Hanging up my toolbelt at long last

A long time ago, in a cold and mosquitoed place far, far away lived two much younger and more naïve Cunninghams. They were living in a one-bedroom apartment in Buffalo, Minnesota, and had recently been informed that their rent was going up $25 a month.

Given that our apartment was a tiny hovel unworthy of the rent we were already paying, and the fact that we seemed to find ourselves driving up to St. Cloud most weekends anyway, we decided to look for a better, cheaper apartment closer to a bigger city and my folks. We picked up the paper and among the apartment ads we found an ad that said “Why rent when you can own?”

Why indeed?

The short version of that story is that soon thereafter we signed our name to a piece of paper proffered by a company who assured us that there was no obstacle to building a house starting in November in Minnesota, despite our stated concerns that winter might be a problem. Turns out, that assurance was good only until the ink dried on the contract. (And to this day, whenever any service or sales person tells us that something will be no problem despite our stated concerns, we look at each other say, “Sure, we’ll just rrrrip right through the frost!”) In any case, we didn’t have any money for a down payment, and we’d agreed to do sweat equity on the house in lieu of a cash down payment. We signed on to do all the insulation of our tri-level in progress, all the priming and painting, and all the staining of woodwork.  Looking back, it’s clear to me that we only did this because we were completely ignorant of what that involved.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but by the time we moved in, because of the work itself, the trips back and forth from our apartment to the building site 50 minutes away, and the classic builder bullshit, Scott hated that house, and wasn’t the least bit sad to leave it behind when we moved to Arizona.

Building that house, we determined it was something we never, ever wanted to do again, and any naïveté we had going into it had been stripped from us by the builder’s shenanigans. It was at this point we came up with our new mantra: Pay. Da. Man. We had discovered through this long and maddening process that sometimes you save money at the cost of your sanity and health, not to mention oodles of time. Some things really are best left to professionals.  Like the installation of a corner lot’s worth of sod.

Somehow, though, I forgot this mantra over the intervening decade, and am frequently possessed of a DIY fervor I’m quite at a loss to explain. Every single project begins with a combination of cockiness and a zealot’s gleam in my eye. It’s always the same: I think, “I have a great deal of (baseless) confidence in my own abilities to get a job done. I own and understand tools. I can do it!”

Only, it turns out, I can only sorta do it. Nothing works out like it should for any of my projects, ever. Apparently, I possess the knowledge of how things are supposed to be done, but lack the art that allows some people to wield tools with finesse and panache. I live in awe of people who can do such things. I desperately want to be Bob Vila, but when it comes to home improvement projects, I’m more Tim Taylor. At best. Actually, I’m more like this:

Never has this been more apparent than in the bathroom project I have been immersed in for over two months now. I started a long and nerdy post about this torturous process, but realized that I probably would’ve lost most of you before I even got the toilet dismantled. So I’ll let the pictures tell the story, if you’re inclined to view the entire debacle start to finish. If you click the picture below, mouse over the image in the slideshow and click on the ‘i’ that appears, and you’ll get the commentary of what is a sadder, sweatier saga than even the pictures show. I spared you most of the swearing and throwing of tools.

I have come out of this project several hundred dollars poorer, but with a greater self-knowledge than I’d had previously. I have learned that I am so very done with DIY projects, and if it cannot be fixed with a hammer, screwdriver, pliers, or paintbrush, I will hire it out.

PAY. DA. MAN. Words to live by, I tell ya.

(Clickey da wee monkey for slideshow.)

Karma

My Grandma Mae got us a secondhand Kimball piano somewhere along the line, back when she still worked for the schools and they were getting rid of one. I don’t remember now how we got it from Maple, Wisconsin to Escanaba, Michigan, but it sat in our dining room. I would pick out tunes on it, and my mom taught me to play “Heart and Soul,” and somebody else, might’ve been my cousin Becky, taught me “Chopsticks.” I started taking piano lessons in the 4th grade with a teacher named Karen Pratt. I loved her, and so I loved the piano. She had beautiful handwriting. Seems to me I wasn’t a great practicer, but I wasn’t a bad one either.

We moved to Manitowoc the summer between 4th and 5th grades, and my mom found both me and my brother a new piano teacher. I didn’t love her, and my interest in practicing piano suffered for it. She was the kind who was always nagging you to curve your hands a certain way, and poking her bony finger in your back to get you to sit up straighter. I took lessons from her for a little over 2 years, and practiced less and less until I quit, both the practicing and then the lessons shortly thereafter.

I started public school for the first time the year we moved, and they offered 5th-graders the opportunity to play orchestra instruments. (Band wasn’t offered until 6th grade.) So I signed up to play the violin on top of the piano lessons, my mom rented me a violin, and it became my new love. Colleen McMahon was my teacher, and I loved her, too. I worked hard to impress her, and I started off strong, practicing every day.

But though I played in school orchestras until I graduated, in time, my devotion to practice became spotty at best, and it always was on the violin, because if you’re not playing the first violin part, it’s pretty boring to play alone. Unless you’re playing concertos, you really need the whole orchestra to bring the music to life. A lone violin part is like being just the flour in some really tasty cookies: necessary, but dry and dull all by itself. You spend a lot of time counting and playing repetitive rhythm bits until you finally fall asleep and crash head-first into your music stand, risking life, limb, and a bow up the nose. However, sometimes I’d be willing to practice without my mother having to holler at me to do it, and up to my room I’d go to do my cat-torturing impression, which (generally) became more sad and shrill in direct proportion to how much nagging my mother had to do to get me to practice and how much I didn’t want to practice at that particular moment

My bedroom in our place on Michigan Avenue was in back of the house, and it came equipped with a balcony that overlooked the back yard, garage, and alley, which I loved. On nice days, I would put my music stand out on my balcony, drag a chair out there, and bring my violin outside to serenade the neighborhood for half an hour in the breezy, careless manner that only a 12-year-old not yet stricken with the extreme self-consciousness of adolescence can manage. It never occurred to me that the neighborhood would not enjoy the dulcet strains of me scratching away on my fiddle. It never occurred to me to think of the neighborhood at all. I was 12, after all.

I was put in mind of those carefree, caterwauling days recently when I unexpectedly discovered that the boy across the street had come into possession of a drum kit. Did I discover this information because I saw him and his dad carrying the drums into their house?

Oh no.

Let me just say that it is monsoon season here in the Old Pueblo, which means that everyone who has an air conditioner (in addition to a swamp cooler) has it cranked, and all the doors and windows are shut tight, because only the Rockefellers are able to afford A/C AND gasoline this summer. But nonetheless, I know that the neighbor kid has a new drum kit, because I can hear it.

In my house.

My house with all the doors and windows shut tight.

My house across the street from the kid’s house, which also has all the doors and windows shut tight.

Sadly, the boy is a diligent practicer, and I hear drums from across the street from the time I get home from work at night until bedtime, and even more on weekends. Frequently, his long-haired buddies from the neighborhood come over and contribute the cacophony.

On the one hand, I think kids having the opportunity to play music is one of the best things we can give them, and for all my mother’s struggles to get me to practice, I am grateful every day that my folks invested in musical education for me. I’ve gotten more out of it than I can ever quantify. And though it took 25 years, I’ve become a diligent practicer of the guitar, even if I never was on piano or violin.

And in truth, it’s better than the situation we had in our first apartment here in Tucson. There, our bedroom shared a wall with the neighbor’s living room. And the neighbor had a budding clarinetist in residence who was fond of practicing in the living room before noon on Saturdays. Lemme tell ya, there are few things more startling (and homicidal rage-inducing) than to be awakened from deep slumber by the squeaking and squawking emitted by a novice’s clarinet at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning.

The only way it could be worse is if it were an oboe. Which may be what one of the neighbor children to the east plays, but whoever it is tends to play only at night, and we don’t have to share a wall. Thank heavens.

But regardless of this somewhat tarnished silver lining, the fact of the matter is that I get to listen to the kid across the street put in serious time on drums, and I can only consider myself lucky in that it isn’t MY kid and my house he’s playing in, even though it sounds very nearly like he is.

I think back to that young girl who played her violin for the neighborhood. And I think about the old girl who plays her guitar in the back yard now from time to time, and I think “Damn, karma’s a bitch.” And then I think, “I’d better plug in and crank this amp to 11.”