Tag: Jobs

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH THE CONSTRUCTION DEBRIS?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We’ve not yet rented one of those green dumpsters that so often accompany a renovation project. To date, at least, that’s been one expense we’ve skipped. Yes, I’ve learned about the recycling center, as it’s called – in the old days, town dump was the term – except that now these things are hauled off somewhere else.

What it does mean is that we have temporary mounds of debris until I can borrow a pickup truck or find some new use for the waste.

With the bathroom and utility room projects, I kept pondering secondary uses for all the tile we ripped from the walls and floors. Any ideas? Can’t see using it as fill if there’s any possibility someone might want to dig there in the future. And yet?

As for the wood, I’d love to just have a big bonfire but know I’d never get a permit from the fire marshal. Alas.

Old piping, wiring, vents, fans, other mechanical parts, insulation, lathe … it all adds up.

The old drywall, at least, will disintegrate in the garden, and it’s a good source of lime to loosen up our clay soil. I’ll be using that stack on the new raised beds we’re planning for flowers.

As I blog about this, please remember I have no intention of speaking as an expert or saying this is how it is done, step by step. Far from it! Instead, these are simply the confessions of someone who’s fallen into the situation of being the owner of an old house – and whose abilities and interests fall far more into literary or theological realms than those of more pressing domestic matters. So much, it turns out, is a matter of muddling through. Or as one expert replied when asked where we were going with one problem: “We’ll know when we get there.”

OK, we did get that overbuilt monolith out from the doorsill we needed to repair and left it on the other side of the driveway. Six months later, I finally buried it – all 500 pounds – in a hole. We’re still thinking of building a gazebo above it. Now there’s one project I think I can handle!

~*~

My poems on the challenges of renovations, repairs, and relating as a husband are collected as Home Maintenance, a free ebook at Thistle/Flinch editions.

CARPE DIEM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Among the historic divisions among Friends, none were more traumatic than the Hicksite-Orthodox separations, 1826-27. While New England and North Carolina were spared, most other American yearly meetings were torn in two. The reasons were deep and complicated – often along socio-economic and geographic lines. Subsistence versus commercial farming, artistan-craftsmen versus industrialists, rural versus urban, traditional versus forward-looking, tensions between having the polity of Friends lodged within the monthly meeting or at the yearly meeting level, even language itself, one holding to old expressions versus those wanting to embrace a new evangelical ecumenism.

We were not alone. The Puritan legacy, for instance, splintered into Congregationalists and Unitarians about the same time we Quakers split, theirs ostensibly over naming the president to head, first, Dartmouth College and then Harvard. The Dunkers (or German Baptist Brethren), meanwhile, managed to hold together, although their tensions would finally reappear in the 1880s, leading to a five-way split, producing the Church of the Brethren – about the same time many Friends began turning to pastor-led programmed worship. Curiously, the Brethren, laboring under a single yearly meeting, faced major tensions between the Eastern, old-fashioned members and the “Western” (west of the Appalachian Mountains) progressives – the same lineup that Friends would see in the quietist versus pastoral worship styles, with our Western Yearly Meetings going programmed and the Eastern ones largely holding to tradition.

These tensions were fueled by and reflected in many larger societal issues. In politics, the Jacksonians reflected the emergence of westward expansion. In religion, the Great Awakening first blazed through New England (sometimes as the New Lights movement) before igniting in Kentucky and the newly settled regions. In the economy, the industrial revolution was well under way.

For Quakers, the divisions essentially shut down the itinerant ministry from traveling Friends, which had kept the central messages of the faith and practice intact. That loss no doubt played into the emergence of the pastoral system in places where Friends were settling, rather than long settled. Another loss was a breakdown in the sharing of epistles and other written material. We no longer had a common vision to express or unite behind.

I reflect on these not so much as history but as a recognition that our larger society is in one of those watershed transitions – as our presentations and discussions on envisioning the future have suggested. How do we parlay what’s been entrusted to us into the future? Will Friends, as a whole, respond with radically new worship, organization, expression? Will we be sufficiently open to be led where we are needed? Of course, Israel under Roman occupation turned out to be another of those watershed moments, spreading both Judaism and the newly emerging Christianity across the empire. But that’s a much larger and more complicated story, except for the fact that we’re Friends as a consequence.

Or, as old Quakers would say, “Christ is come and coming.” It’s more than “Season’s Greetings,” after all.

LET’S CHIP AWAY AT SOME GENDER STEREOTYPES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s supposed to be a guy thing, I know. At least in the widespread expectations. This matter of home repair – carpentry, electrical, plumbing, roofing, and the like. Any of us can do it – or so we think.

It also explains a lot of what we’ve uncovered whenever we engage a new project in this house. And the common response, from anyone on the job now: What were they thinking?

Even I can see a lot of shoddy workmanship. As one example, let me mention the wildly askew joists, previously hidden by ceiling, that had never been attached to the wall. Why hadn’t they blown away years ago? We’d been lucky.

Don’t tell me about the “good old days,” either, or how much better things were done back then. There are solid reasons we’ve enacted building codes and now license electricians and plumbers, among others. As for apprenticeships?

What I do admire in our home upgrade undertakings is the skills many of these individuals bring to the task. As one Friend once articulated during worship, as a carpenter he’s come to recognize that each project is different and requires original problem-solving – it’s what he enjoys. What he didn’t add was the range of skills he also brings to the matter at hand, the recognition that you can tackle it this way or that way, certain tools are better suited at this point, or even the accumulated experience that immediately notices something the rest of us overlook entirely.

~*~

By the way, we’re still wondering about that paper plate we found, face up, in the gap as we ripped up the bathroom flooring. It was pretty much under the sink, or where the sink  had been.

Who’d left it there and how long ago? Back in the ’80s or ’90s? Or was it in the ’60s, when so much of the house was redone?

I’m tempted to blame a squirrel or one of the kids growing up here. Or just a careless worker.

Oh, the mysteries we uncover in a project like this!

~*~

My poems on the challenges of renovations, repairs, and relating as a husband are collected as Home Maintenance, a free ebook at Thistle/Flinch editions.

MOVING ON FROM BLUE JEANS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Over the past few years, there’s been an unanticipated shift in the way I dress, one that’s not entirely related to retirement. One of the lessons I carry from the hippie experience is an awareness that clothing should be comfortable, rather than conforming to the marketplace – and, if possible, it should express some degree of style.

As someone who never fit into the half of the bell curve the clothing manufacturers targeted, I’d always had difficulty dressing to general expectations. Back-to-school shopping was always a terror, one abetted by our family’s financial tight outlook, and one result was my pants were always way too short on my tall, skinny frame. You can imagine my delight discovering during my college years that Levis were actually available in my size. It was heavenly, even if radical at the time. I remember breaking unvoiced rules in attending classical concerts in my denim, even while wearing a necktie. Fortunately, the shift prevailed and later, when I discovered Quaker meeting for worship, came an expectation of dressing humbly rather than for pretentious show. Viva denim!

Moving to New Hampshire, I was delighted to learn that the San Francisco-based Levi Strauss relied on denim produced in the water-powered Amoskeag mills in Manchester, where I lived. So the product linked the continent, New England to California Bay Area, with cotton from the Deep South, and back.

As prices rose, my brand-name loyalty evaporated, even at the outlet store in nearby Maine, but some alternative sources still satisfied. And then they all started tinkering with the fit and gone was that feeling of comfort. Well, all except my Amish jeans – no zipper or belt but a pair of braces (suspenders, if you will) – which seem indestructible. Mine are going on 20 years, I reckon, and just starting to show real wear. The braces, though, can be a pain, as can going to the john when I’m also wearing a sweater.

For everyday usage, I’ve now drifted into variations of khaki or olive cargo pants. I really like all the pockets, along with the fit.

This has been accompanied by a shift from the oxford shirts I always wore to the office. From my first copydesk job, I’d learned to wear my wallet in my shirt pocket rather than sitting on it and throwing my back out of alignment – and so my shirts always had to have that pocket, which never, ever had a plastic liner like nerdy engineers include. Well, with the new pants, I could place my wallet in the other front pocket comfortably and that, in turn, allowed me to move on into turtlenecks for daily wear.

Turtlenecks are simply more flexible – no need for undershirts, I don’t even have to take them off at bedtime, for that matter, and they’re warm, even in our cold house. Yes, they also go with the sweaters I used to wear with those shirts.

I am surprised by my reaction looking at men my age or older who are still going about in blue jeans. They’re appearing somehow, uh, inappropriate.

AS THE CENTER OF ATTENTION IN OUR BATHROOM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In explaining our rotten floor worries, my wife would tell others she didn’t want to find our bathtub crashing down onto the dining room table below. Meaning our cast-iron bathtub, the one that came with the house.

The one that drained poorly, at best, and required plunging and rooting once a week or more and constant cleaning of the screen to catch hair at the drain.

It wasn’t even attractive in an antique sort of way. No claw-foot style, no insulating layer for deep baths, either. And then there were the cold drafts from above.

A bathtub, of course, is the centerpiece of a bathroom. You might substitute a shower alone, but ideally you want a bath-and-shower combination, which is where we were starting.

Determining where the floor moisture was originating and how much damage had occurred would necessitate moving the tub. Was it worth salvaging? No. So make that removing the tub altogether.

The project nearly died right there. Need we mention psychological depression? Despair?

Our carpenter informed us he couldn’t take it out – that would be up to the plumbers, who replied they thought that was his job. And then, with a good deal of swearing and sweat, they relented, busting up the tub with sledgehammers that shook the whole house and likely more.

The floor underneath had escaped moisture damage, but the related piping was another matter. We haven’t seen brass pipe like this in ages, the plumbers informed us, before adding: it could burst anytime, without warning. As for our drainage problem, the old-fashioned ball-drain trap – rather than the standard U? Ours had clogged to not quite a pencil width passage, so that a few stray hairs could create blockage. In other words, we were in for some major new pipes.

No turning back now. As tile and drywall, along with some plaster and lathe, came down and out, we had a clearer picture of what was at hand. A new tub would barely fit in the old spot, and that would take some finagling.

One thing we’d agreed on was our distaste for tile. Grout’s hard to keep clean, and it cracks. While we tried blaming the squirrels for the moisture leakage that led to the floor rotting, a better argument would point to tile failure, especially in the corner between the tub and toilet. Tile, too, is unrelentingly hard, should you drop something or, worse yet, slip.

After the plumbers told us they couldn’t install a one-piece tub-and-shower surround – they wouldn’t be able to get it up the stairs, much less through the doors – we accepted their advice to buy a tub with a matched shower-surround, a three-piece unit that would snap in place. Which was fine until we discovered that would mean losing the window in the room, the one that also provided most of the natural light to the hallway. Cutting into the surround would be difficult, at best. More likely, impossible if we wanted acceptable results. No thank you, there’s enough funky work here already.

Everybody kept suggesting we reconsider tile.

We wound up turning to a composite masonry that could be cut for the window opening. It cost about three times as much as the surround, before we added in the extra labor, and wouldn’t snap into the tub as neatly as the matched unit, either, but it wasn’t tile. But tile would not have created as much dust as cutting this stuff did, either.

Our original plan, to take the composite all the way to the ceiling, failed to calculate the angles of getting the panels into place. As we tried to maneuver the precisely cut units, reality sunk in. So it was back to the masonry saw … and all that much more dust. And that was before tackling the adhesive that would hold the units to the wall – for all eternity, we’d hope.

Well, the new tub’s deeper and drains like a dream. I love the broad stream from our new shower head. We still have our window.

But there are more funky fine points than I’ll care to admit. And the remodeled room is hardly showy – certainly not what you’d expect for the price, which I’ll keep private. I’d rather say we did the best we could under the circumstances. And please don’t tell me about that “old house charm.” You’ll have to understand if we scream.

~*~

My poems on the challenges of renovations, repairs, and relating as a husband are collected as Home Maintenance, a free ebook at Thistle/Flinch editions.

 

A FULLER SEQUENCE OF RELATED RENOVATIONS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

From the outset, we could see our bathroom project would encompass more than just the second-floor chamber in question itself. Other crucial home repair issues of longer standing would finally demand attention in the sequence of labor at hand.

For starters, the bulkhead to the cellar had to be replaced. Bulkhead? In many old houses, it’s the entryway to the cellar, from outdoors. (Note that I say cellar and not basement – in my mind, cellars flood and require a sump pump. You don’t put a Ping Pong table down there much less try to “finish” a room.) Our bulkhead’s plywood covering had rotted badly and was padlocked from the outdoors. (Where was the key these days, anyway?) A temporary plywood layer, covered in plastic, had been dropped over the bulkhead several years ago to prevent anyone from falling through to the stairway below. As I said, temporary.

The bulkhead? What’s that got to do with the second-floor, you ask?

Just start with the plumbers who would have to access the plumbing under the house. And then let’s add the carpenter’s need to have a place to set up his table saw and similar shop work.

So replacing the bulkhead turned into a multiday opening round to enable other stages. In an old house like ours, with all of its amateur “improvements,” finding anything on the market that will fit our existing conditions can be a challenge. As we found, accommodating the nearest-size metal unit would mean building the entry wall up another foot – a good move anyway, considering the way water moves around the house … or into it. Water flowing into the cellar, if you haven’t already guessed, is not good. The bulkhead we found at Home Depot was half the price of the one at our locally owned lumberyard. That’s not always the case, in these projects, but it did sway our decision.

One down, many others to go.

At one time before we bought the house, a first-floor cubbyhole had contained a small toilet, shower, and vanity, but these were no longer usable, separated by a second section where our clothes washer and dryer were jammed in. Once our upstairs bathroom was torn up, we’d need a toilet, at the least. (We could use my mother-in-law’s shower in her apartment in the barn or, more likely for me, the ones at the indoor pool where I swim most days.) So restoring the toilet was added to the picture, for use while the upstairs work was being done. Follow this?

We’d have the toilet from upstairs moved to the first floor so the upstairs work could continue, and then return upstairs when the bathroom itself was completed and our attention turned to the downstairs space.

In the bigger picture, this space – two small connected rooms, actually – could be transformed. If we removed the useless shower, with its rotting floor and falling tile, we could use that corner for a stacking clothes washer and dryer, which would then free up the entryway for a food pantry and broom closet, where the vacuum cleaner might also reside. (Whew!) A usable toilet here, of course, would be a welcome convenience, especially when we had company over. Let’s just call that the Utility Room Project, steps one and two.

While we were at it, under the house, we’d need to address our dying hot-water heater and sump pump, which takes us back to the cellar and that bulkhead. And since we had the electrical lines in the bathroom already exposed, we decided to rewire an adjacent bedroom where only one outlet functioned.

As I’m becoming ever fonder of saying, the plot thickened.

It’s hardly worth mentioning the overdue hallway repainting that moved up on the list.

~*~

My poems on the challenges of renovations, repairs, and relating as a husband are collected as Home Maintenance, a free ebook at Thistle/Flinch editions.

BEYOND THE SUPERSTITION AND BLAME

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

How do we deal with a segment of the public that has no interest in factual reality? Where belief, unsupported by critical reasoning, crosses into outright superstition? Too often, alas, it’s even wrapped in religious trappings – tainting both church and state with irrational fervor or madness.

And that’s what we have in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s campaign. The lies and half-truths will be hard to wash clean. The stench will remain even longer.

Yes, the underlying hurt runs deep, but Bernie Sanders tagged the causes of the problems accurately and pointed to joint collective action to repair the damage and heal the common good. Not so Trump or his legions.

There was nothing pragmatic or even logical in Trump’s babbling, no matter how many were deluded by his initial snake-oil charm. He was not telling it like it was but rather how they imagined life that might have been had they not been passed by. And then, toward the end, he was denying so much of what he’d told them in the first place or that his words had been just a joke. Locker room banter, as he claimed, not that many of us white guys recognized anything of the sort.

Now, no matter the outcome of the election, the nation’s divided by what he’s encouraged.

It’s not just racism, though those who think it’s fine for police to murder unarmed citizens is justifiable go about stealing Black Lives Matter lawn signs and then are alarmed if blacks take up the right-wing’s interpretation of the Second Amendment in self-defense. Folks, what would you do in that situation?

I’ll return to Bernie’s to-do list. I don’t think he was the administrator to push the goals through, but he certainly did an admirable job in articulating them. May he continue, building a base to take both houses of Congress in 2018.

Meanwhile, I’ll lament for what passes for national debate these days in all the tumult. We need honest dialogue to advance. And that will include admission of fault where it’s dues, rather than more blaming others.

ALL ON THE JOB, MEANING ALL THE GUYS, IF WE CAN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Ideally, we would have simply signed up with one contractor to redo the bathroom. Somebody with carpentry, electrical, plumbing, and flooring crew all on one sheet – come in, rip it out, replace it, and be gone in a day or two.

As I said, ideally. It’s not what you typically encounter, especially in an older house. Want an estimate? Everything depends on the unknown terrors hiding behind the walls or under the floor. Surprise, surprise.

What we found in practice as we set out this time around was that the plumbers were in an uncommonly busy period, compounded by a heart attack or two. And suddenly the flooring crew was flush with assignments. What should have been a two-week undertaking expanded into two months – over Christmas, at that. And that fell into just the bathroom part of a bigger campaign. As my wife learned, you can spend a lot of time playing telephone tag.

We’re not even talking Martha Stewart. We’re talking real life where we live. (Who knows how they do this in Europe. Or South America. Or Asia.) At least we didn’t have to consider bribery or physical violence.

A bathroom, after all, is the height of civility.

~*~

My poems on the challenges of renovations, repairs, and relating as a husband are collected as Home Maintenance, a free ebook at Thistle/Flinch editions.

REMEMBER, WOOD ROTS – IT’S THE NEW ENGLAND HOMEOWNER’S CURSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We could say it all began with squirrels. The ones that ate through the metal flashing around our central chimney to gain access to our wall interiors, something we learned about only after a particularly nasty winter storm ripped the metal crown and top layers of brick off the chimney itself and into our driveway. Blew them, in fact, the opposite direction from the nor’easter itself.

You couldn’t see the flashing problem from the ground – that was something the mason discovered only once he was up on the roof. At least that got fixed.

A few years later, we noticed some discoloration in part of the vinyl flooring of the bathroom two floors below – something that slowly spread until part of the floor itself became spongy. Were water infiltration from the chimney and the rotting floor linked? Or was this an unrelated problem? It’s the sort of problem that homeowners too often encounter, not only a This Old House experience, either. Welcome to the club?

Our usual handyman, a combination carpenter and licensed electrician, was booked out for months, and inquiries in other circles proved equally futile. Everybody was busy. (Career advice for young adults? This is a great field. Be your own boss. Set your own hours. Essential service.)

Our own cash flow was another matter, one that had me trying to delay as long as it, in turn, didn’t lead to even more costly problems. These things can be a kind of balancing act. Over time, I’ve come to look at home ownership not so much as an investment but rather an opportunity at free rent, repaid when you finally sell the place. But that’s a long-range view.

Of course, there was no way for us to know what we were really in for until we ripped up the floor. Was the wall behind it full of mold? Would we have to get into the shower plumbing by ripping into the wall from the bedroom on the other side? (Another big project all on its own.) Or would we have to rip out some of the wall in the dining room below – something that’s on the longer term to-do list anyway?

These things can snowball.

I had hoped we could hold off another year, till the mortgage was paid off. But that was being optimistic and ignored the arguments from other partners in the household.

And then our handyman had an opening in his bookings. The summer jobs were over. It was time for us to get serious. Ready or not, here we go.

Who knew what we’d really be in for? Yes, our latest journey was about to begin. Let’s just call it the Bathroom Project.

~*~

My poems arising in squirrel encounters and domestic survival are collected as Rat-Tat Oscar, a free ebook at Thistle/Flinch editions.

REAL NEWS CONTINUES REGARDLESS OF THE HEADLINES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Who will cover them now? All the politicians taking office? All of their dealings with lobbyists and special interests? Who will speak for the public? Or the common good?

I’ve covered some of the work of the daily press in my Newspaper Traditions category, and remind you it’s still a rich resource to visit. It’s a major part of the route that landed me here, after all.

The bigger, scarier perspective is one I take to surreal dimensions in my novel, Hometown News, which also reflects the situation many workers endure in the unchecked spread of multinational conglomerates. Think of Dilbert on steroids. Or the vulnerability of localities in the face of global giants.

The real news continues regardless of the headlines. Take it from me. Or my novel.

Hometown News

~*~

For the novel, click here.