Into the fray...

It’s just a little crackerbox of a two story duplex, and it should have been my first clue as to what kind of shape it was in when it was part of the deal to begin with.  You know, one of those ‘Here, I’ll sell you this comfortable old house sitting on this big corner lot if you’ll agree to take this damn duplex off my hands…’ kind of deals   Yea. 

The whole affair does not have a happy history for me, but history or no history it has to be finished out one way or another.  After letting the whole sad affair steep for a-while, and sampling the extract for toxins (came back reasonably clean, I’ve dealt with worse)  I’ve decided the best way to put the whole affair to peace is to honor my word that was given to perfect strangers.  Story goes like this, and it’s true.

The little building is ancient, very old.  Very solid, but ancient.  It had plastered walls, and with plastered walls almost impossible to remodel with the plaster still on the walls.  So I began the restoration job by taking the plaster out so the wood beneath could be inspected, repaired if needed, so new pipes and wires could be installed.  Not a fun job,  not at all.  Plaster is damn near as heavy as cement, dusty as all get out, and it’s some serious manual labor to get it off the frame in the first place.  They call it sweat equity for a reason.

Anyway, one afternoon having put Brutus to squatting beneath a ton and a half of dead plaster headed for the dump I was taking a bit of a break sucking down Gatorade on the front porch when a land yacht pulled up to the curb out front.  I do mean a land yacht, 1974 or maybe ’75 true baby blue Lincoln Continental in absolute mint show room condition. Memory serves she was  wearing Ohio license plates. There were two very old folks in the car, and they were both looking in my direction.

After a bit I wondered if they might be lost, being out of towner’s and all, so I picked myself up off the steps and covered in sweat and plaster dust walked out to the curb to ask if there was anything I might do for them.  I figured they might have been looking for their grandkids or something.  I was almost right.

What they told me was they were just out sight seeing, revisiting places from their life.  Said they’d lived in the little duplex back when they were in college, back when it was almost a new building.  Now these folks were in their seventies if not eighties, and so I asked them when that might have been.  The gentleman answered they’d lived there the year I hit the dirt.  They’d been co-ed newlyweds the year I was born.  Then they asked if I’d mind if they went in to look at the inside.

I said no, I didn’t mind at all, but it wasn’t much to look at being as how I was in the process of stripping it out to do a full remodel so it could go another fifty or sixty years.  Anyway, they got out of the land yacht and shuffled into the bottom unit, and I walked with them and made sure they got safely onto the good floor past where I had the floor cut out to remove the rot.  With them safely in the living room I stepped back out on the porch, I was in no shape to be civilized company. 

I could hear woman talking.  “We had the screen there, and the table there, and the little daybed over there in the corner…”  Her man interrupted her with a chuckle at the mention of the daybed.  He said “Do you remember the time…?” 

It must have been something way special because yea, she remembered.  Sixty years later she remembered.  She giggled, one of those giggles, the kind that start out as a tingle in your tailbone, bounce off four or five interesting places and end up in your tummy.  She giggled, and I remember thinking “folks, don’t know you from Adam, but that giggle tells me you did it right, kept on doing it right for all the years in between.  Congratulations.”

So anyway, the project of restoring the old building as a couple of apartments is back front and center.  I’ll make a little money out of the deal, but that’s not why I’m taking on what really is a monster of a job where I wouldn’t break even paying myself even a dollar an hour.  The money isn’t the important part.  I’m gonna put it back together for those old folks who started out their life together in the bottom unit, who sixty years later were still together and still happy together.  Maybe, just maybe, I’ll get to rent the bottom unit to a couple of kids who sixty years from now will still be together, still be happy together and out touring the country in their land yacht.  All things allowed for I think that hope is probably the best antidote going for the unhappy things I have tangled up in the whole affair.

So, like the title says, into the fray… just how far off level is the foundation, and how in the name of Michelangelo's pet monkey are we gonna get it back where it belongs?  First things first don’t ya know…  I’ll keep you posted.