OH so grateful...
...for whatever fair wind brought us Mark Boone as a handyman. I have HAD the other kind, all too often. Like the guys who were supposed to remove my old roofing, 20 years ago, but someone neglected 5 layers of tarpaper on the flat part, discovered THIS time around? The guys who charged my insurance company $900-plus for what should have been a $300 job to fix the kitchen ceiling? The ones who said they laid new sewer line out to the alley, and certainly charged enough for it, but in fact went about 8 feet and hooked up to my neighbor's old broken clay one? (Yes. The one Joseph and I will now be dealing with together.) We just discovered that last year, when they brought in a tiny underground camera. I couldn't believe it till I saw it with my own two angry eyes...
How about the guy I paid to fix my rotten floor in the bathroom, last SEPTEMBER, who left a leak so the toilet is rocking again, as in just over 7 months later, the flooring has rotted again, and the self-stick tile I didn't want in the first place has come loose, which I knew it would? AUGH.
Mark is honest, he tells me what needs doing and then SHOWS me, so I know he's straight with me. He offers alternatives. He gives bids and sticks with them. He shows up when he says he's going to. If something unexpected turns up, he actually feels bad about it. He does the work and does it well (he fixed my leaky roof ages ago and it lasted 15 years, till that terrific hailstorm last year! If I had known sooner that he was back to doing this kind of work I'd never have let anyone else in my house!)
The photo above is how the old chimney--soft, powdery bricks, mortar that fell apart into a sandpile--looked at mid-afternoon. I just went over the check on the house and that pile is completely gone. You wouldn't know it had ever been there if it weren't for a bit of sandy residue and the tire marks from his truck. I'm so grateful I could cry.
(I went over and liberated a couple of the bricks for my bookbinding project this afternoon, though--they make great weights for text blocks. I scrubbed them free of 100 years of soot and they're waiting till I have time to get back to binding...).
On a somewhat less delighted note, we wondered why the bathroom floor was so thick, raised about an inch above the kitchen floor. It's because rather than replace a rotting underfloor they just put layers of stuff on top of it. Linoleum. Oriented strand board. Carpet. Jeez. I quit tonight because there's no light bulb in the bathroom (to be remedied tomorrow!) other than the light from the basement shining up from the edges and holes, I felt a strong need to know what I was dealing with as I wielded the crowbar. I have no particular desire to end up precipitously in the basement...
The joists seem sound, so it really wouldn't be that difficult to FIX properly...I just wonder why no one HAS, in the last 20 or so years....
Check out the layers of wallpaper in the kitchen, like a time capsule. That's 4-5 layers in there, counting the Contac paper I pulled down before this was taken. Someone cared enough once to at least try to make it pleasant. (OK, the orange stuff doesn't really do it for me, despite the fact that I like tall ships.*G*)
I talk to the house while I work. I tell it it's going to be all right, that it's cared for now, that we'll fix it.
And we will.