Out of Reach
In the process of building my Hobbit House, I had decided to farm out the stucco work, originally to Handy Brad, who has done some stucco work around the place, and more recently to one of a couple guys who answered Handy Brad’s ad on the Next Door app. That seemed to both Handy Brad and me as the sensible thing to do since Stucco may not be that hard to do, but there are certainly many tricks to the trade to make the process go easier. I have watched perhaps a dozen You-Tube videos about applying two-coat stucco and it is clear to me that this is exactly the sort of household task that I can reasonably undertake, but should not. The first stucco bidder came over on Friday and kicked the dirt on the job. Handy Brad and I came to this plan by virtue of a Google search for the average cost of stucco work in the area. It yielded an answer of $7/sf, which suggested a job price of $3,000 on an official, on-the-books job. Handy Brad, who tends to low-ball all cost projections thought I should get someone (in his mind, someone of Mexican descent) for $1,000. I figured something more like $2,000. The bid came in at $6,900 or $16/sf. That resulted in a hard-no, as Handy Brad likes to say.
In the meantime, I got a call from one of the day laborers (yes, a Mexican) who laid the railroad tie foundation and concrete paver floor. His name is Angel and he was looking for work. I was getting dubious about the Next Door app plan, so I arranged for him to come next Thursday/Friday and Saturday. I figured I could keep him busy enough if need be and the stucco job was being done away. But then, this morning, the other bidder called and had an emergency out of town, so he declined to come over to bid the job. As we are all reading every day, jobs are less scarce than people to do them. This is a labor market to be sure. In the classical Adam Smith way of thinking about the factors of production, capital is plentiful, land (or property) is available but costly due to that ease of capital, but labor is in short supply. Some of that is demographic and some of that is medically-driven by COVID quarantines and antivax sentiments in the Fox News-listening working class crowd. As a side note, have you noticed that there is less Republican focus on wall-building and immigration restriction now that the means of production are at stake?
So, I find myself back in the stucco business and today I loaded up the car at Lowe’s with half a ton of stucco mix, wire mesh for corners and galvanized steel j-bead for the bottom of the walls. Even with all of that and adding to my tool collection, I spent less than $500 and will be paying Angel another $500 or so. I started the wire lathe work today and will finish it up tomorrow and Tuesday if necessary. Then, on Thursday/Friday/Saturday Angel and I will mix and apply the scratch coat of stucco base, let it dry, and then mix and apply the color finish coat. I’m betting that we will have time to spare and that Angel will be able to reset the stepping stones in the path and use the two extra bags of DG I have left to finish the job, and that he and I will be able to bring down the remaining beams and set them in the Simpson metal brackets I have on the wall top plates.
I have watched enough You-Tube to know that stuccoing this size out-building from sheathing to finish coat would take a professional with the right tools and materials one day to do the job to perfection. I am allocating five times that amount of time and adding in a day laborer, all without a need for perfection and perhaps even ego, andI think I have built in enough cushion time for my slow-motion form of construction. I feel pretty confident that this project will come out all right. I also feel a certain amount of pleasure in denying the scoundrels on Next Door who came to my house, saw my Mercedes and Tesla and decided I would not bother to haggle over price and would pay their going rate. I guess they were attributing a certain price insensitivity to me as a city boy in retirement. Did they not see my Duluth Trading Flex Firehose khaki cargo pants or my short sleeve T-shirt worn over my long-sleeve T shirt or my thoroughly abused work books? I look worse than some of the day laborers at Home Depot and since they caught me in the act of grinding and drilling my boulder, I might have thought they wouldn’t price me up so much. No such luck.
I will not compromise on our primary dwelling, but with a Hobbit House I am inclined to believe that nothing that is needed for that project is out of reach to me from my own hand. I have cleared the land, designed the laid the foundation, set the flooring, framed and put up the walls, sheathed the walls, wrapped the walls, cut the beams and prepared them for installation. Hell, I even wired the damn thing with low-voltage lighting inside and outside. I just know I can put up the lathe, seal the joint between the house and boulder, and stucco the house before putting on the roof. I am enjoying the “chainsaw artistry” of doing all of this and am feeling like The Little Red Hen of Hobbit Houses.
It is 7am on a Monday morning and the go-to-work whistle is blowing in my ear. I have received my email notification from Lowe’s Escondido that my supplemental order of more stucco and metal mesh corner joints is ready and waiting for pick-up, so I had better get going since I have planned a big and productive day today to ready the Hobbit house for its stucco later this week.
Strangely enough, when we met with Jeff and Lisa for dinner the other night, they mentioned how much they like the new serial show, Reacher. I have enjoyed the two Jack Reacher movies staring Tom Cruise. He’s a wanderer who rights wrongs using his background as a military law enforcement guy. This new series, has the same basic character except this time it stars a guy, Alan Ritchson, who is a cross between the moody seriousness of Tom Cruise, the build of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the psychological profile of Ben Affleck from The Accountant, with his almost OCD obsessiveness. One of the things I really like about the character is the same thing I like about Denzel Washington in The Equalizer. He has discarded any connection to worldly possessions and lives a simple life of helping others. This is a guy who does his shopping in thrift stores whenever his jeans and t-shirt get funky (usually from all the fights he gets bloodied from). At one point he gets a razor but through his jacket shoulder during a fight with a Latin American special forces type and wears that jacket with duct tape on it for the rest of the show and maybe one more until it gets warm enough to go without a jacket. I also like the fact (not sure what their says about me or our national psyche) that he is merciless once he decides who is right and wrong. This is a self-imposed prosecutor, judge and jury of righteousness and a single-minded avenging angel executioner to those who would do him, his family and friends and the innocents of the world harm. He has no remorse and there is apparently no room for apologies on either side. I suspect that’s they way we all wish we could be to live with such clarity and purity of purpose and little or no conscience, since there is no room for self-doubt.
I am sure this character has touched some deep-seated need for us in modern society that we all harbor. If Reacher were on my hillside, he would never have done anything other than get to work on doing the stuccoing himself. In fact, he would look at me askance for letting it get to 7:30am rather than to get to Lowe’s and finish that damn Hobbit House and get on to the next episode. Nothing is out of reach to us if we stay focused. Off to Lowe’s.