Hammered and Nailed #5--Insanity reigns

      It being August, I'm re-publishing excerpts from my 2002 series on remodeling, "Hammered and Nailed." To start at the beginning, go back to Aug. 4. The inexplicably-popular Saturday "Where IS this?" contest will return Aug. 23.     

     Sometimes I ask myself, "Once the remodeling is done, what . . ."
     Gosh, that has a strange ring to it. "Once the remodeling is done." Sort of sounds like, "After the Earth crumbles to dust."
     Sorry. I ask myself, "Once the remodeling is done, what is this leading to?"
     Yes, a shiny new bathroom and a shiny new kitchen, to start. But what are they for? What will we do with them? Throw lots of big dinner parties with money we no longer have for friends who drifted away once we moved to the suburbs? Take long, luxurious baths in our gleaming white bathroom, eyes locked on the pristine, schizophrenic order of the hexagonal tiles on the floor?
     Frankly, I can't picture it. Right now, the only end I can really, truly imagine is myself, eyes wild, hair in disarray, running madly through the house, gas can in hand, pouring fuel everywhere, then standing amidst the flames, head thrown back, shaking my clawed hands at the ceiling and laughing hysterically as the house goes up around me.
     Sorry (again). Thursday is still weighing on my mind. The day had been so pleasant. The workers, I knew, were putting in the final touches on the bathroom--the toilet paper holder. The towel hooks. The little sproingy thing that keeps the doorknob from carving a circle in the wall. I love those little sproingy things.
     On the train I was relaxed, happy. I strolled home, prepared to savor the new bathroom. Perhaps, thought I, a celebratory bath might be in order. I had not taken a bath in the main bathroom, I realized, in the two years we owned the house. Why would I? It would be like bathing in a scummy pond.
     I opened the front door to a scene of madness. Water was pouring as if from a hose, directly from the center of our kitchen ceiling. The boys were running and shouting. Cats flew by, mewing wildly. My wife was screaming, and a heavy man, naked to the waist, wearing white painter's pants, sneakers and suspenders, was for some reason there too. The only thing missing was the Marx Brothers with flappy paddles and seltzer bottles.
     I should have turned and bolted, but I went inside.
     "The water!" My wife shouted, nobody knew how to shut off the water. This was odd, I realized, later, when I had time to think. Very odd, considering these guys were plumbers, supposedly. But lost in the moment, I merely hurried to the basement and turned a few big valves that seemed connected to the water pipes—even I know how to do that—then headed back upstairs to see the cascade had diminished to a trickle, being examined by the half-naked man, who turned out to be a workman.
     "What's going on?" I said. Drawing a blank stare, I dredged up my college Russian.
     "Shto etta?" I asked, pointing at the water. ("Shto etta?"—"What is this?" are the first words they teach you in Russian class. I almost automatically followed with "Etta capusta"—"This is a cabbage.")
     Concealing my rusty, etiolated Russian had seemed a good idea—I got to eavesdrop on the workers, and knew that showing it off would be a form of cozying up, a social breach akin to those junior executive idiots who pause to pal around with the bums on the bridge out of the mistaken belief it makes them into hip, happening kind of guys.
      But this was an emergency. The workman—he was a painter of some kind—praised my language skills, and said that nothing could be done until the bossman showed up. We waited.
     Finally he arrived, declared that nothing could be done until tomorrow, and then set to chatting with me in Russian.
      Soon the bathroom was forgotten, and he was inviting me to visit Belarus with him and hunt women. (At least I think that's what he said.)
     Four days passed. They finally came back, the problem was located. It seems they forgot to actually bond a pair of pipes, but merely shoved one into another and—gee, guess what?—it leaked.
     Somehow, the bathroom being so close to completion, then having success yanked away, started to affect my mind.
     "We could just keep the water off, use the other bathrooms and look at this one," I suggested to my wife, in all earnestness. "We wouldn't have to worry about cleaning it then."
     One thing vital to surviving home remodeling (practical tip alert! pay attention here) is to inculcate a certain hardness. After the leak crisis, the built-in shelves were installed. We praised them to the bossman then, after he left, actually looked hard at them. They were a kind of pressboard, already showing through the paint, held up by wooden brackets artlessly sawed. I delivered the ultimate criticism.
     "I could have done that," I told my wife.
     We agreed that I should place the call, thus giving the demand the bass and authority of the male. The shelves, I said, in my best butch voice, were no good. They would have to be ripped out and done again.
     "No problem," he said.
     I hung up, amazed. Not so much that he agreed so readily—we'll see what Shelves Part II look like—but that I had delivered the bad news with a minimum of hives and Barney Fife trilling. I thought I was having a bathroom and kitchen built, but it seems they're also constructing a hardened personal shell in the bargain. Imagine that, something extra for free in home remodeling. A miracle.
                                      — Originally published August 25, 2002 

Hammered and Nailed #4 -- That sinking feeling when desires die

    The feature normally in this space, "People Far Richer Than Yourself Show off Their Mega-Mansions as If You Could Possibly Own One in Your Wildest Dreams of Avarice," is on summer sabbatical. In its place, we present a continuing saga of remodeling an old house when money is not just something stuffed in walls for insulation.

     You know what I think makes a kitchen really elegant? A little round sink—not the main sink, mind you, but an auxiliary sink, say, set in a freestanding island. That way, if the main sink is filled with dirty dishes (and really, when is it not?) and you want a drink of water, no problem! You turn, hold your glass under the delicately curving stainless steel swan's neck of a tap and slake your thirst.        
      Fancy!
      Many times, I've fantasized about using such a sink: to rinse brightly colored summer fruit, to pour cool water on my dusty hands, to ease some complex cooking task, standing back-to-back, romantically, with my wife working at the main sink in our brand-spanking-new kitchen.
     You would think this desire would mean that the plans for our new kitchen would include such a little sink. The island is there. The pipes are there, somewhere. But no little sink, and herein lies the tale.

     First, let's back up a bit. Any construction effort, be it a spare bathroom or the Taj Mahal, is a compromise between imagination and practicality, between the fever dreams of the bountiful trappings we know we deserve and what our pocketbooks and spouses will let us get away with.
      Usually, unless we are toward the Taj Mahal end of the spectrum, those constraints are considerable, and a good thing, too. When you see the sprawling monstrosities that the rich tend to throw up (and I use that term aware of its dual meanings), it seems that a few restrictions are beneficial. I mean, as much as we would like Bill Gates' billions, did anyone look at the photos of that enormous hotel-like construction he calls a home and think, "Gosh, I'd love to live there"? Nobody.
      OK, that's a cop-out. Having lots of money would be great when it comes to remodeling. I can't tell you how many times we've noticed something we really like, just to later realize that not only can't we afford it, but we can't believe there's anyone in the world who can afford it.
     Take the stove. We surveyed the stoves available and settled on a Heartland, based entirely on the fact that it had a cute semicircular window. I could see myself peering through that window for the next 25 years, at bubbling pies and browning turkeys. It would make me happy.
     Turns out a Heartland stove costs about $5,000. A lot of money, considering you can get a perfectly good stove for about a tenth of that.
     So we set our sights lower. My wife selected a stove that would do the trick and set us back only about a grand and a half.
     But I had a problem with it. For $1,400, it just, well, it just didn't look cool. I wasn't expecting a round Heartland window. But I wanted something. At least the knobs should be nice. Hefty knobs. Industrial knobs. I scanned the store, and found one I liked. It had big, solid, black, hand-filling dials, knobs that would control the nuclear missile launch in a James Bond movie. The stove costs $3,000.
     Both stoves worked equally well. (Actually, the more expensive stove worked less well, because it had powerful, industrial burners designed to bring 10-gallon stock pots to boil. The thing literally couldn't dial down to low, so it came with a round metal plate you had to put over a burner if you wanted to approximate a low setting, a major pain if ever there was one). I knew, in my heart, it was insane to spend an additional $1,600 for knobs on a stove that demanded you insert a special blast plate whenever you wanted to simmer a can of soup. But that wasn't how I viewed it. I viewed it that you could spend $1,400—still a lot of money—and get some chintzy, Oreo-knobbed, nothing stove. Or you could spend a bit more—and what is $1,600 in the money furnace that is remodeling an old house?—and get a mighty-knobbed stove.
     My wife convinced me this is madness. Which brings us back to the little sink. Features she wants—such as an extra wall oven for Thanksgiving and the other two days a year when we might need lots of cooking room—are vital elements intrinsic to any basic, minimal kitchen. Simple expressions of practicality, on par with church key can openers and straw brooms. You can't live without them.
     The elements that I want—the oven with the hearty knobs, the little round auxiliary sink—are wasteful, fanciful frills that need to be trimmed away to stick with the budget and avoid bank-breaking financial ruin.
     I know this makes me seem henpecked, and I've tried dozens of times to argue. "Why," I ask, "do you dismiss what I want in the kitchen as a needless expense?" She, of course, denies it. "Lots of things in the kitchen were your idea," she says. "The floor—you wanted a floor, and you have one. Or stainless steel appliances. We're getting those."
     I try to point out that she, too, wanted stainless steel, and that I'd happily switch to something else—red is popular nowadays—to prove my point. But somehow the point is never made and I sigh and let it drop, while the little round sink drifts away on the gentle breezes of regret, off to that misty land of sports cars and summer homes and all the luxuries that life hands to the select few but forever denies the rest of us.

                  —Originally published July 14, 2002

Hammered and nailed #3: A plan of action, of sorts

   This is the third installment in a projected 495-part series on the remodeling of Neil Steinberg's 1905 Queen Anne house.

     The Russians have gone. On to another job, at the home of a more organized couple, while our bathroom upstairs sits, a jumble of wallboard and jutting copper pipe and dust.
    "Don't let them leave," I had begged my wife. "Put them to work doing something else. Get them going on the kitchen." But they didn't want to start the kitchen until all the

appliances and cabinets and such were stored in the garage, and who could blame them? The reason they had to halt work on the upstairs bathroom was because the tile hadn't shown up. Our fault. When we ordered it last April, and the tile guy said it would be in stock within a week, we failed to realize that "a week" is tilespeak for "next July."
     "Why not," I asked my wife, as we sat on the front porch, each staring straight ahead at the sugar maple, "order new tile somewhere else?"
     "My heart is set on that tile," she said, with deep seriousness.
     My own heart sank. I turned to look at her, and opened my mouth to say, "My heart is set on getting that bathroom done."
     But I closed my mouth--a very important skill in remodeling. Because the next sentence would be, "It's white tile, right?" and after that, "How hard could it be to find white tile?" And the fourth: "Unless its some kind of special tile, fancy tile--Blanco del Tile Extraordinaire Supremo, maybe."
     Silence is easier.
     Fact is, I have been surrendering fairly regularly on these disputes. For instance, over the permits. I was dead set against getting permits. That seemed the coward's way. There is an old adage in journalism: it's easier to apologize than to get permission. (Okay, maybe it's not an old adage. Maybe I made it up. Who knows anymore?)
     Of course I was influenced by all the contractors who, in snooping around to make their estimates, always asked, in a dubious tone, if we were thinking of getting permits, exactly the same tone that a parent, looking up at a child, sitting on the roof of the garage with a towel pinned to his shoulders, would say, "You're not thinking of jumping, are you?"
     I wanted to listen to the contractors, the experts. First, permits cost some hideous amount-- I could never bring myself to ask exactly how much. Second, they take time and bureaucracy to acquire. Years maybe. Third—and worst—in my mind, they invite inspectors into the house where they'll find God-knows what and issue God-knows-which kind of fanciful orders costing God-awful sums to comply with.
     "Oh gee, Mr. Steinberg, look at this. An arrowhead. Looks like there's an ancient Indian burial ground right here under your foundation. You'll have to have a team from the University of Chicago in to excavate. Or you could just jack up the house and move it 30 feet south."
     So I urged defiance. Silly me. That wasn't going to get me far. My wife, remember, is the last lawyer in the world who considers herself an officer of the court. Who thinks she has a moral obligation to be upright and honest. She is the one who, when I downloaded my first song off Napster ("Satisfaction" by the Stones. It seemed apt.) stood over me, haranguing that I was committing a crime. Not in a teasing fashion, but frantically, as if I were about to drown a puppy. "Don't!" she said. "That's STEALING!" (It's okay," I answered, "I'll send Mick Jagger a check.") Aware that an appeal to moral scruples wouldn't get far with me, she rather cannily played to my deep strain of pragmatism. We have an old house. If something shorts in the wall it could burn down and kill us. The inspector will check the Russians' work and maybe save our lives. When I seemed reluctant to follow this chain of reason, she pulled out her trump card.
     "We live right next to the Village Hall," she observed. "They're bound to notice trucks, a dumpster, workers going in and out."
      I would have still argued, but I remembered the American Elm. The village had left a note that our elm was sick, and needed to be chopped down. "Wow," I said, impressed that the city would diagnose our tree and take it away. That's service. Turns out, the condemning the tree part was the service—we had to have it removed at our own expense. Still, there was a lesson: If the village noticed a sick tree, it would certainly pick up on work of a scale to rival the pyramid at Cheops.
     We eventually got our permit. It's in the window now, which is cold comfort, since there is no tile and no workers. As the tileless days clicked by, I carefully constructed a question, breathing deeply, measuring my words. "So," I finally ventured. "Honey. How long . . . do you suppose . . . we should wait . . . if the tile doesn't show by July?"
     A pause. I almost added, "Remember, the guy who told us the tile would be here in July is the same guy who said it would be here last April." But I didn't. My point had hit home. My wife contemplated. "If it's not there by July," she said, slowly, "we'll go somewhere else." Triumph! Yes, she felt bad about the prospect of losing her dream tile. But at least now we have a plan of action, of sorts.

                                        —Originally published June 30, 2002

Write about the cop, or he might arrest you

   I know I've just begun off two weeks of Hammered & Nailed, and today's installment is below. But yesterday's column in the Sun-Times is too fun not to share, for those of you—and you know who you are—who might not be checking the paper's web site as much as you should. I hope this is half as enjoyable to read as it was to write.

  

     Years ago, I was combing through the Reader classified ads, looking for something to write about, when I noticed a boutique offering women’s shoes in large sizes for men. I toddled off to Elston Avenue and plunged into the world of cross-dressing, safe houses and secret dances.
     After the story ran, I got an out-of-left field call from the other boutique in Chicago catering to cross-dressers, drag Gimbels to this store’s Macy’s, as it were. The owner demanded to know when he would get his due. How could I focus on one and not the other?
      I’m sorry, I said, my goal was to describe a hidden subculture to readers who were completely ignorant of it, not to list stores. Besides, I didn’t know about the place before. “Next time I write about the transvestite community,” I said, using a term that wasn’t derogatory back then, “I’ll include you.”
     That was 22 years ago. The paper has never, to my knowledge, run another in-depth story looking at what is now called the transgender community, so in a sense I was true to my word. Still, that “What about me?” reflex is a common complaint, reflecting a misperception of the news, the belief that we’re some kind of social service where fairness demands all people and all situations be given equal attention, when actually we’re trying to offer news that’ll keep you ponying up quarters and clicks.
     All of this came tumbling back Friday morning when the first email I got in response to my column about quixotic mayoral candidate Amara Enyia was this, which came whistling over the transom at 1:35 a.m. and which I read, rubbing sleep from my eyes, about 6 a.m. Friday. Since many communications and media sorts read this column, let’s play a game I’ll call Find-the-Spit-in-the-Soup. See if you can ID the sentence where Gerald Thomas goes off the rails.
     “Hello Mr. Neil Steinberg,” he begins.

     “I would like to introduce you to the only candidate in this race with the experience needed in this day and time to combat the violence our citizens of this city continue to face. Mr. Frederick Collins is currently serving as a 21-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department. With all due respect sir to Ms. Enyia, Mr. Collins has a website, buttons, T-Shirts and literature currently being circulated throughout the city. We are the only campaign with a radio ad being played each and every Sunday on WPWX POWER 92.3 FM. According to election law, we are to be allotted the very same time you granted any other declared candidate. You can go to our website at . . . "

     There's more, but I assume you stopped at "According to election law," to guffaw, as I did, or at least shake your head in wonderment. So let me get this straight: If I don't write about Frederick Collins then I'll be breaking the law and . . . what? He'll come by the newspaper and arrest me—he is a cop—and drag me away to columnist jail?
     Maybe I'm missing out by generally avoiding political contests as an annoying buzz best left to others. There's gold here. I'm not going to write about Collins, of course—my colleague Mary Mitchell already did so on Sunday. I suppose if he swears out a warrant for my arrest for breaking this imaginary law (his flack must have been thinking of the FCC equal-time rule that applies to broadcasters), I could point to her column, or offer up this one as a defense, if the rule applied to print, which it doesn't. Heck, it hardly even applies to TV.
     And really, is Chicago looking for a police officer to run the city? I would never be so self-punishing as to characterize the esteem or lack of which that cops may or may not enjoy, nor contrast it with their self-image. And while I shouldn't be doling out advice to political candidates, if Collins is considering a slogan along the lines of "Vote For Me or Face Prison," he might want to rethink that.
     I should tip my hand lest people accuse me of hidden motives. The reason Rahm Emanuel is so unpopular is because he's doing the hard things that need to be done, closing schools and cutting programs that can't be paid for. There is no easy way he was going to try to dial back pensions for city workers and end up with cops like Collins cheering. "Sure, Sarge, I won't be getting the money I was promised, but look at our improved civic solvency . . ." You can't tear off the big bandages Rahm's been ripping from Chicago without the city starting to howl.
     For me, the classic mayoral opponent was Joe Gardner, the water commissioner who stocked his first campaign rally with gang members who then menaced the media trying to cover it. Though Collins' guy invoking an imaginary law that demands his candidate be written about has to rank right up there. Memo to all candidates: Life ain't fair.

Hammered and Nailed #2: Contracting stress with kitchen redo.

As an August respite from the nastiness of the news —for me and hopefully for you too—I'm reprising my 2002 home repair series. Part 1 can be found here. This is Part 2.

     In June 2000, my wife and I bought a 1905 Queen Anne near downtown Northbrook. The house was something of a ruin, with problems from basement to attic. But we loved the tree-choked lot, loved being close to the train and school, and figured we could remodel it into new life.
    This is the second part of a bi-weekly series cataloguing the work, which so far has included stripping the floors, painting the walls, putting in air conditioning, fixing a deck, repairing the gutters and—in today's installment—trying to find a contractor to rebuild the kitchen.

     I knew the strain of trying to get remodeling started on our old and decrepit kitchen had snapped my mind when the scam artist called.
    I don't know for a fact that he was a scam artist. But he had a patter that reminded me of time-share condo come-ons, fake police charities, and other such rip-offs.
    "Hello Mr. Homeowner," he said, or something very similar. "Our professional work crews are in your neighborhood right now, remodeling local homes, and because they have downtime, they can do any work you need on your kitchen or bath at an astounding discount. Would you be interested in having one of our professionals visit your home for a no-cost-to-you estimate of...."
     "God yes!" I screeched into the phone. "Please send them over right away. We've needed the kitchen remodeled for nearly two years and I'm GOING OUT OF MY MIND!!!" I was nearly sobbing.

Logo by Jack Higgins

     Not that contractors hadn't come through our house. For every five we called, one might actually show up. A large man, typically, solid, in jeans and a flannel shirt, with a cell phone and a tape measure hanging off his belt. They would step through the afflicted area, then gaze at the blueprints, occasionally asking a question or making long, ominous, "hmmmm ..." sounds. I would hover uselessly at their elbows, feeling as manly next to them as a 17th century French fop in a plumed hat, purple knee britches and a fake beauty mark stuck beside my rouged lips.
     The contractors would all troop down in the basement, for more "hmmm"ing, then check the ruined main bathroom—which, directly above the kitchen, needed to be remodeled first, since the antique iron pipes ran down through the kitchen walls. They'd depart, promising that their estimates would be faxed over in two days.
     We'd never hear from them again.
     After this happened a number of times, an estimate finally did arrive. And boy, was it a shock: $137,000. A big percent of what the house cost to buy. I stared at the paper as if it were a death notice.
     We didn't know then, as we do now, that contractors who don't feel inclined toward a certain job—and, flush with work, few of them are—will just conjure up a fantasy figure, plucked from their perfumed dreams of avarice, and see if you're dumb enough to take it. If you reject it, great, they'll grab the next job. And if you accept it, even better.
     Accepting wasn't an option. "Do you realize," I told my wife, in a hoarse, strangled tone not unlike that used by Katharine Hepburn during tenser moments in "The African Queen," "it would be more cost-effective for me to quit my job, spend six months learning the construction trade, then six months doing the work on our kitchen? We would come out ahead, financially."
     Then—thank God for small favors—a second bid arrived. This one was less than half the first, elephantine bid.
     "At least we're moving in the right direction," I said.
     We kept calling contractors—I approached a man who was in line at Walgreens after he mentioned, answering a question from the pharmacist, that he had a contractoring service. We flipped through the phone book, quizzed friends. My wife and I frequently discussed the best way to proceed—during one such discussion, I illustrated my point by kicking a pair of cabinet doors to splinters.
     I feel obligated to point out here that couples remodeling their homes should take care as to not get divorced in the process. Many a morning I awoke, kissed my wife and suppressed the urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake her violently, screaming, "WILL YOU GET SOMEONE TO PUT IN A NEW @#!$*& KITCHEN!"       
      For a while, I actually fell under the impression that it would be a good idea to, without telling her, take a can of black spray paint and write, "DON'T FORGET THE KITCHEN TODAY!!!" in 2-foot high letters across the entire kitchen wall, and refrained from doing so only because I suspected that contractors examining a room so decorated might detect a certain note of desperation and thus raise their price.
     With one guy, we got as far as a contract. Then everyone in his crew quit—the plumber, the electrician, the carpenter—and he came by with new guys, who seemed very young, and gazed around at our house, confused and apprehensive, not unlike a small child going into a barber shop for his first haircut.
     So we fired him, before work had even begun and—talk about happy endings—finally hired a group of Russians who amazed us by actually showing up when they were supposed to and doing work.
     That was three weeks ago. They've been working every day. We settled on a double pump contract where they'll do the bathroom upstairs first, then, if it seems not too much of a botch job, they'll continue with the kitchen. Work has not been flawless—the bathroom is between the boys' two rooms, and they've managed to burst through the walls into each of them. But they seemed to understand that this was a bad thing, and agreed it should be fixed, probably by them.
     People speak of the inconvenience of having your house worked on—the tramping workmen, the dust, the noise—but in truth, it's heaven. I'm so happy they're here, I can live with the rest. So far.
    
NEXT: To permit or not to permit

                                       —Originally published June 16, 2002

Hammered and Nailed # 1: Battle rages on home front

   It's August.

   Time for us all to curl up in a hammock somewhere and not obsess over all this "what's happening in the world right now" stuff. The scant percentage of the news that actually matters will still matter in a couple weeks, while the information not really worth knowing, well, we'll have dodged that bullet.

Logo by Jack Higgins

     But rather than leave this space blank for the next fortnight, which would tarnish the solemn promise implicit in "Every goddamn day," I decided to resuscitate a strange and I hope amusing tangent of my newspaper career. 
     A dozen years ago, my wife and I began to remodel our kitchen. It was such a time-consuming, gut-twisting, wallet-wringing experience, that for a year I wrote a bi-weekly column that I dubbed "Hammered and Nailed," chronicling the process.    
      The purpose was selfish, to make the experience less of an ordeal, for me, to turn annoyances into material. This wasn't a disaster, it was humor! Readers liked it, and still sometimes mention the series, even after all these years.
     Anyway, here is the first of 14 of my favorites, selected from the 24 original columns. They'll be running over the next two weeks, since those who enjoyed it the first time might enjoy it again, and those who missed it originally—it ran deep in the paper, in the Sunday Homelife section—can read it for the first time. 
         

     As with most wars, the epic struggle to remodel our old house began with high spirits and misplaced optimism.

     My wife and I rushed — like college boys whooping to the recruiting station — from the lawyer's office, having just mortgaged the next 30 years of our lives, straight to the gray 1905 Queen Anne on a half-acre lot in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook.

Smelled worse than they looked.

     On our knees, in sweaty joy, we took box cutters to the horrible, befouled shag carpets, which were ugly in the 1970s and now, after a quarter century of neglect and dog ownership, were hideous, worn and marinated in dog pee. Gagging, we tore them out and lugged them, as heavy and sickening as corpses, out to the yard. The fight was on!

     That was mid-June 2000, nearly two years ago. Since then, the initial opening campaign—something I actually thought, in stereotypical fashion, would be over by Christmas — has devolved into the kind of brutal trench warfare that I believe is not atypical of remodeling.

     "If it was pristine, we couldn't afford it," I had said, of the rambling 5-bedroom house, with a turret and a spire and a front porch. "It's like buying a mansion on the installment plan." 
     Genius, or stupidity.

     The house did have good qualities: a block from the train station, a block from the school. An enormous sugar maple filling the front yard, not to mention a scotch pine and a black walnut and a scoop magnolia that fills the front windows with fat pink blossoms in April.

     Of course the floors were not exactly level, which made walking through certain areas of the house like hurtling through the corridors of a schooner on the high seas. The basement was a horror show of decay and bulging walls. There were electrical worries and plumbing worries and the kitchen could have been the setting for a Stephen King novel--counters warping away from the peeling walls, a broken stove, a merely decorative dishwasher. The bathrooms, three of them, I thought of as Bad, Worse and the Black Hole of Calcutta.

     But I had a plan: We'd remodel! Having once previously painted and sanded a home we were also living in, which is like having your shoes resoled while you are still wearing them, we vowed to do as much work as we could before actually moving in.

     As is typical in war, we started by committing our crack troops—the Steamway Cleaning Co. (why a company named Steamway in fact strips floors is one of those metaphysical remodeling mysteries). Proven in past campaigns (they had sanded the floors of our condo in the city), they briskly stripped away decades of neglect off the charming oak and maple patterned floors downstairs and solved the dog pee problem upstairs without actually having to cut out parts of the century-old floor, and treated the wide red pine boards so you could actually walk on them without leaving dents.

     After that, our attack bogged down. Dave the Painter took nine weeks to finish the interior, then informed us, as I made out the check for eight thousand bucks and change, that he would have done the job quicker, but we were so nice he shifted focus to nastier, more demanding clients. Then he hinted I might feel like tipping him. I didn't.

     On Labor Day 2000, we actually moved in. An hour after Dave and his crew left, the water heater cracked open. We were consumed with a variety of similar woes, such as electrical outlets so worn that one burst into flame when our 4-year-old sat against it. But we dealt with those problems, keeping our eye on the Grail: to begin work on the kitchen.

     When my wife seemed locked in a sort of paralysis as to how to proceed—Home Depot? architect? contractor? what?—I told her that if work wasn't begun by January, I would take a sledge hammer to it myself. She laughed, and said, I'd be free to. Ridiculous to think we wouldn't begin by then. That was January 2001. We still haven't begun. We have not drunk from our glassware, which my wife kept packed away.

     The delay was partly our fault. Like many generals, like Napoleon riding into Russia, we failed to understand the scope of what we had undertaken. Our first encounter with a kitchen designer will illustrate the problem: We went to his place of business, a small, cheery storefront crammed with cabinet mock-ups and stone countertops. Soft music burbled. The designer glided out to greet us—long hair, twinkling blue eyes, work shirt, a Kris Kristofferson of the kitchen. He spoke of artistry, and smiled warmly. This, I thought, is the guy. Our kitchen is as good as built. Ushering us over to chairs, he folded his powerful, Bridges of Madison County hands and asked about our budget for the job. It was a question I never considered, but my wife had an answer ready. "$25,000," she said.

     Boom. We were back outside in a moment, as if by magic. Kris didn't grab us by the belt and give us the bum's rush out the door, but the result was the same. We stood on the street, blinking at each other.

     So, as with war, a certain escalation was required, a ramping up from peacetime innocence to martial readiness. An architect was finally hired, which would have been a more significant moment had it not taken considerable hounding and whining—I learned my lesson from Dave the Painter—until, three months and $1,800 later, a set of rolled blue prints was delivered. Now all we needed was someone to build it.       

NEXT: The Quest for Contractors.   

                                    —Originally published June 2, 2002. 

Fly Boys and Fly Girls

     An artist can burst into your awareness in a moment, a single flash, when you turn the corner in a gallery and come face to face with something fantastic. Or, more typically, they tiptoe gradually into your brain and quietly pitch a tent in a dim corner and go to work.  
     Artist Hebru Brantley caught my attention in stages.
     First there was the work, appropriately. His Fly Boys and Fly Girls, in bright shades of red and blue and black, if black can be "bright," or at least "glossy," set out last summer on the plaza south of Tribune Tower. When I bumbled across them I assumed they were some kind of manga cartoon character convention. They looked vaguely Japanese, they had a certain tilt to them, a hesitation, almost a shamefacedness, as if about to dip their heads and say, "Hai!"
      Then I noticed a few Chicago style stories on Brantley, the sort of "hip-hop tagger does well" panegyric you see in Chicago magazine and Splash, and realized he wasn't cartooning in Tokyo, but working right here, in Chicago. Maybe it's provincial of me, but it mattered that he was here, in a loft in Pilsen. Call it the Ed Paschke effect.
      Another outdoor installation by the Field Museum was vandalized a few weeks ago by goons. Maybe that sparked the sympathy necessary to draw an artist closer to you,  the backstory of the snubs that the fancy, trained French art world delivered to Henri Rousseau that makes Le Douanier's folksy jungles all the more beloved. It was embarrassing that such a thing could happen here, although I suppose, with kids being gunned down every other day, you can't shed too many tears over fiberglas statues. I remembered the name: Hebru Brantley. Quite a name.
      Then Friday, I had a half hour to kill between lunch at The Gage and walking over to Navy Pier to do my radio bit with Eric Zorn on WBEZ. I was standing in front of the Cultural Center, and realized I hadn't gone in for a couple years. So I popped inside and poked around. 

      Upstairs, an exhibit by Brantley, "Parade Day Rain," complete with full size parade float and flying statues, packing a bigger punch set against the rococo splendor of the Cultural Center, like a bust of Mickey Mouse set on a Corinthian plinth. Normally, artists' explanations of their concepts are a careful mix of hogwash and bullshit. But I liked how he contrasted the hoped for success--the parade--with the disappointment of rain. I relate to that. The yin/yang of optimism and pessimism. 
   

     Maybe it's the comix sensibility. Unlike many artists, he isn't pretending to have the secret of life smoldering in the center of his palm.     
    “The paintings don’t take themselves very seriously,” he told Chicago magazine. “I’m a kid at heart. But they still have some of those darker undertones.”
     As being a kid invariably did, if you're honest about it. If it were just the paintings, I'm not sure I would have noticed Brantley. But something about those sculptures. Their bright hues. Their numbers, which seem to follow them even when they're standing alone. Their smoothness, the palette. Maybe it's the goggles, a reflection of the old Tank Girl comic which was one of the better New Age characters.
     I also like these masks. They have a proud innocence, a kind of purity, which could also be said for Hebru Brantley, a young Chicagoan who is catching the world's attention.
     The show is free, and runs through Sept. 23.