Twenty years ago, when I bought the house in which I currently reside, I had big ambitions for the mansion I would create out of that little bungalow.
The mansion-making began almost immediately after my cat and I moved in. I tore off old eavestroughs and replaced them myself. Not being an eavestrougher by trade, the job produced inevitable results: they leaked for most of the next 18 years. I do, however, have this advice: Never join two lengths of steel eavestrough directly over your front porch unless you want visitors to take a good shower while they ring your front doorbell during rainstorms.
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The roof, too, was self-replaced with major help from family. It performed admirably for a long while until it, too, gave up its will to fight the water.
A crowbar and a pitchfork were put to use tearing up the asphalt driveway. I rattled the fillings in my teeth during a couple days on the end of a jackhammer, when I tore up the concrete sidewalks. They had to come up so I could dig down (with the help of a backhoe) to the home’s foundations so the weeping tile, which had done most of their weeping into my basement (while I did my weeping into my pillow at night), could be replaced.
The garage floor was ripped up and replaced. Two outdoor lights were attached to the garage. Two old trees were cut down. The lawns were completely torn up and reseeded. I ruined my elbows, knees and back laying a few thousand interlocking stones around the place. I took off broken siding and replaced it. Got new windows in the basement. Painted the whole place. Put up shutters I made myself.
And all of this was accomplished under the watchful eye of an “old guy” who lived next door. The very watchful eye. Hardly a week went by without a visit from my neighbour who wanted to know what I was doing, and who spent a fair amount of time watching me do it. For each new project, he had questions about what the reason for this change might be and what the expected outcome was.
Sometimes, I think, he felt a little sad, especially when the jackhammer was busting up concrete. Other times, I’m sure he was skeptical about the good sense of what I was doing. A lot of this, I believe, was rooted in the fact that he had watched the house being built in the ’50s and knew the family who had lived there for most of the time since. I think, in the end, however, that he figured things turned out not too badly next door.
Life’s gotten busy, family’s come along, and the big building projects have pretty much ground to a halt. It is a cruel fact of life that you have to pay for building materials to do any building and the building budget is low.
My neighbour’s been gone a few years, now, and his house has been through a couple of ownerships. A “young guy” has it now, and there is something vaguely reminiscent about the way he’s going about things next door. New roof, new front-porch addition, new siding. Lawns torn up. Topsoil added, new grass planted. Sidewalk ripped up and replaced with interlocking stone. New patio and yard lights.
And like I had, he’s got an old guy who lives next door, watching his every move. Wondering why he’s ripping that off. What’s he taking that up for? How’s that going to look when it’s done? Where’s he getting the money for all this? The scene is all so familiar. The aging sidewalk superintendent overseeing the young man’s labours.
Except this time, the old guy …
Is me.
©2005 Jim Hagarty
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