Chapter 1: The Gentleman Carpenter
i ho!
When I get to
the job site I like to tuck right into some actual factual work. I don’t like
to do a lot of chitchat and then hear the whole scope of the project. So instead
of hogging up my trowel with a bunch of back-story, lets get right into one of
my favorite jobs: demolition. In this case cutting out blocking in a stick wall
using a Sawzall loaded with a new nine-inch blade.
The 'sticks'
are old pine studs whose color has mellowed in the wall to a golden hue. These
are straight, tinder dry, golden studs of loblolly or southern yellow pine. At four feet off the ground there is a
horizontal line of these two by four blocks, nailed between the studs and meant
to block rising flames. These stud bays can be like lanes for a fire as it
chases up to the roof or second floor, but the blocking slows it down. It’s
slowing us down as we try to build out a bigger doorway, and so they’ve got to
go.
I lay my
serrated blade into the wood and it buries down like a carving knife working
through chops, the blade thrusts forward and draws back in a reciprocating
motion that pulverizes a kerf of pine, and distributes a messy spray of fine
powder as it digs. My headphones muffle the raw sound of grating and lugging,
but I see that the inside of the studs are a buttery white, and I catch a
snootful of the sawdust. It smells like dusty sunshine. The house I'm working
on was built around 1982, so this is Reagan-era dust. I start thinking about
those days as I demolish.
‘Thriller’
came out that year. I remember the first time I saw Michael Jackson moonwalk, how
exciting and new it was. It felt like nothing would be the same again after
that. That was also the year of the Tylenol poisoning. Man, that was a real
change in the weather – all of a sudden things were packaged with safety seals
and people drew in their bags a little closer. It’s now gotten to the point
where they have safety caps on dishwasher fluid. I doubt you could make
dishwasher fluid any more toxic by adding cyanide, so I don’t know what the
point of that is. As I’m thinking along these lines I’m cutting through wood
and nails and everything’s working out fine. I’m freeing things up and opening
the space so that Henry can get a good look at the studding and decide where to
start the new doorway and what to do with the electrical wires, which look like
long ropes of licorice.
When I get
near the live juice I slow the blade down to a patient lug and tighten my grip,
carefully bearing down and carving a little circle of wood around the black wires.
I’m left with little wooden donuts girding the wires. That’s when I reach for
my hammer and bee bar. The bee bar is a slender pry bar, so-called because a
beekeeper friend of Ollie’s uses it to poke around in his apiary. I knock the
pointed tip of the bar into the end grain of the donut, which cracks open nice
and easy and everything is freed up and I can take a break and give you some
background.
One of Lang and
Miranda Flint’s boys is getting married in forty days, and they're having the
reception at home. So, they want a complete house makeover: a French front
door, and in the foyer some new flooring and oak banisters and better lighting,
and get rid of the popcorn ceiling, and widen the entryway into the living room,
install a fireplace with a tile surround and a stout wooden mantle, and cap it
all off with by replacing the four large crank windows with a grand 11-foot
wide bay window bulging out in the front yard. Add to that a few built-in
cabinets for Lang's long-playing album collection, and the strategic
intermeshing with the other tradesmen on the job and we've got a lot to get
done in forty days and forty nights. It’s shaping up to be a pressure cooker,
especially because Jasmine Meadowbrook, the interior decorator, wants us out of
there so she has plenty of time to work her style into the joint. She’s the one
who hired us, so we have to step to her deadlines, and I’m realizing that this
could be insane.
The funny
thing is that I feel really relaxed and glad to be away from the pressure
cooker we were in at the last job, where we had some mix-ups with the cabinet
pulls on a very pricey vanity.
Well, since
we’ve put our tools down, I guess some introductions are in order.
My name is
Andy Schroeder, and I'm part of a three-man residential remodeling crew
consisting of my father Henry and his partner Ollie. My partners have been in
the trades for 30 years apiece, and I've worked beside them for seven years,
over two stints. I’ve had a lot of different jobs in my day: lawn mower,
dishwasher, fry cook, milkmaid, librarian, sales clerk, photocopy guy,
newspaper photographer, and now, as a 40-year old father of two, I’m a full-time
carpenter. I even bought a truck the other day. I say that a carpenter without
a truck is like a cowboy without a horse, and so it’s now official. Having the
proper ride put me in mind to start a log, something to document the life and
work of a North Carolina gentleman carpenter.
This book
is a chronicle of two years in the building trades during the Great Recession. It’s an inside look
at the work, the houses, the aesthetics, and the wisdom of the tradesmen. If you stay on, you’ll learn about where houses fail, what materials to
avoid, when is a good time to have work done, the pros and cons of a permit.
You’ll meet the interesting characters I work with and go into the homes of our
customers. You’ll hear the sounds of the tools, and see the sights of North
Carolina through the seasons, and feel the texture of the jobs I encounter as a
gentleman carpenter working the field. Okay, back to work.
It’s
spring of 2011 and lately the recession has cut into our business a bit. The
jobs are shorter, more of them are maintenance instead of remodels, and our
salaries have stagnated. But today we’re starting this big wedding job in the
town of Exeter, a sprawling city with a blue collar downtown and then far-reaching
suburbs of all socio-economic stripes. The Flints live in a pleasant
neighborhood of large lots and a constant traffic of dog walkers.
Miranda is
managing this remodel, and is clearly on the ball, fairly easily answering Henry’s
design questions. Her accent is exactly like Mrs. Puff, the driver's education
teacher on 'SpongeBob SquarePants.' One of the garden-variety pleasures of
being a carpenter is trying to guess where the homeowners are from. I'm
guessing Miranda is from western Kansas. She’s huddling with Henry when her
husband shows up.
Lang is
wearing a derby when he arrives home in his tiny coupe. He’s tall and thin, so
when he gets out I have the impression that he’s a pocketknife being unfolded.
He’s very affable and invites me to see his album collection.
"I'm a
competitive ballroom dancer, so a lot of these are for dancing," he says
as we admire the five-foot by four-foot shelf of long playing vinyl records by Dexter
Gordon, Boz Scaggs, Alexander Scriabin, etc.
“Did you know
that Scriabin died from a cold sore?” I ask him, recalling a piquant detail
from my college days.
See, when I'm
in my Carhartt workpants and rigged out with tools and am talking with the
homeowners about non-construction things, erudite things, I like to strike a
pose sort of like Gustave Courbet in his painting 'Bonjour Monsieur Courbet': chin
up, one arm cocked on a hip the other holding a tool. It’s a bearing that is confident,
yet nonchalant, engaged, but almost reticent. But instead of jabbing my
interlocutors with a sharp beard, like Courbet, I offer interesting
observations and ask ponderous questions.
At the
Scriabin tidbit Lang steps back in mild alarm, and I can now see in his
movements a precision and grace that seems like it could have been honed in a
ballroom. I ask him if he can tell the difference between a CD and an LP in
terms of sound.
"It's
easy to tell one from the other. Easy," he says. "Albums are cleaner
sounding, there's more timbre." Over the next few days I formulate a guess
at his place of origin, which is based on overhearing snippets and observing
loose brochures, Mapquest documents, and street maps. I think he’s a
Michigander.
Well, enough of
that, it’s time to get into my own timber. Back to work.
My job is to begin
the process of taking out the wall facing the front yard, where we’re going to
put the bay window. The Sheetrock comes off in massive messy shards – as
always. Behind that is another piece of Reagan-era work: vapor barrier. For a
time building engineers thought that by applying a sheet of clear plastic on
the inside of the studs, before the Sheetrock goes on, they would prevent
moisture from penetrating into the house. They’re out of favor now, and I can
see why. There’s black mold all along the bottom of the outside of the vapor
barrier. It seems that moisture has been condensing on the outside of the
plastic, then running down and moldering. It’s even penetrated through nail
holes and molded-up the back of the baseboard. I don't know what species of
mold it is, but I do know I had some nasty black boogers when I got home. One
of the hazards of the trades my friend, one of the hazards.
So that was
pretty much it for the first day of this pre-nuptial remodeling bonanza.
• • •
I’ve studied
my time sheets and I can tell you that on the average day I start around ten
and end around six, with three-quarters of an hour for lunch somewhere in the
backyard. That’s about seven hours at twenty dollars an hour which pencils out
to a gross take of $140 a day. Most of that money goes to fancy nut mixes and
debt. But occasionally I buy a tool for my belt.
Right now my
leather belt consists of a tape measure that reads half in metric and half in
English, a five-in-one screwdriver, a stiff putty knife, a thick carpenter's
pencil, and a utility knife, which we simply call a 'blade.' On the other side I
have two nail sets, a nippers for prying nails, a needle nose pliers Ollie gave
me thirteen years ago, the bee bar, a torpedo level, a cast aluminum speed
square, and a pouch full of miscellaneous screws and nails. I like to keep a
siding nail in that pouch so I can probe in drywall for a hidden stud. Most of
the time when I hoist my rig into place the speed square falls out and makes a
huge clang – which is sort of like the starting bell for a workday. So let’s
get into it.
Henry is
unloading blond spruce studs from his truck. I hoist a couple and we wander
around the house looking for a place to stash them. A remarkable amount of time
can be spent moving wood around the job site.
If you want to
save a little money on your next remodeling project, put a little time into
making space for the materials and tools, as it will mean less time paying guys
to clear furniture and hump nail guns back and forth to the truck every morning
and night. You’ve got to let the crew dig in for the duration – don’t fight it,
just relax and it wont hurt but a little bit.
The studs are
for a temporary wall we’re building in the living room; about four feet back
from the load-bearing exterior wall we’re taking out. You might be familiar
with the phrase “load-bearing wall,” but how do you know which walls bear the
weight of the upper floors and roof? If it’s a one-story house you go in the
attic and locate the ceiling joists – some kind of two-by running from one side
of the house to the other, and composing the attic floor. The load bearing
walls run perpendicular to these. The Flints have a two-story house, so we had
to poke a lot of holes in the ceiling to find the direction of the joists, and
they told us this front wall, which is mostly windows, is load-bearing.
We stash the
studs and some stained baseboard we’ll be reusing. Unlike the sun-tanned pine
studs I was cutting up yesterday, these new boards are spruce, blond in color
and very light.
It’s a good
start, and then Henry gives me a long-form project: taking down some hideous
square recessed lighting from the 80s. This is careful prying of the fixture, and
then enlarging the hole, then framing it out with some wood nailers, then
covering it with a patch of new sheetrock, and then using a hole saw to drill
out a new circle in which to house nifty modern recessed canisters; seven of
them. It took me most of the day and covered me in enough dust to make me look
like a Xhosa warrior.
As
I was working I felt a kinship with the surgeon, who enters the body with
instruments and removes problematic matter and sometimes replaces it with
something new. I was cutting and patching holes in the body of the house, but
instead of the house healing itself like a body, we'll get Zeke the hillbilly
sheet rocker to mud over the sutures. The detritus of surgery is quite different
as well: blood and guts and fat and all manner of fluids to contend with. My
work unleashes a potpourri of dust: the talc, calcite, mica, gypsum, and silica of
sheetrock, the sub-micron resin binders in disturbed fiberglass insulation. That's
just the harmless stuff I don't always protect myself from, although I really
should. I do worry about silicosis, just as the surgeon has to worry about Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Hepatitis
C. So, every job must have its ups and downs, ins and outs. Today’s highlight
for me was when I went up to the attic to swap out some lights.
I had to get
up to the second floor, which was a narrow dim hallway with a dingy carpet a
lot of darkly stained and shut doors – somewhat mysterious and depressing, and
smelling strongly of a-terpineol – fabric softener. I found the pull-down attic
hatch and climbed up. The wind was howling through the gable vents, it was dim,
empty, but there on some plywood was a thick glossy magazine, turned upside
down.
'Oh yeah,' I
thought and flipped it over. There was Lonnie Anderson on the cover...hubba
hubba...so blond. It was obviously someone's hidden copy of...'Good
Housekeeping'! I flipped past the soup ads looking for the Anderson spread.
Nothing. Then I feverishly looked for the table of contents, again nothing but Febreze
ads and sidebars on arm fat. I was already pretty worked up, so I jerked off to
a recipe for Chicken Pot Pie. It wasn't so bad, this one had a corn meal crust
– just like baby likes it.
And then I was
done. That was my workday. It was tedious at times, but still agreeable, especially
because I know I wont be doing that specific sequence of work again. I will do
these types of things again, but usually between long periods of time, and
never with quite the same particulars. It’s certainly not boring.
Other people
in the world were doing something else that day: recycling metal, manufacturing
new lights, working at the power company, bagging nuts. It's amazing to me that
people show up for work all around the world, everyday, by the billions, even
people who have crushingly tedious jobs show up. The whole thing just keeps
humming along even though people are dying all the time. In that case, new
people just step in, like cells in our body being replaced in mid-stride.
Somehow it all adds up and we humans keep thriving.
• • •
It’s a bright
spring morning, and I slip into the house, nod some hellos, and get right to
work finishing the demolishing of the front wall.
This is a real
wall, full of massive headers above the windows, and course after course of
jack and king studs along the side, and then packed out all over the place with
extra wood, and all bound together by huge hand-driven framing nails. I have to
carefully think about exactly where are the important points of connection that
need to be severed, and what I will be able to pry against, and where to set
the ladder.
It’s important
to think about where you’ll go if your prying force is suddenly released.
There’s no better way to get scotched than by recklessly prying on a ladder.
I finally settle
on a counter-intuitive first step: prying some siding nails on the outside –
thus freeing up the interior framing. Thus free I use the Sawzall to slice off
the nails that connect the two-by-twelve header unit to the king stud, which
runs along the window from bottom to top plate. Then while perched on a
six-foot ladder I carefully pull the whole honking rectangular cuboid out. I get
two headers out in about a half an hour of delicate but loud, dusty and violent
Sawzall surgery. Ollie shows up at eleven and says it took him an hour to
remove two headers yesterday.
"I was up
there pulling and pulling," he says as he acts out the epic struggle of
man against header. Then he rubs his sore elbow as I tell him about the
efficacy of first going outside and removing the siding nails with a cat's paw.
That was the crucial step. It saved fifteen minutes a header, which works out
to be about $10-20, depending on who’s working. Ollie makes $37 and Henry
weighs in at $39. Anyway, that is how the day began. I got into this and that,
but the most interesting new wrinkle emerged when Henry was giving a tour to
the electrician.
"Is there
a permit for this job?" Asks the electrician.
"No, the
customers didn't want one," says Henry. Later, at lunch, he elaborated.
"The Flints
seemed like easy people to work for and I didn't want to scare them," says
Henry of the bothersome permitting process. But, there are some real downsides
to having no permit.
If someone
from the city of Exeter notices all the work trucks arrayed around the house,
and the torn up siding, and the piles of spaded earth, and the trailer of
construction debris and then the absence of a permit box, well, they might put
two and two together and realize someone's doing unpermitted work there. Then
they'll start asking a lot of questions, and likely move on to issuing fines
and stopping the work with red flags. Then we have to go back to ‘start’ and draw
up plans, apply for a permit, pay double the permit fee, and perhaps open up
some work we've already done in order to prove it's all according to code. Henry
didn't make it clear to the home owners how far south this project could go if
we get "red flagged" by the code officers. Remember, there's a
wedding in about a month and the invitations have already been mailed, so if
the whole project grinds to a halt then either the reception will have to be
rescheduled, relocated, or they'll have to work bare stud walls and exposed
wiring into the mise en scene of the
wedding ceremony.
So, I have to
say, I am on tenterhooks every time I come out front and cut a piece of foam or
haul out a flat of drywall from a truck bed. Someone from the city might be
cruising by, or an embittered neighbor might feel like dropping a dime on us.
There are some
longer-term problems with not having a permit as well. We’ve recently gotten
into a kitchen remodel that could not be permitted because the initial kitchen
addition, built by the previous homeowners, was not permitted. Without that
permit the kitchen shouldn’t even be considered habitable space, and when they try
to sell the house, a hard-nosed Realtor could get the price driven way down by
eliminating it from the all-important square footage total.
It makes me
realize that I'm working with some old school renegades who cut their teeth in
the trades in the days when permits were considered optional. Not that the
construction is shoddy. Henry has the building codebook out all the time, and
he cites chapter and verse now and again. The job is being done according to code,
just not with the official imprimatur of the city of Exeter.
Chapter 1: The Gentleman Carpenter
H
i ho!
When I get to the job site I like to tuck right into some actual factual work. I don’t like to do a lot of chitchat and then hear the whole scope of the project. So instead of hogging up my trowel with a bunch of back-story, lets get right into one of my favorite jobs: demolition. In this case cutting out blocking in a stick wall using a Sawzall loaded with a new nine-inch blade.
The 'sticks' are old pine studs whose color has mellowed in the wall to a golden hue. These are straight, tinder dry, golden studs of loblolly or southern yellow pine. At four feet off the ground there is a horizontal line of these two by four blocks, nailed between the studs and meant to block rising flames. These stud bays can be like lanes for a fire as it chases up to the roof or second floor, but the blocking slows it down. It’s slowing us down as we try to build out a bigger doorway, and so they’ve got to go.
I lay my serrated blade into the wood and it buries down like a carving knife working through chops, the blade thrusts forward and draws back in a reciprocating motion that pulverizes a kerf of pine, and distributes a messy spray of fine powder as it digs. My headphones muffle the raw sound of grating and lugging, but I see that the inside of the studs are a buttery white, and I catch a snootful of the sawdust. It smells like dusty sunshine. The house I'm working on was built around 1982, so this is Reagan-era dust. I start thinking about those days as I demolish.
‘Thriller’ came out that year. I remember the first time I saw Michael Jackson moonwalk, how exciting and new it was. It felt like nothing would be the same again after that. That was also the year of the Tylenol poisoning. Man, that was a real change in the weather – all of a sudden things were packaged with safety seals and people drew in their bags a little closer. It’s now gotten to the point where they have safety caps on dishwasher fluid. I doubt you could make dishwasher fluid any more toxic by adding cyanide, so I don’t know what the point of that is. As I’m thinking along these lines I’m cutting through wood and nails and everything’s working out fine. I’m freeing things up and opening the space so that Henry can get a good look at the studding and decide where to start the new doorway and what to do with the electrical wires, which look like long ropes of licorice.
When I get near the live juice I slow the blade down to a patient lug and tighten my grip, carefully bearing down and carving a little circle of wood around the black wires. I’m left with little wooden donuts girding the wires. That’s when I reach for my hammer and bee bar. The bee bar is a slender pry bar, so-called because a beekeeper friend of Ollie’s uses it to poke around in his apiary. I knock the pointed tip of the bar into the end grain of the donut, which cracks open nice and easy and everything is freed up and I can take a break and give you some background.
One of Lang and Miranda Flint’s boys is getting married in forty days, and they're having the reception at home. So, they want a complete house makeover: a French front door, and in the foyer some new flooring and oak banisters and better lighting, and get rid of the popcorn ceiling, and widen the entryway into the living room, install a fireplace with a tile surround and a stout wooden mantle, and cap it all off with by replacing the four large crank windows with a grand 11-foot wide bay window bulging out in the front yard. Add to that a few built-in cabinets for Lang's long-playing album collection, and the strategic intermeshing with the other tradesmen on the job and we've got a lot to get done in forty days and forty nights. It’s shaping up to be a pressure cooker, especially because Jasmine Meadowbrook, the interior decorator, wants us out of there so she has plenty of time to work her style into the joint. She’s the one who hired us, so we have to step to her deadlines, and I’m realizing that this could be insane.
The funny thing is that I feel really relaxed and glad to be away from the pressure cooker we were in at the last job, where we had some mix-ups with the cabinet pulls on a very pricey vanity.
Well, since we’ve put our tools down, I guess some introductions are in order.
My name is Andy Schroeder, and I'm part of a three-man residential remodeling crew consisting of my father Henry and his partner Ollie. My partners have been in the trades for 30 years apiece, and I've worked beside them for seven years, over two stints. I’ve had a lot of different jobs in my day: lawn mower, dishwasher, fry cook, milkmaid, librarian, sales clerk, photocopy guy, newspaper photographer, and now, as a 40-year old father of two, I’m a full-time carpenter. I even bought a truck the other day. I say that a carpenter without a truck is like a cowboy without a horse, and so it’s now official. Having the proper ride put me in mind to start a log, something to document the life and work of a North Carolina gentleman carpenter.
This book is a chronicle of two years in the building trades during the Great Recession. It’s an inside look at the work, the houses, the aesthetics, and the wisdom of the tradesmen. If you stay on, you’ll learn about where houses fail, what materials to avoid, when is a good time to have work done, the pros and cons of a permit. You’ll meet the interesting characters I work with and go into the homes of our customers. You’ll hear the sounds of the tools, and see the sights of North Carolina through the seasons, and feel the texture of the jobs I encounter as a gentleman carpenter working the field. Okay, back to work.
It’s spring of 2011 and lately the recession has cut into our business a bit. The jobs are shorter, more of them are maintenance instead of remodels, and our salaries have stagnated. But today we’re starting this big wedding job in the town of Exeter, a sprawling city with a blue collar downtown and then far-reaching suburbs of all socio-economic stripes. The Flints live in a pleasant neighborhood of large lots and a constant traffic of dog walkers.
Miranda is managing this remodel, and is clearly on the ball, fairly easily answering Henry’s design questions. Her accent is exactly like Mrs. Puff, the driver's education teacher on 'SpongeBob SquarePants.' One of the garden-variety pleasures of being a carpenter is trying to guess where the homeowners are from. I'm guessing Miranda is from western Kansas. She’s huddling with Henry when her husband shows up.
Lang is wearing a derby when he arrives home in his tiny coupe. He’s tall and thin, so when he gets out I have the impression that he’s a pocketknife being unfolded. He’s very affable and invites me to see his album collection.
"I'm a competitive ballroom dancer, so a lot of these are for dancing," he says as we admire the five-foot by four-foot shelf of long playing vinyl records by Dexter Gordon, Boz Scaggs, Alexander Scriabin, etc.
“Did you know that Scriabin died from a cold sore?” I ask him, recalling a piquant detail from my college days.
See, when I'm in my Carhartt workpants and rigged out with tools and am talking with the homeowners about non-construction things, erudite things, I like to strike a pose sort of like Gustave Courbet in his painting 'Bonjour Monsieur Courbet': chin up, one arm cocked on a hip the other holding a tool. It’s a bearing that is confident, yet nonchalant, engaged, but almost reticent. But instead of jabbing my interlocutors with a sharp beard, like Courbet, I offer interesting observations and ask ponderous questions.
At the Scriabin tidbit Lang steps back in mild alarm, and I can now see in his movements a precision and grace that seems like it could have been honed in a ballroom. I ask him if he can tell the difference between a CD and an LP in terms of sound.
"It's easy to tell one from the other. Easy," he says. "Albums are cleaner sounding, there's more timbre." Over the next few days I formulate a guess at his place of origin, which is based on overhearing snippets and observing loose brochures, Mapquest documents, and street maps. I think he’s a Michigander.
Well, enough of that, it’s time to get into my own timber. Back to work.
My job is to begin the process of taking out the wall facing the front yard, where we’re going to put the bay window. The Sheetrock comes off in massive messy shards – as always. Behind that is another piece of Reagan-era work: vapor barrier. For a time building engineers thought that by applying a sheet of clear plastic on the inside of the studs, before the Sheetrock goes on, they would prevent moisture from penetrating into the house. They’re out of favor now, and I can see why. There’s black mold all along the bottom of the outside of the vapor barrier. It seems that moisture has been condensing on the outside of the plastic, then running down and moldering. It’s even penetrated through nail holes and molded-up the back of the baseboard. I don't know what species of mold it is, but I do know I had some nasty black boogers when I got home. One of the hazards of the trades my friend, one of the hazards.
So that was pretty much it for the first day of this pre-nuptial remodeling bonanza.
• • •
I’ve studied my time sheets and I can tell you that on the average day I start around ten and end around six, with three-quarters of an hour for lunch somewhere in the backyard. That’s about seven hours at twenty dollars an hour which pencils out to a gross take of $140 a day. Most of that money goes to fancy nut mixes and debt. But occasionally I buy a tool for my belt.
Right now my leather belt consists of a tape measure that reads half in metric and half in English, a five-in-one screwdriver, a stiff putty knife, a thick carpenter's pencil, and a utility knife, which we simply call a 'blade.' On the other side I have two nail sets, a nippers for prying nails, a needle nose pliers Ollie gave me thirteen years ago, the bee bar, a torpedo level, a cast aluminum speed square, and a pouch full of miscellaneous screws and nails. I like to keep a siding nail in that pouch so I can probe in drywall for a hidden stud. Most of the time when I hoist my rig into place the speed square falls out and makes a huge clang – which is sort of like the starting bell for a workday. So let’s get into it.
Henry is unloading blond spruce studs from his truck. I hoist a couple and we wander around the house looking for a place to stash them. A remarkable amount of time can be spent moving wood around the job site.
If you want to save a little money on your next remodeling project, put a little time into making space for the materials and tools, as it will mean less time paying guys to clear furniture and hump nail guns back and forth to the truck every morning and night. You’ve got to let the crew dig in for the duration – don’t fight it, just relax and it wont hurt but a little bit.
The studs are for a temporary wall we’re building in the living room; about four feet back from the load-bearing exterior wall we’re taking out. You might be familiar with the phrase “load-bearing wall,” but how do you know which walls bear the weight of the upper floors and roof? If it’s a one-story house you go in the attic and locate the ceiling joists – some kind of two-by running from one side of the house to the other, and composing the attic floor. The load bearing walls run perpendicular to these. The Flints have a two-story house, so we had to poke a lot of holes in the ceiling to find the direction of the joists, and they told us this front wall, which is mostly windows, is load-bearing.
We stash the studs and some stained baseboard we’ll be reusing. Unlike the sun-tanned pine studs I was cutting up yesterday, these new boards are spruce, blond in color and very light.
It’s a good start, and then Henry gives me a long-form project: taking down some hideous square recessed lighting from the 80s. This is careful prying of the fixture, and then enlarging the hole, then framing it out with some wood nailers, then covering it with a patch of new sheetrock, and then using a hole saw to drill out a new circle in which to house nifty modern recessed canisters; seven of them. It took me most of the day and covered me in enough dust to make me look like a Xhosa warrior.
As I was working I felt a kinship with the surgeon, who enters the body with instruments and removes problematic matter and sometimes replaces it with something new. I was cutting and patching holes in the body of the house, but instead of the house healing itself like a body, we'll get Zeke the hillbilly sheet rocker to mud over the sutures. The detritus of surgery is quite different as well: blood and guts and fat and all manner of fluids to contend with. My work unleashes a potpourri of dust: the talc, calcite, mica, gypsum, and silica of sheetrock, the sub-micron resin binders in disturbed fiberglass insulation. That's just the harmless stuff I don't always protect myself from, although I really should. I do worry about silicosis, just as the surgeon has to worry about Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Hepatitis C. So, every job must have its ups and downs, ins and outs. Today’s highlight for me was when I went up to the attic to swap out some lights.
I had to get up to the second floor, which was a narrow dim hallway with a dingy carpet a lot of darkly stained and shut doors – somewhat mysterious and depressing, and smelling strongly of a-terpineol – fabric softener. I found the pull-down attic hatch and climbed up. The wind was howling through the gable vents, it was dim, empty, but there on some plywood was a thick glossy magazine, turned upside down.
'Oh yeah,' I thought and flipped it over. There was Lonnie Anderson on the cover...hubba hubba...so blond. It was obviously someone's hidden copy of...'Good Housekeeping'! I flipped past the soup ads looking for the Anderson spread. Nothing. Then I feverishly looked for the table of contents, again nothing but Febreze ads and sidebars on arm fat. I was already pretty worked up, so I jerked off to a recipe for Chicken Pot Pie. It wasn't so bad, this one had a corn meal crust – just like baby likes it.
And then I was done. That was my workday. It was tedious at times, but still agreeable, especially because I know I wont be doing that specific sequence of work again. I will do these types of things again, but usually between long periods of time, and never with quite the same particulars. It’s certainly not boring.
Other people in the world were doing something else that day: recycling metal, manufacturing new lights, working at the power company, bagging nuts. It's amazing to me that people show up for work all around the world, everyday, by the billions, even people who have crushingly tedious jobs show up. The whole thing just keeps humming along even though people are dying all the time. In that case, new people just step in, like cells in our body being replaced in mid-stride. Somehow it all adds up and we humans keep thriving.
• • •
It’s a bright spring morning, and I slip into the house, nod some hellos, and get right to work finishing the demolishing of the front wall.
This is a real wall, full of massive headers above the windows, and course after course of jack and king studs along the side, and then packed out all over the place with extra wood, and all bound together by huge hand-driven framing nails. I have to carefully think about exactly where are the important points of connection that need to be severed, and what I will be able to pry against, and where to set the ladder.
It’s important to think about where you’ll go if your prying force is suddenly released. There’s no better way to get scotched than by recklessly prying on a ladder.
I finally settle on a counter-intuitive first step: prying some siding nails on the outside – thus freeing up the interior framing. Thus free I use the Sawzall to slice off the nails that connect the two-by-twelve header unit to the king stud, which runs along the window from bottom to top plate. Then while perched on a six-foot ladder I carefully pull the whole honking rectangular cuboid out. I get two headers out in about a half an hour of delicate but loud, dusty and violent Sawzall surgery. Ollie shows up at eleven and says it took him an hour to remove two headers yesterday.
"I was up there pulling and pulling," he says as he acts out the epic struggle of man against header. Then he rubs his sore elbow as I tell him about the efficacy of first going outside and removing the siding nails with a cat's paw. That was the crucial step. It saved fifteen minutes a header, which works out to be about $10-20, depending on who’s working. Ollie makes $37 and Henry weighs in at $39. Anyway, that is how the day began. I got into this and that, but the most interesting new wrinkle emerged when Henry was giving a tour to the electrician.
"Is there a permit for this job?" Asks the electrician.
"No, the customers didn't want one," says Henry. Later, at lunch, he elaborated.
"The Flints seemed like easy people to work for and I didn't want to scare them," says Henry of the bothersome permitting process. But, there are some real downsides to having no permit.
If someone from the city of Exeter notices all the work trucks arrayed around the house, and the torn up siding, and the piles of spaded earth, and the trailer of construction debris and then the absence of a permit box, well, they might put two and two together and realize someone's doing unpermitted work there. Then they'll start asking a lot of questions, and likely move on to issuing fines and stopping the work with red flags. Then we have to go back to ‘start’ and draw up plans, apply for a permit, pay double the permit fee, and perhaps open up some work we've already done in order to prove it's all according to code. Henry didn't make it clear to the home owners how far south this project could go if we get "red flagged" by the code officers. Remember, there's a wedding in about a month and the invitations have already been mailed, so if the whole project grinds to a halt then either the reception will have to be rescheduled, relocated, or they'll have to work bare stud walls and exposed wiring into the mise en scene of the wedding ceremony.
So, I have to say, I am on tenterhooks every time I come out front and cut a piece of foam or haul out a flat of drywall from a truck bed. Someone from the city might be cruising by, or an embittered neighbor might feel like dropping a dime on us.
There are some longer-term problems with not having a permit as well. We’ve recently gotten into a kitchen remodel that could not be permitted because the initial kitchen addition, built by the previous homeowners, was not permitted. Without that permit the kitchen shouldn’t even be considered habitable space, and when they try to sell the house, a hard-nosed Realtor could get the price driven way down by eliminating it from the all-important square footage total.
It makes me realize that I'm working with some old school renegades who cut their teeth in the trades in the days when permits were considered optional. Not that the construction is shoddy. Henry has the building codebook out all the time, and he cites chapter and verse now and again. The job is being done according to code, just not with the official imprimatur of the city of Exeter.