My wife Sue is an extremely patient woman. Even people who haven't met her will tell you that, if they've met me. There's no better example of that patience than the amount of time she's been waiting to have improvements made on our house.
We moved into our current place in Santa Clarita about 13 years ago. That's the longest we've been in one place... the nature of my work and my uncanny ability to hitch my wagon to companies that were rolling toward the corporate graveyard kept us moving around a lot, and we mostly lived in rentals. But then we bought this place. It was our first two-story residence, and after the near-death experience of moving a bunch of stuff up a narrow flight of stairs, we decided that, God willing, this would be our last move (not counting the eventual home Sue will send me to when I start dribbling my Dr. Pepper).
The place needed some improvements when we moved in. The padding under the blue carpet seemed to consist of a couple of layers of newsprint; the kitchen floor and cabinets had seen better days; the ceilings were covered in that weird stuff that some people refer to as "popcorn" but always reminded me of where bats hang out at the Carlsbad Caverns. Sue and I would talk about planned improvements, but less glamorous and more pressing expenses always seemed to push the more cosmetic projects to the back burner. Over the course of the last decade, our house seemed to be reminding us that putting in new carpet and new paint would be like a heart patient spending her surgery money on a make-over.
One year we replaced our galvanized steel piping with copper, when leaky pipes started giving the downstairs a rain-forest ambience. Another year we replaced the air-conditioning unit and ducting, when the upstairs temperature brought a global-warming SWAT team to our door. Yet another year we replaced our cellophane-like windows with double-paned glass. We had to replace our garage door when it started sagging so badly that our house looked like it was smiling at the street. Then there was the year a severe wind storm reduced our back yard fence to a pile of pick-up sticks. I tried to erect a new one myself, but it looked like something built by Salvador Dali, and collapsed as soon as sunlight hit it, so we eventually had professionals come out and put a new one up. Landscaping the back yard became a part of that job. And of course, there were things like a new water-heater, garbage disposal, and other sundry malfunctions, as well as car expenses.
Looking back, it seems like a lot of stuff was done, but when you walked in our front door, you couldn't see any of it. It was like my childhood, where Wonder Bread kept telling me it was building a strong body 12 ways, but I still looked like a dumpy little kid.
Sue, inspired by desperation and HGTV (or as I call it, the Sci-Fi network) , tried to take on some of these projects herself. She tried scraping the stalactites off the living room and stairwell ceiling and repainting the walls. I finally couldn't stand seeing her work so hard, especially on that 12 foot ladder, so I moved out for the rest of that week. Sue's effort was noble, but the results weren't the same as those achieved by the professional amateurs you see on HGTV, and she was never happy with the job.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton