I come from a long line of very handy people. My grandfather was that guy who had every tool ever made, neatly placed on a corkboard with outlines. My father drove trucks and fixed them. My mother repairs hydraulic motors on Air Force and Marine aircraft. My stepfather does the same. My first husband could fix anything with spit and chewing gum. Even my grandmother, a waitress by trade, could carry 7 or 8 full plates, stacked up each arm, fix blenders and other assorted kitchen tools, and once redid all the cabinets to be closer to the ground, because she was short.
Similarly, my current husband comes from a long line of people who are handy. His grandfather was an architect, who worked with builders for fun and relaxation. His father owns no less than 6 chainsaws, and is currently building a huge fence cause he enjoys the work. His other grandfather was a boilermaker, and like my grandfather, was a tool guy.
So, we - two well educated people, with plenty of access to Google, bought a house. An old, uncared for, 1895 era townhouse in a row of four. It’s the only unpreviously renovated house in the row, unless you count the addition of a kitchen and bathroom, possibly sometime in the 40s or 50s, and someone knocking down the dunny and capping the hole.
So, from the kitchen door forward, we got professionals to do our renovation. Did I mention the house had nothing at all done to it, including reasonable levels of cleaning, for many years? It hadn’t. And teenagers had been allowed to paint walls. So it had to be fixed. That part looks great, fabulous, the original floors brought up to a blinding shine and the walls – unrendered – looking wonderful and very period with brass light fittings and so forth. I want to cry when I see it like I cried the night we walked in after the owners had gone to discover just how utterly, disgustingly nasty the pace was.
The original plan was to leave the bathroom and kitchen in “usable but ugly” condition until we paid a huge amount on our mortgage and then have that redone. We were going to do several things ONLY, all by professionals - replace a toilet and stove and have the kitchen counters nailed back to the wall from which they had come loose, and leave it at that. Good job, well done us, wait for the reno to be done and away we go.
Then, when we had the toilet, which was so nasty it couldn’t be cleaned, replaced, that old, nasty toilet got set down - gently, I was there to watch - on the old, somewhat drummy, bathroom tiles. Those did what drummy old tiles do - they shattered.
Fine, ok, we didn’t budget for this, but let’s see what we can do. Tiles in the bathroom are loose and drummy. The plan becomes to buy a sledgehammer and chisel and take up the loose tiles and put new tiles in, because I found out how to do that on Google and it didn’t look too hard in the video and we’re adults, so how hard can it be?
As it turns out, many of the tiles were loose and came right off the floor. This was easy! I was right, adults can do these things. We’re homeowners now, after all. We need to learn to do this stuff. The glow of self-sufficient pride settled over me like a warm blanket in winter. Off to buy replacement tiles…
…only to discover that tiles in that size haven’t been made for 20 years. Now the standard size is bigger. We have a look at a tile cutter, mentally calculate the time and expense involved, and make a new plan. We’ll take up all the tiles and lay vinyl floor, because the concrete under the tiles is sound and level. Easy…
…except tiles initially laid in the 40s or 50s, we discover, do not ever want to be moved. Dynamite is discussed (mostly by my frustrated husband) and that idea discarded. Many late nights with sledgehammers and chisels ensue. Tile is sharp when shattered, by the way. It’s really funny what amount of bleeding you will put up with when you should probably have gone to have stiches but need to move into somewhere in three weeks time or be homeless.
But whew, that’s done, let’s lay that vinyl! How hard can it be?
Next to fucking impossible, that’s how hard. Too many corners rounded bits around toilets, and Google is lost to me since our net access is gone due to the move, and we’re running out of time.
More late nights ensue, and no penis ensues at all for a while.
Then - and I stress, we’re reasonably intelligent people, we decide that since the kitchen floor looks awful, and we have lots of left over vinyl we can’t take back because we bought it on sale, and because we hare learned a lot in doing the bathroom (this is relative, since mostly what we learned is that vicious arguments waste time and accomplish little) we figured could put the rest on the kitchen floor.
As it turns out 50 or 60 year old, cheaply added kitchens are not square. Ours is roughly triangular. The vinyl comes in neat, square strips that are meant to stick to each other in an over and under fashion.
This, as you may imagine, did not go well either – but at the time it seemed like a really good idea. I can’t tell you why I thought it would be a good idea. I suppose, like old fashioned dog training, I should have had a saner, wiser, less tired person to beat me with a rolled up newspaper and go BAD BAD GLEENA, YOU STOP THAT NOW. But no. Even my 12 year old said, “Mom, are you sure?” But he’s 12, not an adult, and I am, so……
But with new floors (that don’t look…well, charitably, they don’t look horribly bad) the paint was looking…well, not any different from when we started. That means it was dirty (filthy dirty) industrial green. We’d planned to do a good wash of these to clean off nicotine, grease and filth. I also wanted to take down a corkboard in the corner of the kitchen…
…only to discover that it must have been there for YEARS, because the wall behind it was, well, bare cinderblock. So we’d just paint, right, how hard can it be?
Painting cinderblock, as it turns out, is REALLY hard. You can’t use a roller (all those pits and stuff) and you can’t do much of anything, really, except dab paint into the rough concrete with a brush. Blisters are added to cuts and bruises, and the only consolation is that vicious arguments have turned into stony silences.
More late nights and no penis ensued. There is much snarling and blaming, but it gets done. It doesn’t - charitably - look horrible and will look much better when we get done scraping paint off glass with a razor blade…
We move in, yeay! But there’s no curtian rods, so I decide to hang them. Really, we just did two floors and two rooms of paint, how hard can this be - six screws in the wall, away we go…
I wish I knew where this went wrong, but I couldn’t tell you. It just did go wrong. I used a level and everything, but it’s all crooked and seems to want to leap off the wall at the slightest provocation. The whole process, flawed though it is, took me 4 hours to complete.
When I asked my husband how hard it could be to hang doors, he asked me how much a divorce would cost vs a handyman.
The doors look lovely.
And I am dumb.
Cheers,
G
