Month: April 2021

Many years ago I had a visit from my brother who had recently redone his kitchen.  He had done most of the work himself (he also put a 2nd floor on his house) and I confess I had gotten pretty tired of his constant talking about the minutiae of all his adventures in home building.   So to shut him up I drove him down to the Breakers in Rhode Island.

If you have never seen it, it is a mansion built in the era when the 1% had an even a bigger piece of the pie and were not afraid to spend it.   On the tour, the guide took us to the library, which is an entire room built like a leather bound book.  The guide said, “if this room were to be built today, it would cost well over $100,000.”  My brother immediately said, “You couldn’t build this room today at any price.  The craftspeople who built this room don’t exist any more.”

I think there is something to this.  I occasionally get called to work on  relatively new houses, often big ones, which I like to call “McMansions.”   And what I have learned is, while they look great from the road, when you get into the house, the bits and pieces, like the toilet paper holders, the towel racks, the locks and latches . . .  all seem to be lacking.  The hardware in the doors and windows is just . . . chintzy.  And the installations are often sub par as well.

Today I replaced a toilet paper holder and a couple of towel racks in a McMansion.  The thing about towel racks and toilet paper holders is, they are destined to get stressed.  So they can’t just be hung like a framed picture.  They needed to be really solidly attached with proper achors in the drywall.  But these items in this house were just attached with the bare minimum.  One towel rack was attached with just a screw into drywall, not even a plastic anchor.   It wasn’t even close to level either.  You know, we’re talking a 2-3 million dollar house.  And yet this is what you get sometimes.

I see other disasters in McMansions and new construction generally– one shower I saw, the grout had not been mixed properly and it was all eroding away, after just 3 years of use.  (Proper grout lasts forever.)  And don’t get me started on 3-year-old shower enclosures that are leaking here there and everywhere.

I have actually gotten to the point where I dread working on new construction homes.  Old houses from 1920, they have real dignity and self respect.  Most of the hardware still works.  The wood is hard as steel.  It feels like it’s worth fixing.

 

It’s not that I am complaining, nor am I saying my work is harder than anyone else’s, but there is one aspect of handyman work that I find to be increasingly taxing, and that is . . .   multitasking.

Back when I was a union musician, we had a system where you got paid 50% extra over scale for “doubling” on a second instrument.  For example, when the flute players all stand up and play their piccolos at the end of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” they are, in, in musician parlance, “doubling.”  They only do it for 16 bars but they get 50% more money than everyone else, for the whole show.  Other examples, a tuba player will double on baritone horn, or an oboe player will double on english horn.

Handyman work has a lot of doubling in it, but it’s different, it’s more like playing the Brahms Violin Concerto and then running over to play tuba in Pictures at an Exhibition– or running across the street to operate a forklift.   Sounds simple enough on paper but it requires an entirely different mindset.

And then there is a whole lot of production/project management.

For example, on a recent job I had to paint a water damaged ceiling  over a tub.  Ok, I need a ladder, I need a dropcloth, the painting pole, a roller (which depth of roller nap to buy??), a can  of stain blocker . . .  THEN, once done with that, I had to swap out a light fixture, and for that, ok, need a ladder, but I also need the new fixture, my multimeter, my voltage detector, my circuit tracer . . .  flute players are switching to another instrument that’s almost identical, just smaller, while I am having to enter entirely new dimensions.  AND they get more money.

I also call this working in multimedia.  It is a major grinding of mental gears.

I envy electricians because all they do all day is deal with electrical stuff.  Their work is challenging but at least they don’t have the distraction of suddenly working on a broken window, a broken deadbolt, a bad downspout, or a stuck drawer in an antique dental cabinet.  I know how to do many things, but that knowledge is all stored on a hard drive in my brain and it takes a little time to call it up to random access memory.

Just one more challenge.  Keeps the competition away anyway.