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.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     As something of a connoisseur of the lumpish, hideous mounds of fiberglas and metal scattered around the downtown area, purporting to be modern art, I have to admit that I don't despise this glob of shiny junk as much as I hate, say, the Dubuffet jammed into the tiny plaza in front of the Thompson Center.
     Of course, this has the benefit of being hidden away inside a building, in a place where the general public seldom goes. I also only saw it once, fleetingly, just in time to snap this photo a moment before I saw the stern sign warning everybody not to dare take pictures. So I only got this one, rather close-up shot.
      Which is just as well, because you've been solving these puzzles with too much abandon. In fact, I've never stumped you yet. This is the last Saturday puzzle for three weeks—I'm taking a two week hiatus and running 14 installment of my 2002 series, Hammered and Nailed, chronicling the endless hassles of installing an new kitchen. Beginning Monday. So I'd like to stump you, if I can, as a parting present to myself.
      Where is this thing? The winner gets lunch at Harry Caray's with me in September—my lunch with previous winner, reader Ed Bass was a lot of fun, and the kind people at Harry's, perhaps charmed at the antique, newspapery thing I was doing, picked up the check, which was also nice. Please post your answers below. Good luck. 

Does the name "Amara Enyia" ring a bell? It will.

 

     Precious Quinn had never heard of the woman who walked into her drama class in the basement of the Austin Community Resource Center Wednesday  and stood watching their scenes, then was introduced by teacher Arraon "Skippa" Hixson.
     “My name is Amara Enyia,” she began. “I live in East Garfield Park. I work in Austin. I met Arraon a few years ago. Arraon’s been doing this work in theater for years, I always respected, always enjoyed it, and I am running for mayor of the city of Chicago.”
     The three dozen teens applauded.
     “I wanted to say a few words to encourage you,” she continued. “As someone who remembers, not too long ago, when I was your age, I know what it’s like. I know what it is, in the community here, and I want to encourage you, all of you, to do what you’re passionate about, and not to let anyone tell you anything is impossible.”
     Enyia is certainly taking her own advice, as the only opponent of Rahm Emanuel who is actively campaigning (former 9th ward alderman Robert Shaw’s efforts seem limited to announcing his candidacy last March. He doesn’t even have a web site. Karen Lewis is still curling her toes around the edge of the diving board, gathering her courage).

Amara Enyia

     Not Enyia. She has campaign buttons, a web site. I tagged along with her and was pleased to discovered that, unlike the typical marginal eccentric who feels compelled to run against a powerful if not popular Chicago mayor, she is neither a crank nor a fool, but a thoughtful, grounded community activist, one of six children of Nigerian immigrants, whose only obvious sign of unbalance is the apparently sincere belief that she will defeat the mayor in February.
     “I fully expect to win,” said Enyia.
     Then again, Rahm keeps saying that he’s going to make CPS the best school system in the nation, so maybe a quixotic hunger for the impossible is part of the job description. 
     “People are really looking for change,”  said Enyia. “No baggage, Authenticity. Things we don’t associate with our elected officials. A fresh voice. Fresh energy.”
     What has Rahm done that she wouldn’t have done? What has he failed to do?
     “He did not articulate a clear vision for Chicago,” she said. “His Chicago is very polarized, very divided. Entire neighborhoods feel ignored, like they’re not part of the city.”
     We certainly felt that in Austin, where the YMCA abandoned its decaying building, which community leaders now try to run on their own. We looked in at the most crowded volleyball game I’ve ever seen: I counted 24 kids on the cacophonous brick-walled court.
     “Everybody’s scrambling for the scraps,” said Robbie Wilkerson, who runs the center.
     Enyia is short on specifics. When I asked about the pension crisis, she talked about finding inefficiencies and mentioned the will-o’-the-wisp of a financial transaction tax, which isn’t quite the same as saying the city will hold bake sales, but is currently illegal under state law and might not bring in enough if it weren’t, since traders vow they’ll move to the Cayman Islands first.
     She spoke of the need “to show every individual, every neighborhood is valued,” but I wondered if she realized that many voters see politics in literal black and white — is she not the black candidate to Rahm’s white?
     “The younger generation is less beholden to the identity politics that have prohibited groups of people from working together collectively in the past,” said Enyia, 31. “That unifying message resonates more with us. Our generation isn’t looking for the quote-unquote ‘black candidate.’ It’s looking for the best candidate.”
     Pretty to think so. Every time she insisted she is going to win, I heard Sydney Greenstreet’s voice, as Signor Ferrari from “Casablanca,” saying, “That would take a miracle. And Rahm Emanuel has outlawed miracles.”
     Still. Stranger things have happened. The city is honoring Jane Byrne, who beat a sitting mayor as her first (and last) electoral victory. I have no idea whether Amara Enyia will end up even running a credible campaign — she has, she says, a few thousand dollars in her campaign chest, compared to Rahm’s millions. But she is a former high hurdler at Crete-Monee High School, and nothing makes someone dig for their best effort like hearing footsteps closing in from behind. You don’t have to want Rahm sacked to think that a real contest in February would be better for the city than a cakewalk over Bob Shaw. Whether Enyia makes Rahm sweat will depend on how much she can inspire people like Precious Quinn.
     “I like her,” said Quinn, 19, adding that the violence in her neighborhood made her “about to give up.”
     But Enyia offers hope, she said. “I’ve never seen anybody with her strength.”

The pen and the wrench

    My wife is busily equipping our older boy for his relocation to college at the end of next month, packing boxes to be shipped off to California. While I have been urging her to practice what I call the Buy-Things-There method—they have Targets and Office Depots in Los Angeles—the fact is there's only a day or two after he arrives before he has to start classes, so in practice, my philosophy will be refined to Buy-Big-Heavy-Things-There.
     Thus my wife showed off this little mesh cup filled with pens, which she was charmed with for its beginning-life-afresh quality. "I bought him this metal cup!" she announced, proudly. I admired it, but noticed that one of the pens was very different than the others—positively wrench-like.
     "I got it at the dollar store," she explained. "The college recommends you provide them with simple tools. I got him a screwdriver too."
     To be honest, I can't imagine a circumstance where my scholar would be prompted to tighten a bolt. I'm not sure he knows what bolts are or that they occasionally need to be tightened. My fault. Still, I was pleased that she had included the wrench, and double pleased with its juxtaposition among the pens. As somebody who manipulates words and thoughts for a living, I have a natural affinity for the nuts-and-bolts physical world, and believe that our general praise for academic excellence we sometimes give the realm of tangible stuff short shrift. I have heard many, many kids, including, sadly, my own, brag about their good grades, but very few—okay, none—brag about building a good chair. I don't know if he'll ever use the little wrench in his cup of pens, but I'm glad it'll be sitting there when school starts, reminding him, subtly, of the quiet, unassuming presence of objects.
     "You're your father's daughter," I said to my wife, a high compliment. I was thinking of 14 years ago, when we bought the house. Her father showed up out of the blue, and gave me a gift. It was a cordless electric drill, the first I ever had. What, I remember thinking, is this for? It wasn't my birthday, it wasn't a housewarming gift. It wasn't wrapped. It was, he knew and I found out, something I would need, a lot. Most practical gift anyone ever gave me, I used it continually for a decade until the drill eventually expired in my hands. My wife cried when we got rid of it. I bought another just like it, because I knew, every homeowner needs a cordless electric drill. 
     Love is many things, but giving people the tools they'll need before they need them is as good a definition as any.

All told, I prefer my wasps as metaphor

     I’m a cautious person, so nothing bad ever happens to me.
     Mostly.
     I’ve never broken my arm. I’ve never lost my wallet, or accidentally set myself on fire, or any of the accidents and happenstance that seem to afflict so many people.
     I’ve developed rituals to help prevent bad things from happening. Stepping out a cab I pause before closing the door and scan the seat, to see if I’ve left anything behind. I suppose that creates a different risk—the cabbie driving away while I’m holding the door, tearing my fingers off, a reminder that trying to skirt one peril sometimes puts you in the path of a worse one, like somebody who jumps away from a speeding bicyclist into the path of a truck.
     But in general, being careful pays off.
     It must be genetic. My father was always a very cautious man. He would no sooner ride a roller coaster than take heroin. My older son, when he learned to walk, would mutter “keh-ful, keh-ful” as he gingerly placed one foot in front of the other.
     But even a careful person manages to bumble into harm’s way, eventually.
     Such as Monday night. Guests were coming over after dinner.  My wife suggested a fire. This being a cool summer, we’ve had a lot of fires in the fire pit in our back yard—a dish of bronze set on a cast iron base that people admire as if it were some exotic accouterment, even though it cost 50 bucks.
     Anyway, lots of fires, going through lots of firewood. The pile was almost gone after I stacked wood up for the fire; down to kindling and one half hollow log, a curving piece of what had once been a large catalpa tree that blew down, years ago. Picture an arc of bark, maybe a foot wide and a yard long. I looked at it, and thought, “I can break this apart and use it to feed the fire while our guests are here.”
     So I stepped on the log, hard.
     It broke easily because of all the wasps living inside.
     For a guy who has trained himself to immediately blurt out quips on the radio, the thought, I’m being stung by wasps was actually slow in forming. I think I was halfway to the house, operating on some limbic fight-or-flight response hard-wired into the cerebellum, before it consciously occurred to me that something bad was happening.
     I burst into the kitchen with a shriek and a cloud of wasps—okay, two or three—in hot pursuit.  My wife, who has her own reflexive instinct, that motherly ability to shift instantly from the mundane to full crisis mode, took charge, ordering me to strip off my shirt, while the younger boy went after the wasps with a fly swatter.
     “Windex,” she decreed, and within three seconds was spraying me with the blue substance on the bites, which were limited to my legs, arms, torso and face.
     “This … really … hurts,” I hissed, arms out. I had often used the term “jamming my arm into a wasp’s nest” to describe the reaction to a column. Now I see what an exaggeration that was. Right wing revanchist trolls have nothing on actual wasps.
     I thought the whole Windex thing was a joke propagated by “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” and said words to that effect.
     “It’s the ammonia” my wife explained, hosing me down. It did feel better.
     Actually, it’s a placebo, I later found.
     “Windex is just folk lore,” said Dr. Anju Peters, an allergist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “Rubbing with aspirin, copper, none of those has been scientifically studied. There is no data. For a local reaction, ice is best.”
     Peters said that the important thing is, if you have trouble breathing, or feel lightheaded, or your throat is closing up, call 911 immediately; 50 people a year in the U.S. die of anaphylactic shock from insect bites.
     My wife asked if we should go to the ER. I asked myself if I felt as if I were dying: no, we’ll ride this out.
     The boy for some reason stood gawping at one of the wasps as it progressed across the kitchen screen. “Kill it!” my wife cried
     “No,” I said, reaching for the swatter. “Give it me. He’s mine.”
     I slapped true, and the evil thing fell among the drained dishes. Distinctive black-and-yellow stripes — a yellowjacket.
     The funny thing is, despite the utterly random nature of the mishap, even though it didn’t involve any particularly risky behavior — I stepped on a log — it bugged me that I let it occur. It seemed to mean something. Human nature. People have the tendency to assign meaning to random fate, whether viewing their good luck as somehow being an earned reward, or bad luck coming as a kind of punishment. Neither need be true. Sometimes stuff just happens.

   
Photo -- mayflies, not wasps, at Put-in-Bay, Ohio