Man's Best Friend

Cody stands statuesque on the deck, his hind legs slightly bent and tight like springs ready to uncoil.  With an outstretched neck he peers across the yard.  The cool autumn breeze contradicts the warm sun on my arms and face.   Cody squirms slightly, makes a barely perceptible high pitch whistle, then returns to attention.  I take a sip of my coffee.

By the pond underneath the great pecan I see the pop of a squirrel's feathery tail flickering in the golden dawn light.  With frenetic quickness the squirrel takes a giant pecan in his small hands, spins it, pushes it in the dirt, then shoves it in his mouth.  His face has now become equal parts pecan and squirrel.  I take another sip of my coffee.


"Squirrel!"  I call to Cody.


Instantly Cody's springs uncoil.  His claws scrape against the deck in quick repetition as he bounds and then drives his legs into a full sprint.  For a brief moment the squirrel is blissfully unaware, completely absorbed in his oversized pecan.


Now at full speed Cody hurtles his sixty pounds of squirrel hunting fury at his prey.  The squirrel with a flick of his sun kissed tail having sensed his impending doom seems to levitate then flies horizontally to the small trunk of a nearby Mulberry.  He scuttles to the upper branches then leaps to the safety of the pecan while Cody dances alone underneath in humiliation.


"Ninja squirrel," I mutter to myself.


Cody takes a moment to "mark" the Mulberry and the Pecan in a not so subtle reminder to the squirrels of who is king of the backyard. He then trots back to the deck and sits at attention, gazing into the backyard for more prey.  I take a seat next to him, put my arm around him and take another sip of my coffee. 

Three Ways to Not Go Broke Living in an Old Home

 

Learn to Ignore Imperfections:  Remember, it's an old home.  When you bought it, you probably really enjoyed the quirkiness of the un-level floors, the creaky stairs and the interesting décor.  When you think you don't like something, go think about something else.


Learn to Fix Some Things on Your Own:  You can't hire everything out, unless you have tons of cash sitting in offshore accounts.  Invest in some good tools.  Learn from the contractors you do hire so that you can apply it to your own work.  YouTube is another great resource.


Prioritize Repairs:  Not all house repairs are created equal.  Safety comes first.  Is a floor sagging and possibly falling through?  Exposed electrical? Fix it.  Then look at risk.  Can future repairs get out of hand if you put them off? Anything with uncontrolled water fits here.  Once these are knocked out you can start doing the more fun things like painting, fixtures and furniture.

 

Miracle Chicken Coop

"This is just like the movie, The Money Pit," I had told one of my co-workers. 

We laughed and joked about it for a while, but when I sat alone the crushing pressure seemed unbearable. My thoughts hung low and thick like a tropical storm.  Every step immediately became a misstep, or so it seemed.  I had always been very conservative financially, and had no idea how quickly years of savings could evaporate.

"Why did we move here?" I said to myself as I gathered my things at the end of the day.

During my commute home thoughts bounced around in my brain, everything from selling out to getting a second job.  The phone rang. 

"Are you almost home?"  It was Julie.  "The girls have a surprise for you,"

I had left a little early, and traffic was light.  "I should be there in about twenty minutes," I replied.

I came in through the side door, because the front door was stuck.  The cowbell Julie had placed at the top of the door made a soft clunking noise. 

"Dad!  Check it out!"  Bella stormed from the mud room and grasped my hand, tugging me to the back of the house.

A large plastic storage bin sat on a wire shelf.  Clamped on the shelf above a heat lamp blazed into the bin. 

"Scratch, thump, thump, cheep, thump, cheep, cheep," Strange sounds rose from the bin, which shook ever so slightly with each "thump".  The light of the lamp created tiny scurrying silhouettes on the plastic.  Gazing in I took in the six fuzzy chicks, pecking, hopping and having a great time.

I on the other hand was not having such a great time. 

"What am I supposed to do with these chicks?" I whispered to Julie.

"Build a coop,"  she replied.  It will be fun.

Time passed, and the chicks grew.  It wouldn't be long before they would be graduating to a new home, but I hadn't built or bought anything.  I really didn't have any spare cash with all of the unplanned repairs we had just experienced on this wonderful home.

"God, please help me figure out these chickens," I had prayed more than once.

One evening while leaving work I spied a pallet leaning against a dumpster.  "I bet I could use that to build the chicken coop," I thought to myself.  Jamming it into the back of my Prius I headed home.

Designed to hold industrial equipment this was no ordinary pallet.  Four by four runners and two by six cross members made this an extremely heavy and heavy duty foundation for the chicken coop.

"Thud!' The pallet scratched my bumper and smashed into the gravel driveway.  As I tried to carry it through the chain-link gate it snagged on this trashy 4' by 6' section of an old privacy fence.  The nasty thing was wedged between a tree and the fence. Vines had grown up around and through it. I had noticed it the first day we moved in, and had planned to trash it, but had not gotten around to it.  "I need throw that piece of junk away," I thought to myself.

"What are you doing with that?" Julie asked as I drug the pallet to the backyard.

"This is our chicken coop," I replied.  She didn't look like she believed me.  Actually, I really had no plan at this point, but for some reason, I felt like this was an answer to my prayers.

The pallet sat untouched in the back for a couple of weeks.  One morning over a cup of coffee I sat gazing out of the back window when an idea came to me.  I quickly grabbed some paper and sketched it out.  Soon I had marked out a plan for a dollhouse looking structure with a sloped roof.  Maybe we could paint it blue to match our house.

I leveled the foundation with some concrete stepping stones, then spent the morning framing the coop with discarded wood from our recent home repairs.  It wasn't long before the structure was nearly complete, but I was quickly running out of materials.

"Just go to Home Depot and get what you need," Julie said.

"No, I'm not going to buy any wood," I replied.  "I'm tired of spending all of our money on this place, and I don't have any extra cash for a chicken coop,"

Julie just stared at me with this impatient look she sometimes gets.

"Besides, I continued, "I am confident that God is going to take care of us in spite of this chicken coop.  I'll figure it out,"

Julie widened her stance, her hands on her hips.  "God has your wood alright.  It's at Home Depot," she said.

"I'm not going!" I replied a little too harshly and started gathering up my tools. 

"I hate it when you talk like that," she said.

The next morning my oldest daughter, Morgan, and I worked together on the coop.  We had completed all but one side with plywood sheets, but I was out of wood.  I was about to put up my tools, when I saw it, the trashy 4' by 6' fence section cluttering up my yard.

"Hey Morgan.  Check out that section of fence.  I bet it will work perfectly for the last side of our chicken coop,"

Sure enough, this piece of "trash" that I passed every day intending to throw away, fit perfectly. As we continued our project we still found ourselves short of supplies.  The pen needed to be framed, but we had no more wood. 

That afternoon our neighbor, Trisha, peeked her head over the fence. "What are your building?" she asked.

We told her about our coop, and she shared stories of building her own.  On her way back inside she turned around.

"I have a bunch of old wood in the corner.  Take all you need," So amazing.  So kind.  I hadn't even told her we had run out of wood. 

As I was finishing up the chicken wire around the pen, Julie came into the backyard to check our progress. 

"I saw an old screen door in someone's trash on Virginia," she said.  "Do you want it?"

"I can't take anymore trash.  I've got too much of my own," I replied.

Julie gazed at the coop for a moment, I'm sure thinking how I had constructed it primarily of "trash".   "You'll need a door on the pen," she said.  "You said God was going to take care of you,"

I stopped working and looked up at her.

"Maybe you should get the door," she said.

"I think you're right,"

Tools for Living in an Old House

I have had several friends say this to me.

"We want to live in an old house, but we are going to wait until we retire,"

That sounds okay, but I think there is more to it than that.  After two years here I have come up with a list of the top ten requirements for living in an old home.  Of course, some of these are not necessary if you have unlimited financial resources.  Here we go!




10.  A love for old things


  9.  An air compressor


  8.  Lots of time

  7. Work gloves

  6. Creativity

  5. Power tools.  Lots of them.

  4. A pro account at the local hardware store

  3. A desire for community

  2. Nerves of steel

  1. A Purdy 2-1/2" tapered paint brush

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