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Crack House Diaries: Home Improvements -- Part I
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5025 Reads
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Susan, none too thrilled |
We had been camping out in the house for weeks. When I say camping, I mean this in the most literal sense. No hot water. No heat. No refrigeration. No oven or range. No proper front or back door. The security screen doors let the wind blow through.
We did have a toilet, cold running water, and electricity in a couple of the rooms. This meant that we slept wearing sweats and socks, performed selective personal washing when necessary, listened to a lot of NPR, and ate an inordinate amount of microwave popcorn. It was like being a college freshman all over again, but with a four-year-old boy constantly complaining that he was BORED ...
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It was a prickly environment. We had pulled up MOST of the carpet tacks and staples, but would occasionally find one when it would push through our shoes and into our feet, a painful reminder of the herculean task before us.
Since the house was uninsurable âas-is,â the bank had agreed to finance our mortgage on the condition that we fix the place within three months of closing. The list of required repairs included:
Replace roof
Install front and back doors
Fix plumbing
Install heater
Install water heater
Replace carpets
Repair water damage (the black mold)
I have always had a Tim-the-Tool-Guy streak, so these jobs looked like the perfect excuse to expand my tool collection. I could buy the tools to complete each of the tasks, do the work, and still come out ahead of the cost of hiring a professional. âBesides,â I thought to myself, âI AM a professional... I am an architect.â I had spent my first summer in New Haven building a house for Yaleâs Building Project, a program where first-year architecture students collaborate to design and build a single-family home in a low-income neighborhood. I felt confident that I had the skills to get it all done. Time was a different matter.
We moved into the house in September, enjoying the last few warm weeks of the year. The repair list looked like to me what the Russian army must have looked like to Napoleonâs troops â a necessary obstacle on the path to greater things. It was early autumn in L.A. We had more important things to do, like kicking back at the beach and enjoying the last few weeks of sunshine before the rainy season.
My first task, though it wasnât on the list, was to trim the front tree. The low-hanging canopy created a tent-like shelter in our front yard, providing refuge for drug users and prostitutes. I bought a small electric chainsaw, a long extension cord, and a pole trimmer. I climbed into the tree with the chainsaw and began to work. By the end of the second day, I had managed to defoliate half the tree, making a significant improvement to the house and yard. In the process of cutting out a heavy limb, the falling wood slammed into my leg, knocking me out of the tree from ten feet up. I had tied a knot in the extension chord and looped it over a branch, so the chainsaw ripped out of my hands at a quarter of my drop. Asa, who had been basking in the insanity of my manliness, asked in all innocence, âDaddy, are you dead?â From my supine position, staring up at the swinging chainsaw pendulum, dangling like a sword of Damocles over my groin, I moaned, âI donât think so.â The piles of downed branches had broken my fall.
By October I had fixed the plumbing and installed a hot water heater. When an early rain fell, we realized just how badly the roof needed to be replaced. Because of the mold, we had filled and sealed up the water-damaged rooms with unessential items like books, photos, miscellaneous electrical equipment, and extra clothing and bedding. This made more living space in the rest of the house, and gave us a sense of protection from the mold. I came home from work on the first rainy day of the year to find hundreds of dollars of water damage to my library, destroyed photos, and piles of soggy clothes and bedding that would turn into a mildew love-fest if we didnât act fast. This prompted a game of moving-box Tetris, laying out wet goods in dry places and replacing waterlogged boxes with buckets to catch the rain. I fell into bed after 1:00AM, and called a roofer first thing in the morning.
By mid-November we still hadnât replaced the roof. I had been paralyzed by sticker shock from the first rooferâs estimate, and had once again convinced myself that I would hire some labor near the Home Depot and get up there and do the job myself. The rainy season officially began, but not before we rented a storage unit and filled it with most of our crap. This made the bucket wars a lot easier to fight. The dripping rooms, now naked but for the array of buckets and pots on the floor, came alive with the incessant *PING* *PING* of water searching for a place to rest. That water had come a long wayâdown through the jet trails and miasma of car exhaust, trickling through the dirty cracks in the built-up asphalt roof, dropping down onto the soggy pillow of moldy pink insulation, percolating through an equally moldy layer of painted gyp board, and finally coming to rest with a loud *PING* in a 5-gallon bucket. Depending on the location in the house, the contents of these vessels blanketed the color-spectrum between yellow and brown. They filled quickly, giving the water very little time to rest before we would send it on its way to the ocean with a flush.
The ceiling may as well have been made of cheese. I held a crowbar by the curved end and poked at one of the overhead blisters, easily penetrating the plaster skin. Pulling the crowbar out brought down a chunk of gypsum, exposing the mold-covered backside, and sopping insulation. Susanâs face registered these events with growing disgust and horror. Had a rotting toe fallen from the hole in the ceiling her reaction would have been no different. At the site and smell of the mold and decay, she recoiled, âI canât handle this! It has ALL GOT TO GO!â
Thus began the filthy process of stripping out all of the drywall and insulation from our walls and ceiling. Throughout all of this, one bedroom was spared any water damage. We would come home at night, park Asa in front of the television in that one bedroom, and spend hours pulling down and bagging plaster and insulation. When we could do this no more, we would shower, never able to wash away the itch and irritation from the dust and plaster, and finally collapse, the three of us, into a queen-sized bed. By the end of December, the plaster and insulation lay settling in a pile in our back yard, and we could now look up into the rafters and clearly see where the water was coming in.
(continued soon)
Previous:
Crack House Diaries - Ghetto Music
Crack House Diaries - 911 Is a Joke in Yo Town, part II
Crack House Diaries - What Are We Doing Here?
Crack-House Diaries - 911 is a joke in yo town, part I
South Central Living: Introduction
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| Posted by: RoganFerguson on Monday, November 08, 2004 - 11:31 AM
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