Tapestry

Imagine a rug, a beautiful, multicolored work of art.  A tapestry of shapes and designs woven together by hand.  Details that took months, possibly years to create.  Then take that rug and begin to pull the fabric, sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently.  Then notice how the rug begins to separate, and the designs lose their meaning.

Working on and living in an old house is a little bit like that.  This is a little story of how I started pulling the tapestry apart and had to put it back together again.

It all started one day when the lights went out in the living room.  There were no issues in the electric panel, so I called over a good friend who just happens to be a master electrician.

Pulling off the ceiling fan in the living room we found our first problem.  There was no electrical box, only two holes drilled through the ship lap with two lone wires sticking through.

"It's most likely just a loose connection somewhere.  "The only problem is I can't get to anything, because it's all covered in ship lap," my good friend Dale Brewer said.  "You really need to get rid of that old wiring," he added.

The next day I started to expose the ceiling.  First came the painted wood paneling.  This came off relatively easily.  Just some light work with a hammer and a pry bar brought down the two foot square panels in just a few minutes. 

"Hey Julie, check out this wallpaper on the ceiling," I called.

Old wallpaper attached to cheesecloth entombed our ceiling.  Its cracked and dingy surface made it appear to be just barely hanging on.

Grabbing an open area I ripped, and the air of the room filled with years of dust and debris as if a West Texas dust storm had just barreled through.  Rat terds fell to floor like rain, and a strip of stained wallpaper dangled from the ceiling.  I had just transformed our living room into a haunted house.

Quickly shutting the doors and snagging a dust mask I finished the job.  It wasn't long before the ship lap ceiling was exposed, a board removed and we found the electrical culprit, which was quickly corrected.

"What do we do now?" Julie asked.  The ceiling had been covered for years and matched the fabric covered walls.

"Why don't we pull the fabric and batting off the walls?" she asked. "It smells like cat pee anyway,"

I frowned at her.  She must be kidding.  No way.  I glanced behind her and witnessed my Baylor Bears score yet another touchdown. The next thing I knew I was ripping fabric off walls like they were one gigantic Christmas present.

"Check this out!" I called.  "Old car wallpaper above the fireplace!"  As we continued we found two kinds of wallpaper.  One consisting of old cars, and another that looked like something like wood.


"Can you imaging what was going through their minds when they put this up? " I asked.  "I can just hear them saying, 'Let's cover these really cool real wood walls with wall paper that looks like wood,'"

Soon the paper was gone, and we sat in a living room covered floor to ceiling in rich, red ship lap that breathed in fresh air for the first time in years.

Unfortunately, our work had just begun.  You see, above this room sits our girls' bedroom.  Unknown to us when we bought the home, the floor sagged badly.  In fact, walking across it was like walking on a trampoline. There were no structural issue, only years of sagging from undersized and over spaced floor joists.

"Do you think we should fix it?" I asked Julie one night over a glass of Bordeaux.

Someone once told me that the following quote is always true when working on an old house.  "As long as you're doing this, you might as well do that too,"

We called our good friend and master of everything wood, Raymond Gonzalez.  He can truly do amazing things, and he always wants more money before he is done.

"From now on I'm going to call you, Quiero Mas," I once told him.  He just laughed and continued on.

Soon the real work began.  Walls shook, the house trembled, boards laid out in the yard like the carnage of war, and men covered our home, scurrying like ants on a mound.  Raymond exposed the floor joists, cut them and inserted two enormous beams spanning the room.  My good friend, Dale Brewer came over and fixed my electrical issue, and then Raymond put our room back together.

But that wasn't all.  No that was not all. Stringy cheesecloth covered the walls like someone tossed wet spaghetti everywhere.  Julie and I spent hours upon hours with a Bic lighter and a wet wash cloth, burning and wiping, burning and wiping, burning and wiping.

"Be careful, you're going to burn down the house," Julie said.

We debated a long time about painting the walls and finally decided on a light creme.  Our neighbor, Carol Scarborough, who has a knack for decorating, came by and helped us to dress it up just in time for Christmas.

Sitting in or new living room, broke and happy, Julie looked over at me.  "I feel very fortunate to live here,"

"Me too," I replied.  "Me too," I reached over and petted Cody dog.  He lay fast asleep, exhausted and very, very happy.

Hot Water

"How does the hot bath feel?" Julie called from the other room.

"Excellent!" I replied. "A claw foot tub is way better than bathing in the kitchen sink,"

With a gigantic smile on my face and my knees in my chest I lounged like a sardine in a can in a miniature claw foot tub that measured only four feet long. There wasn't even room for a rubber ducky.

I mentioned in a previous post how life seems to turn on a dime.  I have to say that ever since we hit that dime in the road on Virginia, everything seemed to spin out of control.  Sometimes the tiniest of things sent us reeling like Dorothy traveling to the Land of Oz in a twister. 

For instance, three little drops of water on the floor in a high traffic area doesn't seem like much of problem does it?  Maybe one of the girls scooted by and spilled some of their drink.  Maybe Cody had just finished slurping water from his dish, and the droplets fell from his mouth as he trotted to the living room.  Maybe, however, just maybe, those tiny beads of water precluded an epic flood.  Probably not.  What are the odds?

"Julie, did you spill something on the floor," I called from the mud room.

I'm not sure why, but  I glanced up.  Maybe it was just my imagination, but in the narrow space between the ship lap ceiling boards, I caught a faint sparkle. 

"It's probably just the polyurethane coating," I said to myself.  I decided to check it out.  Climbing up on a ladder I reached out to the ceiling only to feel cool, damp, soft wood. 

"Crap!"

My heart raced, and my stomach felt like lead.  We had already taken a big hit with painting the exterior and replacing both A/C's.   Surely this was only a small leak. easily repaired.  A "flesh wound" as the Black Knight would say.  But like Monte Python's Black Knight, both of my arms had been cut off.  I have since learned that the words small, easy and cheap do not exist in the world of one hundred year old homes.

A "highly recommended" contractor showed up the next day.  "We are going to have to rip out the shower and tub upstairs," he said. 

I didn't say a word but just stared at him.

"When they originally installed your tub, it was not supported correctly, so it's falling through the floor,"

I looked up at the ceiling above and could see it bowing.

He continued. "Your downstairs shower needs to be replaced as well.  It's leaking through the floor and rotting the wood,"

As we reviewed his bid, I noticed that it seemed to have too many zeros.  My head spun, and I felt a little dizzy.  I'm not sure exactly what happened next, but I found myself huddled up in a lawn chair under a bush in the far corner of our back yard, blubbering like a baby.

"Is he alright?" the contractor asked my wife?

"He will be fine," Julie replied.  "We will call you tomorrow,"

That night we talked about renting the movie, The Money Pit, but decided against it.  Our family was about to grow a lot stronger together.

Vinyl Removed and Painted Blue

EXPOSE

"I want mashed potatoes, chicken fried steak, green beans, mac n cheese, green jello, strawberry shortcake, and a roll!"

When I was a kid my parents used to take us to Luby's.  With a set of eyes ten times bigger than my stomach I always bit off just a little more than I could chew.

Things really don't change too much when you grow up.  You may not clean out Luby's anymore, but you do other things, like buying a 115 year old house with a laundry list of inspection deficiencies.  I mean, how difficult could it be?  I have a crowbar and a hammer, right?

Right.

Well, safety is a top priority, so I went to work replacing a bunch of old electric plugs with GFCI's. I started in all the obvious places first, like the kitchen and the bathrooms.  It was so easy I even threw in the GFCI's on the porch.  They may get hit by a stray raindrop after all.

"Hey Julie check this out," I said.  She didn't respond.  She was too busy trying to eliminate the smell of cat urine from the air ducts.

The plug on the porch wasn't mounted, but hovered unattached in the vinyl siding.  I hate cheesy, half ass work, a character trait which may end up being the death of me.

I pulled very gently on the vinyl siding around the plug trying to find the wood underneath.  That's when I got my first peak of it.  You know what it's like the first time you see it.  My heart raced.  Pulling back the processed, fake wood grain I gasped at the sight of pure, clean virgin wood for the first time!

"Why the hell would they cover that 115 year old wood with vinyl?!" I exclaimed.

Something changed deep inside.  I no longer cared for replacing plugs, but became a man on a mission.  A mission to expose this house.

"I'm going to rip it off," I said to myself.

I glanced across the street.  Like ants on a mound painters crawled around my neighbor's home. Turning back to my wall I hooked my index finger inside the vinyl.  It moved easy, almost like it was giving itself to me.

I took another look across the street.  "I wonder how much they would charge to paint my house?" I thought.

The next thing I knew I gripped the bottom of the vinyl and yanked.

"Prrrdddddppp!"  It sounded like a gigantic zipper.  It came off so easy.  Looking up I saw an 8' by 10' section of vinyl dangling by a thread.  Aluminum paper covered the wall, so I still had no idea of what I had gotten myself into.

"What's going on out there?" Julie called from the living room.

"Oh, nothing," I replied.

With a deep sense of dread I reached slowly up to the shiny, silver paper.  I tore off the tiniest section.  It was wood.  I grabbed a handful and tore into it like a kid at Christmas.  After about 30 seconds I stood on my porch, surrounded by exploded vinyl, aluminum paper, staples and the most perfect wood siding you have ever seen.  I remained for several minutes taking in all of the amazing details that someone years ago had covered in plastic.

"What are you..."  Julie stood at the door in amazement.

"Just replacing the old plugs," I said

Life Turns on a Dime

The family had already crammed in the car by the time I slid in.  I didn't say much, just put the old gas guzzler in reverse and backed out.

"Life turns on a dime," my wife said.

Like a hog in mud, I wallowed in a rut of self pity. The beat down routine of rear entry garages, perfect little homes on postage stamp lots, traffic, corporate slug work and chauffeur duties had taken its toll.  I was ready to leave it all behind, pitch a tent and plant a garden somewhere far away.

"Does it?"  I replied.

It didn't matter too much, though, because it was Sunday afternoon, and I had absolutely NOTHING to do.  We decided to go to downtown McKinney for lunch.

"Can we go to Juarez, Dad?"

"Sure", I replied.  The food was really good, and affordable.  Plus, I really liked downtown McKinney.  Julie and I had gone there on a date several years ago, and I was hooked.  It always made me think of what an American town should be like.  There was a town square surrounded by shops and restaurants.  People actually walked around.  Sometimes we drove around the historic neighborhood checking out all of the old homes.  I always wondered if we would ever be "lucky" enough to live in a place like that.

Heading home after lunch we rolled west down Virginia.  That's when we hit it; the dime in the form of a little sign advertising an open house.

"Do you want to check it out?" I asked.

"Ugh, sure," Julie answered, not realizing we had just run into the dime she prophesied.

"Let's go! Let's go!"  The shouts echoed from the backseat.

So, we took a sharp right, and then another and parked behind a row of cars on a tree lined street. From behind a blooming crepe myrtle arose a yellow Queen Anne Victorian with a wrap around porch.  As we entered a young real estate agent greeted us with a smile.

Stepping through the front door was like passing through a portal to another time and place.  Tall ceilings, tile lined fireplaces, hardwood floors, pocket doors and a squeaky staircase all combined to give us a quick sense of home.  The backyard was a far cry from our postage stamp.  A forest of pecan and mulberry trees greeted us.  It was so forested, I couldn't see the fence line..

I became blind to my life and responsibilities.  Maybe it was because of my rut.  Maybe I'm just a dreamer, but I was hooked.  For some strange reason we were drawn to every quirky nuance.  I even thought the un-level, spongy floors upstairs were amazing.  I knew at that moment life would be different. I just didn't realize how much.

In the car on the way home I looked over at Julie. "We are going to live here," I said.

Julie didn't look at me, but turned around to the backseat. "Kids, you have to remember, your dad thinks out loud,"

We had hit the dime.