Week in the Knees

Like water slowly pooling unseen beneath the floorboards of your home, here and there offering clues of itself that just barely seep across the borders of perception — an unusual humidity on the first warm day of Spring, or a whiff of cave on a cold day, when the air is shifting just so inside the envelope of those four cozy walls — a certain realization has slowly crept into my mind. I finally put my finger on it over today's breakfast sandwich: doom.

In September, Lauren and I bought the fixer-upper we live in now. It is twice the size of the last house and several years older (1913 vs 1947). We are having our wedding here on the property in three months, and there are great calving glacier bays to ford before that dawn. (The previous owners had lived here since 1975, and seemed to own only a flathead screwdriver and a roll of double-sided tape.) Meanwhile, I've spent the last five months supplicating around the 1947, replacing siding, plumbing, baseboards, flooring, appliances, crawlspace insulation — if a house needs a repair, it needs it most when you see the place through the buyer's eyes, and notice your greasy fifteen years of occupancy around every door frame, light switch, and toilet pedestal.

Meanwhile, Hayden's first trailer failed (after the winter's snow and rain, some undisclosed and comically-performed roof repairs had the place sagging and molding like a dying taleggio), so he and his mom picked up a new used one. I arrived to visit and discovered that beneath the cute checked linoleum floor, the wooden subfloor was uniformly mush — like, step too hard and you're standing on the soil — the result of ages of invisible water leakage. So, rather than let my child live in a depressing hellswamp, we tore out all the old subfloor (largely by actual handfuls), bolted down some 3/4" ply, and laid some pretty nice Pergo planks over it. We got it done in two days.

We did that the day after Lauren and I replaced an 8x12' front porch deck with reclaimed tongue and groove fir, which had to be violently fought into place, because it did not, of course, all come from the same sawmill, or even decade. Maybe not even the same century. But we're living the reuse-recycle lifestyle, and that's how we do things.

And just now my real estate agent calls and says the buyer for the 1947 wants a new sewer line and roof, plus better insulation. All of which are in good working order, but I have to do more personal crawling around and inspecting and getting bids.

Is this draining you? I just realized it might be. I'll stop there.

Wait, yesterday I tore out a 15' x 30' set of rotted garden beds and tilled them flat. We're growing the flowers there for the wedding, so I suppose it's a good thing that ZigZag and Sunny had apparently been using them as gothic-scale litter boxes. Oh, I also landscaped the 1947 and hung with the plumber while he fixed a sink leak and we diagnosed the sewer on our hands and knees in the crawlspace. ("I'm seriously in here again?" I asked myself. "Your sewer line's fine," he said. "They scoped it from the wrong place. We tradies [tradesmen] hate home inspectors because they're all burned-out restaurant managers who took a six-hour course and don't know a cleanout plug from a chicken's asshole.")

Okay, I'm done. At least until my real estate agent calls and says that the buyer wants to see me naked on a cold day.

Today I am going to dig more on my rain garden and install its retaining wall, which is my fun personal project. That's my reward for working on house stuff all week.

Back to the promise of doom: I realized this morning that I have placed myself in the center of enough moving parts — parts of entropy, of decay, of outmoded visual standards — that I may never actually be free. Getting out of the 1947 itself is like clawing on my belly away from a tar pit, the black, stringy, hardening mass stretching out behind me, still clinging to my hips and boots. (Wait, did I forget to tell you that when we were doing the trailer flooring, I somehow knocked out a circuit that needs repairing? Also Hayden wants me to climb up fifteen feet in the barn and install a hanger for his aerial gymnastics silks on a rafter.)

As you slowly sense that you are grateful none of this lies before or after you, I want to warmly welcome you to your weekend. I hope you spend it wiping your tongue across a mango frozen custard, folding blistered Neapolitan pizza into your mouth, and taking in the sumptuous beauty of an IMAX nature film.

I will be sanding and staining that new front deck, and if I'm lucky, I will fry an egg on the stove before it plummets through the floor and onto the basement washing machine, which will then send a high-pressure jet of water straight up into my face, dislodging my new Warby Parkers.