brushed on a final coat, then happened to glance back. I saw the rocker across the room, but not in a familiar way. My eye-level was more that of a dust-bunny. The house just felt different.

 

Installing bookshelves near the living room ceiling had a similar effect. The ladder gave me a look from on high like how the book titles might stare down at me when I’m on the couch. It presented a side of myself I hadn’t seen before.

 

There’s no teacher like experience and the shelves I just mentioned are schoolmarm-certified. Our house is pushing 90-years-old and its aging plaster walls aren’t necessarily shelving-friendly. Ideally, I’d anchor shelf brackets into wall studs. But I found that the studs in our house aren’t evenly spaced. Perhaps the carpenter was drunk. What’s more, a stud-finder couldn’t detect them through plaster.

 

Locating studs became a crapshoot. Though specialty bolts will secure heavy objects onto walls, they can only be used if hollow space is behind the wall; they won’t penetrate into studs. Therefore, my only alternative for finding either studs or hollow space was by test drilling. When I’d finished, the walls looked like they’d been ravaged by artillery.

 

That said, this’d probably be the time to address the inherent value of cussing. No project worth doing is ever complete without timely outbursts of profanity. Don’t let it bottle up. Cussing verbally stamps the moment into memory so the incident won’t be forgotten or repeated. Without cussing there is no growth.

 

I’m reminded of a kitchen project when all my wife and I wanted was a simple paint job. It lasted a year and a half.

 

Before starting, we invited a neighbor from the back alley to came over and consult. As she inspected, she lifted the edge of some curled wallpaper quite easily, then looked at my wife. They must have had a secret go-ahead signal. Without warning, our neighbor let ’er rip. Cinderblocks, plaster and former layers of paint beneath the paper were suddenly exposed. Project on.

 

From refrigerators to toothpicks, we jockeyed appliances and cupboard contents to other rooms around the house. Anywhere was legitimate location for anything. The microwave, a loaded rack of washed dishes and several utensil drawers went into the bedroom. Depending on the project phase, we thought these temporary arrangements would last a day or two. But sometimes it turned into weeks and that didn’t count when we reached good stopping points and put stuff back where it came from. We schlepped the same items back and forth second, third and fourth times.

 

Cracks, gouges and pockmarks came next, filling them with compound, then sanding so they were baby-butt smooth. My schooling for this included YouTube instructional videos. But I found that do-it-yourself tutorials can be misleading. Those experts in front of the camera have done the work they demonstrate since birth. They sling plaster like Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence. It’s not something on my skill chart. So I repeated the plaster-sand-wash procedure in a nightmarish loop.

 

Can’t say I embraced that repetition. However, starting over was my constant companion and integral to lesson retention. For instance, if a standard vacuum accidentally inhales even a small amount of water, the wet bag loses structural integrity, splits and blows contents out the back end. It’s good to catch this kind of calamity before too much time passes. In my situation, my back was turned, and until I smelled it, I had no idea that powdery joint compound was recoating the walls, floor and countertops behind me.

 

Other neighbors and friends dropped by to offer commentary and flat-out help. Without my asking, one friend volunteered to spray-texture the walls. She explained it was her way of paying forward some of the contributions she wanted to make in life. Her kindness touched us, but I was elated for other reasons, too. First, this would camouflage my plaster goofs. Second, I’d learn by doing when my turn came to give spray-texturing a try.

 

But as I observed her artistry, I knew to stay out of it. My participation would have been akin to grabbing the brush from O’Keefe; yelling “cut” on the set of a Bogdanovich film; or adding a kazoo to Bach’s Cello Suites.

 

When it was done, some knocks and dings remained that only I could discern. But the wall looked darn good. It set me to thinking that maybe another perspective had changed—my definition of “perfection.”

 

In some cultures, weavers who handcraft exquisite Persian rugs purposely slip in one imperceptible flaw. Their reasoning is that only God can be perfect and they do not want to challenge the All-Mighty. In so many ways, I’m with them. Our kitchen project was my Persian rug and I was no threat to the throne. I left behind a dozen reasons for the Creator to rest comfortably.