STUCK IN REMODEL WITH YOU

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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.

Let me stop here and give you an idea of how our house is set up. It's not a big place; maybe about 1400 square feet overall. It's what the deed paperwork calls an "attached residence" and what we used to call a "duplex": two small houses side-by-side that share a common wall. Basically, it's the housing industry's version of a Siamese twin. The developers optimistically call it a "garden home", but obviously they haven't seen our back yard. The ground floor really looks more like an apartment than a house. There's no entryway to speak of; you walk through the front door and you're in the living room. Technically, part of the living room is supposed to be a dining area, but the Thornton philosophy is that every area is a dining area, so we didn't take up valuable living space by sticking a table and chairs in a spot that was better served by La-Z-Boys. There's a small kitchen just off the living room. The master bedroom is also on the first floor; its door opens directly into the living room area. The one ground-floor bathroom serves double duty as a guest and master bathroom. It even has two doors: one leading out to the living room and another one that leads straight into the master bedroom. The two doors can be very confusing to me when I'm fresh out of the shower, and it's led to some embarrassing moments when we've had guests.

Upstairs are two other small bedrooms and another bathroom. In addition there's an open area that we call a loft, and which serves as my home office and tree house. One of the bedrooms is occupied by my son Ben, the other by my son Sam. Both of them are of sufficient stature to make these bedrooms feel about as expansive as the average accommodations at San Quentin. Curiously, though, neither young man has moved out.

In January of this year, the Thornton home decor status quo was irrevocably damaged.  The month previous, we had given Ben a new stereo system. He started setting it up in his room in January and, rather than running seven sets of speaker wires all over the floor, I came up with the bright idea to run the wires through the crawlspace between his ceiling and the roof. I even volunteered to be the one to crawl up there, figuring that, for someone of Ben's size, our "attic" might function like a roach motel... after entering, he'd find that he couldn't leave. We've had the unpleasant experience of a mouse dying inside one of our walls, so I could only imagine the odor we'd face if Ben wasted away up there.

Once I was up there twixt residence and roof, I was very careful to try to step only on the joints or jousts or joists or whatever they call those thin pieces of wood that a ceiling's nailed to. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that it takes the coordination of an Olympic gymnast to make one's way across the latticework above Ben's room. And since my agility quotient is measured in imaginary numbers, it wasn't long before I put my foot through the ceiling of Ben's room, creating a hole where I could feed not only speaker wires, but also whole speakers and farm animals.

I knew that Sue, who has been known to spot the assembly of two or more microbes on a kitchen floor, would inevitably notice the damage to the ceiling, no matter how much duct tape I used. So when I fessed up and showed her the damage Ben had caused, I tried put a positive spin on the situation by saying that, since we had to get the ceiling repaired anyway, we might as well take the opportunity to have the whole ceiling scraped and repainted.

From there the dominoes fell quickly. Within seconds, Sue had explained the logical progression that led inexorably to a major interior facelift. We couldn't get the ceiling painted without doing the walls; painting the walls and ceiling would inevitably lead to paint on the carpet, and let's face it, the carpet needs replacing anyway; we can't just carpet one room, because the house will look funny and who knows if the same carpet will be available if we postpone the rest of the house? And carpeting the upstairs means moving all the furniture off the second story, and if we want to avoid doing that twice, we should have the painting done at the same time throughout the rest of the house. To be fair, on previous occasions we had discussed the logistics of painting and re-carpeting, so it wasn't like Sue came up with the project escalation out of the blue, but it was still pretty impressive that she had the plan at the ready in her frontal lobe, to be produced at the first opportune moment.

And so began Operation Home Facelift, a project that required the planning and logistical preparation of D-Day, but with none of the fun.

As you may have gathered, this was not a do-it-yourself proposition... we knew enough not to give the job to a guy who puts his foot through ceilings, and we wanted the job finished before the colonization of Mars. Sue had the name of an outfit that our homeowner's association had once used to paint the exteriors of our development, so she called The Guy out to look things over. I thought The Guy was basically a Wall and Ceiling Guy, someone we were hiring to repair the ceiling damage Ben had caused, scrape the stalactites off the rest of our ceilings, and paint the interior of the house. But The Guy looked around and told us he could not only get the walls and ceiling into shape, he could replace the kitchen's overhead fluorescent lighting with can lights, paint the kitchen cabinets, put in a new kitchen and entry way floor, replace some other lighting fixtures in the house, and knock out the pony wall by the stairs.

(That's when I learned that a pony wall is the name given to an approximately 3' by 3' wall outcropping that keeps the foot of the stairs from being visible from the living room. Basically, it's a ledge that virtually cries out to have things set on it or draped over it: cups, magazines, spare change, coats, DVDs, etc. I don't know why it's called a pony wall... I don't know why it's called anything, other than a ledge. I always thought it fell into that category of things that you don't really need to know the name of, like the little plastic tips on the end of shoelaces. At any rate, Sue always hated this bric-a-brac magnet, and was ecstatic to be able to order its destruction by name.)

I watched Sue's eyes light up as The Guy described the transformation that could take place if he were allowed to put our household into order. It was as if Mary Poppins were coming to visit. When the time came to say yea or nay to approving the project, I did some quick mental calculations. They weren't of a financial nature, though... instead I was calculating the ratio of the years of nonsense Sue has endured to the amount of time our household would be in disarray, and multiplying it by Sue's satisfaction of finally having walls, ceiling, and floor the way she wanted them. If I put the brakes on this, they might as well add my portrait to the gallery at the Husbands Hall of Infamy.

Once the go-ahead was given, there was a couple of weeks of planning involved. The Guy didn't do carpets, but at his suggestion, we went to a place called The Home Depot. Perhaps you've heard of it, if you're capable of driving a nail. Not being of that persuasion myself, the place was as exotic to me as the sorcerer's den where I take my car to be magically healed. I went with Sue to look at carpet swatches and participate in material selection. After learning that Astroturf wasn't an appropriate selection, I turned the job over to her and spent the rest of my time there watching a guy make keys.

Sue decided what kind of carpet she wanted, and came away with an appointment for an estimate and a carpet manufacturer's sample board, on which were glued about 24 one-inch-square swatches of different colored carpet. The idea is that you're supposed to look at this little square of material and, through the miracle of imagination, decide how your whole house will look when covered with thousands of them. She also picked out a couple of paint colors, and brought home a small amount of each paint along with a teeny tiny paint roller that looked like something you'd use to redo the interior walls of your doll-house. She was told you should pick your paint based on your carpet selection, so once she decided on the color of carpet she wanted, she went around the house with her little roller, smearing patches of her paint alternatives on the walls of each room. She tried to hold her carpet sample board up to the wall, but that exercise in frustration didn't last long... she finally clawed the little square of carpet off the board so she could hold it right up against the wall. I told her that the Home Depot enforcement arm wouldn't look kindly on her treatment of the sample board, but Sue seemed about as intimidated as she is by those "do not remove" warnings on her pillow tags and she assured me she'd glue the sample back on the board before returning it. After careful deliberation that thankfully fell short of bringing in a mass spectrometer, she made the final decision on paint and carpet.

Next was coordinating the carpet installation with the wall and ceiling work. We were told by The Guy that it would take 3 days to paint and repair the upstairs, and another 3 days for the ground floor, and that, unless we had picked DuPont Dropcloth as our new carpet pattern, the carpet should be installed after the painting. That left two possible installation scenarios:
1. Move everything out of the house, let the painters and carpet folks do their thing, then move everything back in. Since we didn't have the storage facilities (or the fortitude) to make this move ourselves, this scenario would involve hiring Bekins, giving them our address as both the pick-up point and destination, and have them move everything out and drive the truck around the block for 9 days until the house was ready.
2. Do the upper and lower levels in two stages. This meant moving everything out of the the upper level and into our garage  on a weekend; having the painters come in on a Monday, do their work for 3 days, bring in the carpet people on Thursday; then move everything back up to the upper level before the following Monday, when we'd repeat the process with the lower level.

We went with plan #2, without using any movers, mostly for economic reasons. Rather than hire folks to move all our furniture out into our garage, we figured it would be cheaper just to invest in a couple of defibrillators and do the moving ourselves.

So we finalized the installation schedule on a Thursday. The following Monday the work would begin. This gave us the weekend to get the upper story vacated.

As with any move, we had to get all the the non-furniture out of the way first, so we would have the elbow room to deal with the furniture. And a few concepts become painfully clear once you're moving things down 14 steps and out to your garage:
1. The average home, which doesn't have to store things in glass display cases, actually holds more stuff than the Smithsonian.
2. All structures with more than one floor should have a freight elevator that includes the capability of traveling horizontally to the garage.
3. An item's sentimental value is inversely proportional to number of trips you've made up the stairs before dealing with it.

Part of the upstairs manifest is over a thousand vinyl LPs. For those of you who are still ascending life's hill, vinyl records used to be the way you brought music home. (The timeline goes like this: first there was humming, then whistling, then music boxes, then player-piano rolls, then records, then eight-tracks, then cassettes, then CDs, and now magic.) Although I've embraced each subsequent technological advance, my music collecting started with long-playing vinyl discs, accessed via a needle while spinning at 33⅓ rpm on a turntable, and because I've never gotten rid of any of them, I've now accumulated a collection that I'm very fond of, as long as I don't have to move it. There are audio snobs who hold onto their vinyl because they think that the snap/crackle/pop of a record on a turntable is somehow more "real" than music reproduced digitally. I suppose I could lie and say that it's my discriminating ear that's led me to keep all my records, but the truth is that no record company with an ounce of survival instinct would want to invest money in doing digital re-issues of most of the albums in my collection. So I have to hold onto the LPs if I want to enjoy the vocal stylings of Robert Mitchum, the Beatles as interpreted by the Hollyridge Strings, or Bach played on harmonica.

Although a 12-inch vinyl disc doesn't seem like much, if you're staring at over a thousand of those puppies, moving them is about the last thing you want to do... more accurately, for a guy in the shape I'm in, moving them would be the last thing I'd ever do. So I gave that job to Sam, reminding him that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger (a phrase whose uncertainty outweighs its encouragement).

By Saturday, we had moved almost everything out of the upper level. We moved Ben's bed (a single) down to the living room, and Sam had a bedroll tucked discreetly behind our living room couch, right where our dog used to sleep. All that was left upstairs was two desks, one in Ben's room and one in my office.

Ben's desk is pretty heavy, but compared to my office desk, it's an end table. My office desk is a huge L-shaped oak edifice. It was delivered about 10 years ago by two gentlemen who subsequently had to change their career path to accommodate spinal columns that now looked like crushed soda cans. Not wanting to suffer the same fate, I came up with a strategy that didn't involve bringing this behemoth any closer to sea level. It's simple, I told Sue when we were first considering the project. The desk is now the only piece of furniture in the loft. We'll move it to the center of the floor, cover it up, and the painters can work around it. Then, when the carpet installers come in, we'll budge the desk toward one wall, have them lay the carpet starting from the other side of the room, and move the desk over to the carpeted side when they reach the desk side. And, I added, we can do the same thing with the desk in Ben's room.

Sue didn't say anything, and as we all know, silence is a wife's way of saying she agrees wholeheartedly.

But now that we were at the point where the aforementioned desks were the only two non-gasping things left upstairs, Sue said, "You know, we have to move the desks downstairs. The painters and carpet layers don't need these things in their way while they work."

Thus ended over 33 years of marriage.

No, just kidding. The discussion followed the usual pattern... I carried on a bit, expressing, in turn, my indignation, consternation, exasperation, and, eventually my capitulation. Sue has the irritating habit of being right in the long run, and after I calmed down I realized that if I won the battle of the desks, the victory would be offset later, when we'd discover the dismembered corpse of our desk in our bathtub, or a desk-shaped lump underneath the new carpet. I was further persuaded to acquiesce when I was reminded that I had two grown sons that I could throw under the desk, so to speak.

Once Sam discovered the change in plans, he let us know he was scheduled for work at his paying job, and it was hard to discuss any scheduling alternatives over the screech of his tires. But Ben was still available. At first I thought he lacked the inherent craftiness that Sam had displayed, but it turned out he had invited his unsuspecting friend David (who has since left the country) to assist.

Together, the three of us managed to wrestle the desks down the stairs, in an agonizing, step-by-step process that, I can tell you from personal experience, would make a grown man weep. Later, after that upper story was done, Sam and Ben and I reversed the process. It was a life-changing experience for me. One of my favorite films used to be an old Laurel and Hardy short called The Music Box, where Stan and Ollie spend most of the picture hauling a piano up an incredibly long set of steps for delivery to a house at the top of a hill. I now realize that this was the only true-life drama that Laurel and Hardy ever made. I can always laugh at Ollie falling off a ladder or igniting a room full of natural gas, but I'm telling you, there's nothing funny about The Music Box.

Here's a picture of our garage with all the upstairs stuff in it:

That vacant area toward the right was reserved for my car and Ben's car, until we realized I don't have an eye for spatial relationships... then we decided to keep it available for the roll of carpet that would be left over after phase 1 and held in reserve for phase 2.

By that Sunday, the upstairs was ready, and we were able to stagger to church and thank God that... well, that the upstairs was ready and that we could stagger to church. I didn't have the foresight to snap any "before-and-after" pictures, but I did take some pictures of the upstairs level after it had been emptied. Here's a picture of the loft/home office area. It gives you an idea of the old carpet and paint. That's not Wall-E in center of the room... we had to keep our fax machine and internet modem connected through all the work. It was covered up and left in the middle of the room.

The following Monday through Thursday, we all just hung out downstairs while the painters, followed by the carpet layers, did their jobs. Except for the fact that Sam and Ben were sprawled like bear rugs in the living room, we could almost make believe that everything was normal. Here's an indication of how it looked:

Phase 2 was a different story. Like I said, after the upstairs had been completed on Thursday, we had to scramble to get everything out of the garage and back on the second story, then move all the lower level out of the house. This included our beloved La-Z-Boy furniture and the huge entertainment cabinet that houses our home theater set-up (seen in the picture above). Each presented unique challenges that will be addressed in the next exciting chapter.

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