Ringing in the New
We are in the home stretch of the modern world’s annus horribilis. While we will soon be at the start of another year that will undoubtedly begin as badly as this one will end, we are all hopeful that over the course of the twelve months of its duration, 2021 will somehow work its way out of this malaise and resolve itself into a fine year. For that to be the case, at a minimum, we must see the Coronavirus pandemic brought to heel early enough in the year that we can declare it done in the most part. It is already estimated that under the best of circumstances (vaccine roll-out being the biggest factor), hundreds of thousands more Americans and probably a million of more citizens of the world will perish before we can close the COVID chapter. Everything else should and does pale in comparison to those facts, but COVID is only one of the things that need to go better for us to break from horribilis. I believe the economic situation, particularly as it afflicts the bottom half of the economic spectrum, may actually have more of a misery-index effect on the world than the actual pandemic deaths. And just so that no one gets left out of the suffering equation, let us remember that at least in the United States we have the great and quite disconcerting disharmony that rankles at any time almost half the nation that remains so frightfully divided in its thinking about what defines social, economic and political “justice”. None of these are small problems and none has an easy fix though at least the pandemic has the possibility of being statistically ameliorated in a meaningful way by a simple set of two injections for the eight billion souls on the Earth.
Hope is the only salvation of man, and the strength of the faith in that notion of hope is what keeps us all going, if not in lockstep, at least trudging forward to what we all individually believe to be a better place. This is the hope we find in the spring of a new year, the rebirth of the dormant world. We all look for those positive signs, those symbolic buds of new life that remind us that life goes on and that whatever this is, it shall pass in time.
In a very strange way, I am feeling that time-honored expulsion of the old and ringing in of the new in the project I am marshaling at this moment. Today we turned the corner from ripping out the old and putting it into the 40-yard steel dumpster and cutting a length of fresh clear lumber to put into the ledger under the house and on which to hang perhaps as many as ten new joists. I have always thought of demolition as a quick and bullying job that brutishly and easily throws out the old, and that the process of rebuilding was the slow part of the task because of the precision and care it requires to get it right. But the funny thing in this project is that either because of the multiple stages of building and rebuilding involved in the creation of this Frankensteinian monster of a deck, or just the fact that once started off badly and haphazardly, the deck never found its way out of the cobbled-together manner of its ultimate construction. In either case, the deck was a mess structurally and shock and awe has accompanied the peeling back of every layer of its skin until it now sits with only its bare bones exposed and even those are in process of removal and replacement for the most part. This is a case where much more is being replaced than is being kept.
Despite the mounting cost and the increased duration of the renovation schedule, I am strangely pleased with the situation. Now that I have seen how badly put together that deck was, I am quite happy that it s getting fixed thoroughly and properly. I’m not sure anyone who comes to visit will realize how much better it will be than what it was before since unless you put your foot through as I did a month ago, it all looked quite nice from the outside. It was a classic case of being a pig with layer upon layer of ruby red lipstick. I am strangely happy and proud to be fixing it, not just replacing it, but actually fixing it to make it as good and solid as it should always have been. I suppose it goes somewhat to pride of ownership, but it seems to be more than that. Generally I am the sort that cares about how it looks on the surface rather than worrying if there are dust bunnies under the bed, but this is somehow different.
This afternoon I watched as that new 2×12 fourteen-footer was tucked into the space between the kitchen pony wall and the ledge under the sweeping kitchen doors. It goes from the kitchen, under a faux exterior column and over to the end of the living room. It’s almost seems like the linchpin of the house (though that is hardly the case). And as it sat there with its reddish blonde newness of solid milled pine, I could almost smell the newness and the sweetness of strong young wood. It gave me hope that we were not only on the downhill side of the project, but that we were doing it all right. That is the feeling I want to have about the world as we enter 2021.
I am expecting the new 2×12 joists (actually 2×14 ripped down to 11 and 7/8) to go in quite quickly. There will be an unhindered ease of construction since we have washed away all that might have been in the way and in need of jury-rigging. There will still be some old joists that will be sistered or sandwiched with carriage bolts that will provide extraordinary, almost over-engineered strength to the structure. But I suspect that of the 34 joists, where we were planning on completely replacing only a few, we will now be enticed to replace somewhere in excess of half of them. Even at the relatively high cost of lumber during COVID (Canadian stock is much less available it seems), it is a bargain to put in new and actually probably costs less than the labor and materials of sistering. Once the joists are down, the beams go in on the newly cured pilings with their waiting post embeds. There are a number of blocks that will need to be cut to both sturdy the structure and provide added nail beds for the sheathing. Then the 1 inch plywood goes down and the fire-rated gypsum goes underneath to replace the antiquated and nasty stucco.
As you can tell, I can see the finish line from here and I can envision myself, arms raised in victory, running through the tape. I am not quite there yet on 2021 and in particular COVID, but I almost feel that once the vaccine is in my arm I may have that same new wood feeling I am getting about the deck. But then I hear the wobble and creak of the floor in the Master Bedroom and I am reminded that there will always be more remedial work to be done and that solving COVID will just be the start, albeit a critical one, to ringing in the new in a meaningful way.