Always Something
Who says retirement is easy? There should be little or no stress, right? That should certainly be the case with a casual fun project like my Hobbit House. My MO is optimism. As that pertains to projects around the property, that translates into a sense that everything is easy and quite doable, so what’s the problem? While I have been aware of this can-do attitude tendency, I do find myself slipping easily into that posture all the time. I noticed it a lot in dealing with Handy Brad, who is very project risk-adverse. He thinks nothing is easy and that everything is bound to get screwed up. I’ve been surprised to find that he feels that way even about the things that he is very expert with like tile and stone work. I have often wondered if this was a result of his apprenticeships leading to a taskmaster beating on him if there was ever the slightest mistake. I have said that Handy Brad measures ten times before he cuts rather than just twice. For a get-it-done guy like me, that can be a difficult day-to-day approach with which to contend. I jokingly say that if you combine me and Handy Brad, you might end up with the optimal mix.
This Hobbit House project is a very different one for me. To begin with, its a greenfield project and I want it to be more than sure that it is built safely for the kids that will inhabit it. It can be rustically built, but it has to be sturdy and safe. After having Handy Brad here on site for fifteen months or so, including five long deck rebuilding months, I have been without Handy Brad for most of the last eight months. I needed a break from a fixer upper cash flow standpoint and I think he and I both needed a break from each other as well. I like Brad and I think the feeling is mutual, but it was better all-around to do more of the projects around here either alone or with the occasional help of a day laborer. And while I wanted to do more of this Hobbit House myself, I also wouldn’t have minded Handy Brad’s help along the way. But Handy Brad has a new patron and he has been too committed and busy with that to be available except in short, special need situations. This has left me largely on my own, which is a very challenging place to be.
Yesterday, I was under the impression that I would be doing the stuccoing of the Hobbit House myself, with the help of my day laborer friend, Angel. I was half looking forward to it and half dreading it. I am under the impression that the tag-teaming of stucco program requires one to haul 80-pound bags to a trough and mix the base coat stucco mix while the other team member uses something called a hawk that resembles a painter’s palette with a handle, and a trowel that can either be steel (for the base coat), or what is called a float, which is a trowel with a sponge (used for the finish coat). Given my propensity for taking frequent rest breaks and the stucco’s tendency for hardening rather quickly, it strikes me that since I am unlikely to want to tote 80-pound bags of stucco mix and water, I will be the guy with the hawk and trowel and a quickly hardening wad of cement stucco.
As I contemplated my fate, I was putting up the wire lathe and making hamburger of my hands, despite the almost constant use of leather gloves. Wire stucco lathe and the added corner wire lath have lots of metal that can bite you when you least expect it. The nest news is that the electric stapler may be my favorite tool right now. It has more than earned its keep already. I am ready to throw out the staple hammer that smacked my second finger last week (it still hurts). Between the wire lathe and using Flex Seal (yes, the amazing stuff you see on infomercials) to seal off my boulder art from the outside world, a guy walked up to me and asked if I was the owner. What owner would be using a staple gun to put up wire lathe, he must have figured. It turns out he is a stucco guy who must have gotten my name and address from one of the other two who Handy Brad spoke with. His English was so-so, but he let me know right away that he knew stucco. Bottom line, he offered to do the whole job for 23% of the other bidder. I n fairness, I was doing all the lathe work, but it was still a good deal for me, so I hit the bid. We agreed he would start Thursday, which meant I had a day to finish the lathe since I needed to keep Wednesday free for our guests Steve and Maggie.
Based on my aching hands and the fact that dunking them in stucco for a few days would have dried them out like old sticks, I decided that having Ernesto and his squad of guys doing what they knew best how to do was a wise choice despite my moving in the DIY direction the day before. The only issue was that I needed to get the lathe done pronto. So, today I got to it and put in the hours to cover the Hobbit House with wire lathe. I have a few corner pieces to add tomorrow, but am otherwise ready for the stucco crew. I realize I’ve been on-gain-off-again on this phase of the project, but it was less my flakiness than the flakiness of the service providers. Hopefully, Ernesto will be reliable. The good news is that I am still waiting for the front timber posts, so I have the time to correct anything I don’t like about the stuccoing, since the roof can’t go up until those posts get installed.
Even though I am down to the short strokes on this project and am well ahead of schedule, I know that anything can still happen. I don’t consider it a breach of my belief in optimism to be aware that there will always be something that upends my plans on a project like this. In fact, I think that the “always something” attitude is a bit of the carefree acceptance of the inevitability of shit happening that is both realistic and yet possessing the calm that comes with rolling with the punches.
I am not undertaking household projects to better myself at this age. I am doing them because they interest me and I like having a sense of accomplishment and pride of ownership that accompanies them all. Today I got a sense of that as I got to show Steve and Maggie my renovated yard (they last visited in 2020, well before I began the work on the back hillside, the garden , the play area and the patio. It felt good to show off my flowers (lots in bloom right now), my metal yard art, my boulder art, my paths and benches and all my succulent and native plants. And guess what? Every one of these projects had something about them unexpected. It was always always something, and that is almost always just fine.