Man of the House: Painting himself into a cluttered corner
I realized the house needed a little work when a crew from Habitat for Humanity showed up the other day and started rebuilding walls.
I’d have let them continue, but I was afraid FEMA would roll in next, and who needs all those trailers in the yard?
Well, I guess we do.
It’s a coach’s lament. During baseball season, the house goes all to Helsinki. This visible decay makes my wife, Posh, a little crazy. I soothe her with bird sounds and keen observations, such as:
“You know, wood looks better when it has a little weather in it.”
Or, “I like the way that Adirondack chair peels in the sun — like in an Andrew Wyeth painting.”
Then I go to the hardware store and buy a bunch of paint.
“Where do you keep the gin?” I ask the paint store clerk.
“Over by the tequila,” he says.
Oops, wrong store. Again.
Which brings us to July.
As you may have detected, I generally sneer at useful information, yet in these long, project-filled days of middle summer, here are a few home repair tips:
— Before you take something apart, use your cellphone or digital camera to take a photo. You might have a fighting chance of putting it back together the way it was.
— Cellphone photos are also useful when you need to explain your project (a drain replacement, a bad gutter, etc.) at the hardware store. It increases your chances of leaving with the right part.
— Never buy a funnel. Instead, slice off the top of a plastic Coke bottle to create a disposable funnel that works for cars or even in the kitchen.
— Keep the rest of the bottle for a dog bowl or to soak paint brushes.
There are others. For instance, a stiff wire brush is great for scraping old grit out of a paintbrush, and there’s no overstating the value of a steel-toothed brush comb (ask your paint supplier).
But I can’t think about them right now. Right now, all I’m focused on is getting the porch painted so that I can use the backyard sprinklers again. I’ve sanded the stairs to bare wood, and don’t want them soaking up water before I paint.
Painting — like romance — is all prep work, and I’ve been so burned in the past by rushing these things that I now tend to overdo the prep work. Sand-sand-scrape. Sand-scrape-scrape. Make sense?
No, nothing in my life makes any sense. Like the mushrooms forming on the third step of the back porch. Isn’t that typical? If I’d been trying to grow mushrooms on the third step of the back porch, I’d have no luck whatsoever.
In fact, very little grows at our little house. Olives, by the bucket full. Tomatoes, here and there. The only thing that grows from seed around our house is children.
Zinnias? Forget about it. Cucumbers? No way.
This soil — it’s like trying to get wine from a cow. I’ve enhanced it, enriched it, brought in priests and had it blessed.
I’ve added worms, lady bugs, non-lady bugs, butterflies, guano, coffee grounds, wine corks....
Productive or not, let us praise these long sweaty days of summer projects. I embrace the sun and the heat. Dads always look better when they have a little weather in them.
“What kind of paint do you want me to use?” I ask Posh.
“Egg tempera,” she says, and back to the liquor store I go.
Meanwhile, we’re also renovating the kids this summer — manners, etiquette, hygiene — the whole teeming bunch of it, because what we discovered recently was that our kids, bless their hearts, know how to turn a ceiling light on but not off.
Now, these are the same children, mind you, who can figure out a video control in about four seconds, or use their smartphone to make French bread. But they do not understand the intricacies of a simple light switch.
Then there are the nuances of replacing the toilet paper. What they’ll generally do is lay the new roll atop the empty spool, without taking the two seconds to replace it.
When confronted about this, a child will say: “I thought the maid would do it.”
“WE DON’T HAVE A MAID!” I explain.
“We don’t?”
“WE BARELY HAVE PARENTS!” I say.
Lately, I’ve been talking to them in all caps. Seems to make no difference whatsoever. The louder I get, the less they respond. So mostly, I scream for my own benefit.
It’s sort of like when I give skin-care tips to the plastic clown at the fast food drive-through.
“Wow, your lips are really blistered. But you have really nice eyes.”
It mostly just shows that you care.
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