Mud and Bands

Mud and Bands

This is week twelve of my deck saga. I feel like Peter Mayle creating a document-drama about a year in Escondido and all the attendant house renovation projects and local characters that find their way to his door. For me there are three primary characters; Handy Brad, DoRight Dave and Rascally Rich. There are many other folks that work on the house in one way or another, but let’s start with just these three. You have heard a lot about Handy Brad already, but I am hesitant to tell the whole story since I have now seen the darker sides of Handy Brad and in its worst moments its not something anyone wants to be around. Handy Brad was orphaned as a child in what may be the most severe way. His parents did not die, but they abandoned him nevertheless. He was one of the younger of his brood and by the time he came along, his father was unengaged and quickly absent altogether. I sense that his mother could not handle the burdens of her children and for one reason or another and in some manner or another, he was abandoned by her to the unpleasantness of the social welfare system that kicked him around in rural Pennsylvania between orphanages and foster homes, neither of which gave him much love an attention by all reckoning. Handy Brad had to figure out life for himself, which he did as a young man in the sixties, doing manual labor and eventually apprenticing with a tile and stone craftsman. He learned his trade the way tradesmen have since the Middle Ages, strictly on-the-job with lots of hard work and plenty of subservience. It was the mud he chose and had all the benefits of stability of work and all the detriments of being hard, knee-capping perfectionist work that eventually led him to a degree of capability that allowed him to be his own craftsman.

Mud is the substance of his work and it well describes the good and bad aspects of that work. To Handy Brad, a bucket is the quintessential vessel of life. Handy Brad is extremely personal about his PVC buckets. At one point, one of the other workers commented that Brad has probably spent $25,000 of time washing his $10 bucket, and God help you if you suggest he should lend it to you and Satan help you if you return it in less than pristine condition. Of the other two workers, both seem better adjusted from a life history standpoint (parents who loved them at least at a minimum and all that), with Dave being somewhat less tolerant of individual eccentricities and psychosomatic constraints, and Rich being more tolerant, but equally less reliable and dependable on any given day. Dave does what he does and has wide range, but wants and accepts minimal turbulence from any direction as an acceptable work environment. Rich simply doesn’t have all aspects of his life nailed down tightly and, as such, seems to have more excuses that the other two combined for not showing up to work or having to leave early from work. There is a clear pattern of partial presence and regular absences that take away greatly from what would otherwise be a man with decent and diverse skills. Today, Handy Brad is in a perfectionist zone of finding the high points and setting the levels for the prep mud on the deck. Dave is wary of running afoul of Handy Brad either doing remaining electrical on the deck surface (around the palapa), can’t start the fascia until Handy Brad puts on the drip-edge flashing and is concerned that his way of handling the pillar stucco caps may not comport with Brad’s standards or ways. Rich is AWOL with an honest but uncontrite hangover from Super Bowl Sunday. Handy Brad says good riddance since today’s exacting work is best done alone. DoRight Dave is trying to both be helpful to Handy Brad and still stay out of his way. And Rascally Rich is home soaking his head.

Meanwhile, the bags of mud sit in Handy Brad’s truck awaiting mixture and placement on the deck surface while Handy Brad is out there screwing in guide-screws to precise heights to give guidance to the mud skreed, which is a leveling of the surface to a precise angle to allow for the free flow of water down to the drain or, in the is case, the edge, so that water does not collect on the deck’s surface. I think from everything that I’m seeing, this is the key step to a tile guy like Handy Brad. The framing of the deck, the placing of the plywood and cement board and the very foundational diligence to make the deck level properly for the existing entry doors and the eventual new edge was all painstakingly undertaken to make sure that the screed would be consistent and relatively easy to execute with minimal mud prep before the tile is laid as the final coat. So far we have used digital transoms, plumb lines, screed bars and levels to get things as precise as possible in this irregularly shaped deck (there is an irregular and non-square nature of the floorplan as well as various angles to be considered in the drainage equation). Handy Brad is more used to dealing with these calculation over the span of something like an 8’x10’ bathroom and not a 60’x18’ deck surface. It is apparently a lot for him if he were in his prime, but being in retirement, it brings with it all the aches, pains and doubts that accompany any ex-master craftsman who wonders if there is an easier way now.

So we have a progression of personality types out on the deck crew. They range from the pent-up and responsibility-burdened Handy Brad who views this home and my patronage with a bit of proprietary thinking, to the do-it-right-but-get-‘er-done Dave who just wants to put in his time and go home to work on projects at his kids’ homes, all the way to Carefree Rich who prioritizes his work somewhere down in Subbasement A, which probably goes a long way to explaining why he is always interviewing and rarely getting the job of his dreams.

But here is the funny thing, they all three like listening to 1960’s music and for someone like me that relates well to that era, I am forever hearing the hard metal and soft soulful ballads of my youth over the remote speakers that are constantly on out on the deck. The three of my guys are not good at agreeing on many things, but they all seem to like the same music. So when I have heard Handy Brad talk about getting the mud and the bands set, I just assumed he was talking about how important the music was for the monotonous work of pulling the screed across the mud to get it level. But then, in the process of trying to learn about the preparation needed for tiling, something I feel I am paying for so I should understand fully, I came to understand that what Handy Brad was talking about was the mud and the hydro bans. Hydro bans are the waterproofing material to be applied on top of the mud before the tile gets laid. It is a self-curing liquid polymer that forms a flexible and seamless layer that should keep the demon water out of my deck.

As I ponder the final weeks of my deck saga I just want to get the mud and the bans straight and listen to a few more bands along the way.