recently, I . . .
On Saturday I got a lift with a fellow filthy liberal hippie to beautiful Westville, New Jersey, to work on a Rebuilding Together Philadelphia project. I have a limited skillset when it comes to home improvements, so I ended up doing a lot of painting, tool-fetching, and child-wrangling. The homeowner, a Katrina evacuee who lost all of her worldly goods to the flood and then one of her six children to cancer a few years later, cooked up a huge barbecue for the building crew, who numbered only five.
The previous work on the house, which I didn't participate in, involved insulating the floor of a bedroom area that was above the front porch. I guess when they built the house was built in the 1880s, coal was cheap and home insulation hadn't really been invented yet. Another project was to put real exterior doors between the kitchen and a sort of enclosed porch that led to the backyard deck. The way it was, when you would enter the house from the back, you'd come onto the deck, come into this porch via a sliding glass door, and then enter the kitchen via one of two open doorways. And the porch was uninsulated. Rather than take out the walls, put in insulation, and replace the walls, they decided to put in two good, solid doors at the kitchen.
Up in the attic, a lot of plaster had fallen off the walls, exposing wall studs underneath. My filthy liberal hippie friend and his son slapped on new plaster, spackled the smaller cracks, sanded it, and did some painting with the homeowner's older kids. The goal was to make the attic a useable bedroom so that the siblings could spread out a little out of the bedrooms on the second floor.
Out front, we trimmed off some gaps where the porch ceiling didn't entirely cover the open space at the joists -- I learned how to use a motorized miter saw, buzz-buzz-buzz! -- and then we put two coats of paint on the ceiling and trim. While the first ceiling coat dried, I painted the porch railing and uprights. It was about that time that the younger kids ran out of things to do inside, so they came out to "help."
It was kind of like a couple of months ago when I helped my dad and a landscaping crew clean up pine tree storm debris from my dad's yard: when the crew left to take everything to the dump, they left the woman in the crew behind to babysit. On Saturday, the kids were fine, and they shouldn't have been around the other projects anyway, but thbfffft. If I were a person who enjoyed hanging around a lot of kids for hours at a time, as I've said before, I would have gotten an advanced degree in early childhood education, not in law.
Or maybe I should have gone into carpentering.
On Sunday, well, you know all those muscles you use when you roll paint onto an 8-, 9-foot ceiling? Twice? Every last one of 'em was sore. I got a little bit of housework done, including laundering my house-paintin' clothes, but otherwise I spent a good part of the day rehydrating on the sofa with the one-volume collection of Jane Austen novels I've been plowing through for the past couple of weeks.
Anyway it was a good privilege-check weekend, reminded me that it's rough to complain about the lack of a dishwasher, my stained carpet, and 1980s formica in the kitchen and bathroom. The house had a single bathroom -- six occupants in the house, you recall -- and had that type of wallcovering you see in little old ladies' houses in South Philly, a kind of vinyl paneling tacked on with strips, popular in the 1940s and '50s to cover up plaster. In the tiny kitchen was a small complement of tin cabinets that looked as though they dated to the 1920s. The livingroom floor was damaged and partly torn up; there were two sofas (six occupants in the house) and one of the seat cushions was completely split open. Overall the house was a "charming" "fixer-upper," only with the family living there among the ugliness and needed repairs.
The previous work on the house, which I didn't participate in, involved insulating the floor of a bedroom area that was above the front porch. I guess when they built the house was built in the 1880s, coal was cheap and home insulation hadn't really been invented yet. Another project was to put real exterior doors between the kitchen and a sort of enclosed porch that led to the backyard deck. The way it was, when you would enter the house from the back, you'd come onto the deck, come into this porch via a sliding glass door, and then enter the kitchen via one of two open doorways. And the porch was uninsulated. Rather than take out the walls, put in insulation, and replace the walls, they decided to put in two good, solid doors at the kitchen.
Up in the attic, a lot of plaster had fallen off the walls, exposing wall studs underneath. My filthy liberal hippie friend and his son slapped on new plaster, spackled the smaller cracks, sanded it, and did some painting with the homeowner's older kids. The goal was to make the attic a useable bedroom so that the siblings could spread out a little out of the bedrooms on the second floor.
Out front, we trimmed off some gaps where the porch ceiling didn't entirely cover the open space at the joists -- I learned how to use a motorized miter saw, buzz-buzz-buzz! -- and then we put two coats of paint on the ceiling and trim. While the first ceiling coat dried, I painted the porch railing and uprights. It was about that time that the younger kids ran out of things to do inside, so they came out to "help."
It was kind of like a couple of months ago when I helped my dad and a landscaping crew clean up pine tree storm debris from my dad's yard: when the crew left to take everything to the dump, they left the woman in the crew behind to babysit. On Saturday, the kids were fine, and they shouldn't have been around the other projects anyway, but thbfffft. If I were a person who enjoyed hanging around a lot of kids for hours at a time, as I've said before, I would have gotten an advanced degree in early childhood education, not in law.
Or maybe I should have gone into carpentering.
On Sunday, well, you know all those muscles you use when you roll paint onto an 8-, 9-foot ceiling? Twice? Every last one of 'em was sore. I got a little bit of housework done, including laundering my house-paintin' clothes, but otherwise I spent a good part of the day rehydrating on the sofa with the one-volume collection of Jane Austen novels I've been plowing through for the past couple of weeks.
Anyway it was a good privilege-check weekend, reminded me that it's rough to complain about the lack of a dishwasher, my stained carpet, and 1980s formica in the kitchen and bathroom. The house had a single bathroom -- six occupants in the house, you recall -- and had that type of wallcovering you see in little old ladies' houses in South Philly, a kind of vinyl paneling tacked on with strips, popular in the 1940s and '50s to cover up plaster. In the tiny kitchen was a small complement of tin cabinets that looked as though they dated to the 1920s. The livingroom floor was damaged and partly torn up; there were two sofas (six occupants in the house) and one of the seat cushions was completely split open. Overall the house was a "charming" "fixer-upper," only with the family living there among the ugliness and needed repairs.