Esprit d'Internet

“Don’t hire people – buy tools,” a friend said to me recently. I’m writing on the train right now, about two weeks later, and the perfect response just came to me. You might want to get comfortable for this, maybe grab a glass of your favorite beverage. Ready? Here it is.

“Tools don’t install baseboard moldings, people install baseboard moldings.”

Whoa! Sorry about that – I’ll give you a minute to clean the Ovaltine and snot off your keyboard and let you blow your nose. Better? Good. Now, you see why that was so funny? Because it works on two levels. First, it’s true. And second, it cleverly references that NRA gun commercial, the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people with guns” thing. Or whatever they say to sell all those guns.

All I’m saying is, I shouldn’t be around tools.

I’ve got a truckload of respect for the plumb line and the level and the miter box and the router and the saws (crosscut, rip, table, jig, hack), the hammers (pneumatic and manual), tape measures, pliers, wrenches, drivers, prybars, caulks, adhesives, paints, trowels, vises, shims, screws, nails, nuts, bolts and chisels that make a man a man. Hell, you know that. My problem is that I misplaced the tube of sticktuitiveness I was using to finish the soap-dispenser installation project, and without that I can’t even think of starting on the baseboard thing. Sure, I’ll a run a marathon, but that’s because there’s food at the end. Fixing stuff? Nah. Wrong guy. If I had been with Dorothy and we found the Tin Man, he would have died.

This is especially difficult to admit in my town, where the fifty percent of men who are not contractors are, in fact, also contractors. Our neighbor very kindly gave us a swing set his boys had outgrown, but it’s been sitting out there disassembled because the ideal spot for it happens not to be level. I told our generous neighbor that I was planning to shorten the supports on one side and he got very alarmed — even though, you know, it would take a saw, which I thought was quite the burly thing to do.

“No, no, you don’t want to do that,” he said. “You gotta dig down.”

“But it’s bedrock.”

“I gotta pick!” he started toward his Tool Dungeon.

I immediately thought how great it would be to drive a couple hours in a direction away from the pick and the Pick Project. Next thing we knew – woop! – we were on Long Island, studiously not engaged in backbreaking labor of uncertain utility. (Look, I own a pickaxe, too – you can’t really live up here and not have a few tools – I just don’t like using it, especially on my precious, precious bedrock.)

I started this off intending to talk about the baseboards. Or, rather, the bases. There are no “boards” attached presently – we took ’em off when we moved in and got the floors fixed (good people helped us do that – I drove to Home Depot a lot for them) and haven’t yet mustered the will to get new ones (the old ones? crappy).

Which brings me to my next rejoinder, this one to myself: People don’t install baseboard moldings either, if you can’t afford to pay them.


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Floor, meet wall. Wall, floor.

"Bring it back," an assertive woman said to me last year, standing in our new dining room. She was pointing at the ugly open wound between the brand-new, raggedly planked edge of the floor and the wall. Pale flourescent light from the cellar glimmered through the opening, and the stairs were visible if you cared to look.

She didn't care to. "You can leave the rest of it out there, but bring back the one piece that went along here," she said. So I went back out to the nail-studded debris pile beside the garage and selected "DR#10," the length of beaten, squat, hammer-marked and pry-bar splintered shitty pine that had formerly been the baseboard in that spot. I placed it back into its old location, where it handily blocked the view. Even stunted, beaten and ugly, it improved the room a little. But I wouldn't bring back its kin; no, I knew that in short order we would have new baseboards. I agreed because for the next few weeks -- just until the new baseboards were in -- I wanted my wife to be able to eat in the same room as the unfinished work without having to peer into the cellar, down near where the snakes live.

Yes, we'd get those new baseboards, just as soon as we got a leeetle extra cash together and then whoops we had another baby a month after moving in.

1.25 years pass. I think in that time I may've mentioned baseboards in this space. So you'll understand if my celebration of the matter seems out of proportion to the ease of the task, but I can say today, without fear of hyperbole, that THE NEW BASEBOARDS, INSTALLED TODAY, HAVE CHANGED MY LIFE. Ring the bells, ye givers-of-a-shit-about-the-baseboards, because that glorious day long foretold but oft scoffed at -- and even ofter ignored completely -- has finally arrived and I don't know about you but we are now complete beings here, as complete as the rooms in which our new, clean, tall baseboards stand proudly on the floor and hug the walls in a slow, slow dance.

That is to say, we look better, but we still need to be painted.















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The Serpents of Paradise

Ahh, yes, the country, I thought when I saw the garter snake sunning itself against the foundation. The most regular snake in the world, Thamnophis sirtalis, both wild and captive examples familiar from my childhood. Regardless, I knew it had to go.

The otherwise very brave woman with whom I share my abode has a cowardice around snakes that is nearly unmatched in the annals of chickenhood. To be fair, she still bears the scar of a youthful encounter with Crotalus horridus, an eastern timber rattler. Not that the snake did anything, but in her panicked flight she tripped over a boulder and gashed her knee on another rock. Then got up and threw stones at the snake.

In addition, we were eating buyer’s remorse for breakfast, lunch and dinner during those summer weeks after moving in. On top of the Sump Pump Issue, the Baseboard Debacle, the Questionably Leaning Mudroom and the Dinky Proportions Conundrum, the last thing I thought the house needed was an Unwelcome Species Situation.

Thus, having a snake of any kind on the premises, even a beneficial garden-friendly and pest-reducing garter snake, was right out. Besides, I wanted to show it to the boy. I snuck up on the specimen, made a clumsy grab, missed, and watched as it slithered directly upward into the siding.

That was an interesting wrinkle.

Perhaps because of perversity, but also with some underlying idea of taking on the Snake Admiration Deficit that pervaded our household, I told my wife a few days later that I’d seen one. And where it went. She was predictably unhappy. My naïve hope for primate-reptile reconciliation was dashed when she ordered its removal. So the next time I saw it, I made a more strategic and faster move, and had the snake.

The capture and release program I’d devised was based on repeat viewings of Mutual of Omaha’s pet project, so after some dramatic posturing and a recreation of the event for the lad, I carried the snake a couple of yards over, to a stone wall next to a small pond, and let it go. It immediately took shelter among the rocks.

And that was that.

Until a couple days later, when I spotted another snake in the same spot. This one was clearly not the one I had captured previously. It was smaller, and proved easier to catch. I brought this one down to the snake release center and didn’t mention it.

Not long afterwards, I opened the Bilco doors to enter the cellar and surprised two garter snakes lolling in the superheated oven beneath the doors. I grabbed one – the other slipped between two foundation stones. There were shed skins lying around like the remains of a particularly debauched Snake Party.

C’mon, what was I supposed to do, NOT tell her? How do you not tell someone about all these snakes? And whom could I tell but my trusted mate, my helpmeet, my advisor and confidante, my best friend?

She took it well, if by well you mean that she started calling different hotels to see what kind of non-anapsid specials they were running that week. I got on the horn with a couple of herpetologists to see how many there were likely to be and if they had a homing instinct. The lizard people were about as sympathetic as the smokies had been about the bear. “They’re great!” they told me (which I knew). “Keep ’em!” (I knew, I knew, but they didn’t understand, this woman has a snake scar.)

I converted a bucket into a snake conveyor, adapted a long-handled paint roller and a pair of gloves into the Acquisition Apparatus (I was sick of getting pissed on by every nervous snake in the county) and haunted the backyard, flipping open the doors at random intervals, getting under any snakes with the roller, flipping them out into the yard (I had weeded out the slower ones and now those I found would almost make a whiplike crack as they vanished into their holes) and scooping them into the bucket.

Worst of all, I wasn’t sure whether I was catching the same ones repeatedly. I started venturing further afield in search of the right habitat for release – it had to be as good as my cellar. (We also had these tiny black crickets, order Orthoptera, that lived around the foundation. Inky black little guys. They never bothered anyone. Least of all the snakes, for whom they were doubtless like chicken wings to a fratboy.) If you’re a snake looking for someplace with sheltered stony crevices, a ready supply of insects and occasional running water, our cellar comes up as the first result on Snoogle. The last two I caught I released at a farm ten miles away.

Total snakes: nine (possibly including repeats).

That seemed to do it; we haven’t seen any since. But last fall, after the snakes were gone, we started to see these large black crickets. Big, inky black, startlingly spidery. At night a couple of times, a rogue bull would enter the house, set up someplace undetectable and start singing. So we’d creep around late at night trying to pinpoint its location, and when we’d get close it’d shush. The crickets’ own version of Marco Polo.

And who doesn’t like Marco Polo?





PS: Were you looking for Edward Abbey? Here.
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Nailed

Baseboards and labor: $1500.00
Nails: $1.60
Two small nails in copper radiator pipe: $0
Replacing new floors, one wall, insulation, removing mold, reinstalling radiator and baseboard: Priceless

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Finding Room

One enters our house into a 9' x 16' room we call the parlor, for it is where we keep the piano. We also keep the washer and dryer there, in a closet along one side. Because that's where they fit.

And although we both sort of sighed about that -- a house too small for a laundry room -- it is a very convenient location for laundry, not being stuck down in a cellar. The closet has a sliding door that hides the unsightliness, there are cabinets above, the machines are super-quiet, and you don't have to be sequestered to wash the clothes and can keep an eye on the kids, if they're about. So let's just shhh about the laundry, then. It's the parlor.

Like most rooms in our house, it does triple duty, so it's also the entry foyer, with a rack of coathooks artfully hidden behind the door and a shoe rack underneath it, piled with thousands of boots, work shoes, running shoes, hats and gloves. The hooks periodically swell with an unsightly mass of coats; this week we instituted the If It Wasn't Worn this Week, Put It in the Back Closet Rule. There are two armchairs just inside, which, although designed to accommodate the human form, are typically occupied by briefcases, backpacks, coats and coat parts, purses, tote bags full of necessaries, and books. No different from your house, of course.

This room's primary characteristic is that it is not a space for socialization. You don't Go there; you either pass through or you do laundry. We do keep the stickers in a secretary bookcase there, as well, so you might stop in when you require an adhesive-backed Parasaurolophus to shut someone up reward someone for good behavior. Otherwise, it's a way station, despite the chairs, despite our sense that space is at such a premium that we should make this room usable, desirable, worthy of attention.

To add injury to the insult of the room's uselessness, in the fall we had an Incident. Back then I crowed in this space about the installation of new baseboard moldings, an event that had been awaited since we moved in a year earlier and removed the old ones to allow the laying of new floors. And more recently I alluded to the fact that, during that process, a contractor drove two really thin nails directly into one of the radiator pipes in the wall. No problem, until you add cold weather, the heat goes on all night, the pipe expands, radiator water pours out into the wall and seeps into the (new) floors and subfloor and sheet rock and insulation and eventually pours down the outside of the foundation, which is when you notice it.

Part of the process that followed involved removal of the lower half of the sheetrock wall and insulation in the parlor. The wall behind the piano, half gone. The wall you face as you enter. And so it will remain until we get the scratch together to fix it up. (The contractor's insurance will pay, but we'll pay first. And yes, I could learn, but it would be my first one, and it would be ugly, and it would be prominent.) We're not in despair over this, precisely, but there it is, half a wall missing, just as you enter, sigh.

This weekend we invited some locals over for afternoon eggnog, so we snugged the piano up against that wall, performed precise calculations to dim and redirect the lights, put two large portraits of our kids on the extant half of the wall, and assumed that the room's standard traffic flow would prevail and that no one would see the exposed studs and electrical conduit as they headed for the dining room.

What was funny, though, was that on entering, people subconsciously hesitated a second to process the two portraits...they slowed, and lingered in there, and even stepped back into the parlor after settling their coat and getting a drink...a switch had flipped, and the room's energy was now curiously social. As the party wound down a couple of hours later, it gravitated toward the parlor. A couple of people sat in the chairs (relieved of their household burdens for the occasion). Our friend and his daughter began playing the piano. We went in there. After the last guests left, we sat down in the chairs ourselves, until two other neighbors came over with a bottle of wine, and our smaller party found itself seated entirely in the parlor for another hour.

Maybe it was the exposed wall letting something in. Maybe we subconsciously steered people into our unused social space. Who knows? Our parlor made music and laughter last night. Missing sheet rock or no, we keep growing into this little place, finding that its modest boundaries hold more than we noticed at first glance.

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