34) Set in… Wood…*

Work on the church picked up after the stairs were fixed. When you had first moved in, the renovation pace was feverish… it bordered on ‘ludicrous speed’… or at the very least non sustainable for any great length of time.

The holidays had brought a much needed slow down. You had finally come to the realization that this renovation was not a sprint, but rather a marathon… maybe even ten back to back marathons if you were being honest. You knew that this church was not going to be put back to pristine condition in months, maybe even not for a few years, and working seven days a week every week until all the work was done, was not going to do much to cut down on the renovation time frame aside from burning you all out.

While the holidays had brought work to a crawl, everything was starting to pick back up… this time at a viable pace. The weekdays were used for working on renovations, catching up on administrative work, and taking care of any appointments or errands. The weekends were spent with the kids: watching movies, playing games… normal family activities.

This week was no exception.

After David repaired the stairs you both jumped back to your number one renovation priority… the basement.

“Do you think that we’re going to have enough Killz?”

“Absolutely. I’m pretty sure that we had just about half of that five gallon pail left last time I checked…”

“And that will be enough?”

“For the eight panels we have… front and backs? Definitely.” You may have sucked at coming up with a realistic time frame for completing projects, but estimating the amount of paint that a project was going to take was definitely in your wheelhouse.

David brought the five gallon pail into the center of the basement where he had his drill and paint mixer attachment set up. The paint had begun to separate ever so slightly; there was a slight creamy discoloration that marbled the top of the primer. You loved to watch everything swirl back together into one homogenous color.

“Ok so how do you want to do this?”

“I figue we can prime the back of the boards… lean them up against the walls, then come back and do a second coat… prop them back up on the walls… and if we have time, do the same thing to the fronts and sides. I think that two coats each will be plenty.”

“Alright then… let’s get this done,” David said.

He had already set up a foldig table and two saw horses. You’d each be able to roll one of the boards then move onto the next. A week ago David had ordered the 4 x 8’ sections of cabinet grade plywood to use for the bead and batten walls over the furring strips he had installed. You had both gone back and forth trying to figure out what the best material option would be for these walls and although the wood was going to cost significantly more than the drywall, the thought would be that you could not only waterproof the backs and sides of the wood panels, but that if there ever was a reason that you might need to remove a section of the paneling, unscrewing a waterproofed wood panel was going to be far easier than ripping out wet drywall.

The boards were stacked neatly against the small wall that would eventually become one of the exterior walls of your daughter’s bedroom. David grabbed one side of the board and you took the other.

“Are you sure that you’ve got this… with your arm?”

“Yup. I can pick stuff up fine… just don’t ask me to lift it past my chest and we’re good.”

“You’re sure?”

“For fuck’s sake… if I’m not, you will know it… come on… let’s get this done with,” you huffed. Something about being asked the same question repeatedly, as if you weren’t able to answer honestly the first time really got on your last nerve. He meant well… but you couldn’t help but feel infantilized.

David shrugged and grabbed his end of the plywood, you bent your knees and got down to pick up your side. You lifted up from your legs and brought the wood up to your waist, you had imagined that it would be far heavier… as if he sensed your thoughts… “The pressure treated plywood was really heavy… this isn’t too bad.”

Awkwardly the two of you managed to maneuver the large piece of wood between the basement’s metal support columns, the paint trays, the saw horses, the card and folding table to lay one of the pieces of plywood onto the long table. You repeated the process and laid the other piece over the two saw horses. David poured some of the mixed Killz into the paint tray and you used your paint roller to wipe the inevitable drips.

David slopped on large gobs of paint and rolled it out in a thick layer. You rolled a thin layer on, pushing the primer hard into the wood’s grain. Over the years it had become more and more obvious, the two of you were complete opposites in almost everything. Sure, for the most part you agreed on important fundamentals… but everything else you couldn’t be more polar. Your favorite ice cream was his least favorite and visa versa; if he loved a certain meal he pretty much assumed (correctly) that you would hate it; when he told you that he exclusively used the left shower head you laughed because you always used the right one… At this point you both found the disparate tendencies (mostly) hilarious. Even the way you painted couldn’t have been more different… you were slow and methodical with thin even layers… he was fast and a bit haphazard with a heavy hand. You weren’t even halfway done and he was already onto the next panel.

“I can’t believe that you’re not done yet…” he laughed.

“I’m being super careful…”

“It’s the back of the panel Vanessa… no one is going to see it…”

“I know… I just like to make sure that everything has a thin even layer…”

“Well I’d like to make sure that we finish the painting sometime this year.”

“That’s fair,” you laughed.

You plopped your roller down in the tray and helped him bring the primed panel to an empty section of the room where you both carefully leaned it against the wall. The next panel the two of you struggled to walk to the saw horses… your unfinished panel made the squeeze a bit too tight and you nearly tripped over the paint tray…

“You know what Vaness… these really aren’t heavy. I’m just going to move them and if I need help I’ll let you know.”

By the time you finished your first panel David was wrapping up his second. Within a few hours the two of you had primed all of the wood on both sides with two coats each along with all of the edges.

“What were you going to work on next?”

“I figured that this was going to take us a lot longer… this was my only goal for today down here so I’m going to go wash up and start getting the tax shit together for the accountant… I’ve been putting that off. I hate administrative shit.”

You didn’t mention that you loved the administrative side of things.

“Ok well then if we’re done with the basement stuff then, while we’ve got this primer out, I’m going to prime the dog’s bed so we can finally finish that project up.”

“Sounds good!”

When you bought the church it had come with an old stove… a Hasty Baker. It looked like something out of an episode of Leave It To Beaver and quite frankly it scared the shit out of you. The whole notion of natural gas made you leery. You were terrified that you were going to blow all of you into the next zip code if you even so much as looked at a gas appliance. David wasn’t bothered at all by natural gas… he preferred it to electric for cooking. You were the chicken in the relationship and in true opposite fashion, he was fearless… this stove however even made him a bit on edge. When he turned it on the first time you had taken the kids for a walk down the block… “Just in case it blows the whole place up…”

“It doesn’t work like that Vanessa…” he had laughed.

“Well just in case it does… I’ll catch you in the next lifetime…”

When you got back you were relieved to see the church in one piece and David still earthside. “So how did it go…?”

“Well… it turns on… it works… but when you turn the oven off…” and he was laughing now… “the gas stays on… which is kind of a big problem…”

“Jesus fucking Christ… that thing NEEDS TO GO before it kills us all!”

“Don’t worry, I’ll just use the other oven…”

“And I’ll order us a new one.”

When the new oven came in it was professionally installed and the old stove was moved to the opposite wall. Jackie had listed it on marketplace and when no one had shown any interest in it, you eventually offered it up for scrap. On one hand you hated to get rid of it… all the history… but you weren’t about to become history to hang on to the past. You did however keep the base and you and David had decided to turn it into a bed for your dog. Every so often he would work on it, figuring out a way to build a wooden insert that fit just right inside the curved base with enough strength to hold at least 200lbs should all the kids decide to stand on it… When he was done and it was good and secure you had found a free queen sized foam mattress topper on marketplace and you cut it down into two thick layers that fit seamlessly inside the wooden frame. David then added decorative trim. With a little bit of down time, you used the opportunity to prime all the wood and a few rusty areas of the old Hasty Baker base.

When the priming was all done the two of you were very pleased with the results. You couldn’t wait to give the bed its final coats of paint.

The next day David continued to work on the administrative side of his business along with finishing up the gathering of all of the paperwork needed for the accountant. You took the opportunity to work on prepping the basement for paint. The thing with the basement project was that it was so misleading in regard to scope of work. There was peeling paint to scrape before you could prime… you gave yourself a few hours tops to finish that… except that once you started, you realized that there was far more scraping that needed to be done and that a good chunk of it had to be done 11 feet off the ground. Which added far more time to the job, not only on account of having to stop scraping work to move the ladder around every few feet… but because you were utterly terrified of heights. Terrified.

David climbed with the grace of a Ninja Warrior… you almost pissed your pants the first time you climbed to arm’s length of the ceiling, your palms sweating and shaky. With each climb you made, you’d cautiously pull yourself up with your good arm, one foot on the rung above, and then the other and then a long pause before you’d try for the next one. That was after you had tested the ladder by doing your best to shake it for stability before you even started the climb. When you’d get to the top of the 11’ ceiling, your palms soaked, your feet wobbly, your heart thumping, you’d carefully scrape a few inches of peeling paint, careful not to sway or move too quickly and then when you had scraped as much as you were comfortable doing without reaching too far, you’d carefully climb down each rung, making sure to watch each step you took so as not to miss one, before dragging the ladder and starting the process all over again.

What David probably could have finished in an hour, took you four and that was just one of the three beams that needed scraping.

“I’m throwing in the towel David… This is so out of my wheelhouse. I’m pretty certain I’m going to die doing this,” you had told him when he came downstairs to check on you. “Listen if you can finish all of the scraping… I’ll muster up whatever little bit of ladder bravery I’ve got… and I’ll prime everything. I think that I’ll feel far more comfortable gently painting than I do using force to knock paint off.”

David agreed and you happily put your feet back on solid ground to scrape the doors. You were happy that you could reach the tops of them while standing on a kitchen chair. One set of swinging doors however, soon turned into three additional doors, fronts and backs and when that was all said and done, so was the work day.

The next day David ran errands and you had planned on priming the doors you scraped except that you had caught the bottom of your sneaker on something in the basement’s floor. You weren’t sure how you had never noticed it before… there was a small staple sticking out just enough to reek havoc on a bare foot. You grabbed a pair of pliers from the row of tools neatly arranged on the basement floor, got down on your hands and knees and with a good yank, ripped the offending staple out. “Ooooh… that was satisfying,” you said to the empty basement. Then out of the corner of your eye you noticed another one… and then another one… and another… before you knew it you had spent several hours on your hands and knees tearing out staple after staple. “What in the absolute fuck was stapled down here?!” You had wondered… there were two parallel rows of staples about twelve inches apart. Each row spanned nearly the entire length of the basement and each row had so many staples. Their placement made no sense. Regardless… they all had to come out… and unlike a single satisfying yank out of the floor… hours of pulling up staples was very much NOT satisfying.

When you were done with that you realized that the floor, after being on your hands and knees for a good chunk of the day, needed some sanding and wood putty to fill in some of the knot holes and gaps. Two large containers of wood putty later and you still needed at least two more to fill in the rest of the areas. By the time you had finished this… it was time for dinner. You hadn’t even finished applying the wood putty or sanding it… let alone prime the doors.

This was how the week went. You’d think that you had just ‘one more thing to do’ before you could paint, only to find something that you had previously missed which started you down a whole other road of mini projects… You were adding far more to your list than you were checking things off.

Two months ago, thoroughly exhausted by the basement projects, and if you were being honest: probably really annoyed that you kept finding stuff to do before you could paint, David had a little “meeting of the minds.”

“Hey listen… more stuff keeps getting added to this basement. You tell me that this needs to be done but then we’re doing that…”

“I don’t think that’s really how it’s going… I think you’re forgetting…”

“You know what… let’s just stop right there and figure out what needs to be done, and then I’m going to write it down on this piece of wood AND NOTHING will be changed or added and we will agree to it and I am going to zip tie the wood to this column… we’re going to set this in stone…”

“You mean on wood?”

He glared at you…

“Geez… ok fine…” you had thought it was funny.

He ripped the marker’s cap off with his teeth and scrawled “BASEMENT LIVING QUARTERS GOAL,” onto the top of the piece of wood and “DOES NOT CHANGE”, on the bottom. He even went so far as to write the date on there. David definitely meant business.

Now almost two months later you stared at the piece of wood zip tied to one of the columns in the basement. A fair amount of items had been crossed off the list but neither one of you had factored in the projects within the project. For instance you needed to prime parts of the floor and walls… but you couldn’t prime without scraping, spackling, sanding, removing staples, and screws… You thought about trying to add those little projects into the big projects on the wood. Sometimes when you made your to do lists you liked to go back at the end of the day and add in all of the little parts of big projects so that when the day was done and you hadn’t entirely finished the task at hand, you could still check something off the box and not feel like an entire piece of shit…

This list with the big thick letters “DOES NOT CHANGE,” you decided to leave be. Unlike yours, the nice thing about this to do list however was that there was no finish by date… so you reasoned… you didn’t have to feel like shit at the end of the night when it wasn’t done…. “Right…” you said to yourself… “why would I opt for just one night of feeling like shit when I can instead make it into a month’s long endeavor?!”

You made two decisions right then and there… 1) you were never going to make another project list for this place without factoring in all of the projects within the project… and 2) when you finally finished this basement renovation, you were going to gleefully cut the zip ties off this piece of wood and either A) pitch it into the fire pit or B)  you would frame it and hang it up.

That last part was still left to be decided…

The List… I CAN’T WAIT TO CHECK THE LAST THING OFF HERE!!!!

Just being ridiculous here… this has GOT TO BE FUN… or I will lose my mind (what’s left of it)!

Me doing my best to avoid the wood putty…. In all fairness my knees were killing me at this point!

Seeing this place every day, sometimes it’s hard to see progress… this video is a great reminder of how far we’ve come!

At this point my to-do lists have to-do lists. When we first moved in we would say things like… “Oh we have to refinish the floor in the north tower… and we really need to fix that door in the bathroom… the old fans in the basement need to come down… did you change out the light bulbs in the sanctuary?”

Then we realized how ridiculous that system was for trying to accomplish anything (while staying happily married lol)… so I decided to make a list of what had to be done. I quickly saw that there was no way that this list would fit on a single sheet of paper… we were looking at a novella at that point… so I grabbed the roll of thick butcher paper and ripped off multiple three foot long sections. Each section was titled with the name of the corresponding room. Then I either physically or visually walked through each room and wrote down everything that I could possibly think of that had to be done. To be honest I’m surprised I’m still not working on those lists…

When I was done I had roughly a dozen three foot long lists that I taped up in the sanctuary. What I didn’t realize was that there were so many sub items to each item on the list. For example… cut down the trees that needed to come down. One line item right? WRONG. Once the trees came down they had to be cut into no longer than three foot sections and then neatly stacked at the curb for the city to come pick up. The trees came down pretty quickly… but you couldn’t really check off that item when you had a dozen maple trees splayed out in your backyard. Something as simple as cutting down a few trees turned into a good week of work. Same with the bees… “Remove bees from soffit…” seems easy enough right? Except good fucking luck finding someone to do that.

I pretty much called every bee person and pest control company within a 100 mile radius and they’d tell me that they could help until I sent them pictures of said issue… at that point they’d do one of three things: ghost me (which I took as a no fucking way are we coming out there to do that), laugh hysterically before telling me that there was no fucking way that they were coming out there to do that, or politely say no but that they would refer me to someone (whom I had most likely already reached out to - see above sentence for their responses). Meanwhile our bedroom was being inundated with bees… I’d get into bed and hear them buzzing on the comforter around me and as soon as I’d turn on the lights they’d buzz right up to the ceiling (did you know that as soon as you turn off the lights that bees will just fall to the ground… it’s instantaneous and actually pretty useful information should you buy a 130 year old church with a massive bee problem… oddly specific… I know… also… this does NOT work for bats… promise).

Then once I actually found someone to remove the bees there was the issue of getting the 65’ boom lift out here… then someone to check that the bees were no longer active in the hive… THEN there was the task of removing a 50 gallon tote’s worth of honey and comb… which you may not have guessed: was the stickiest, nastiest task ever… unless you’re a brown bear… (which good luck getting one of those guys on a lift).

So I worked on that bee removal thing, routinely removing them from my bed at night, for MONTHS from the time we started till the time we completed the removal which… guess what…? Still isn’t 100% complete because we (I mean David) still has to get back up on the lift and properly seal the bee entrance… he had just done a temporary closure before… Did I cross that “Remove bees” off the list though? You better fucking believe it… In reality though, it wasn’t a one and done kind of thing… there were so many moving parts involved. And I have since added a new line item… “Fix bee hole…” One step forward… one step back… (and let’s be honest… will be at least three other projects within that project… but I digress).

Then there’s the basement… I think I wrote something dumb on that first list I made like “Fix the basement” which is hilarious because there have been SO MANY projects involved in just that little ol’ fix. For instance on David’s wood list I believe I have paint or prime basement written on there… which seems simple enough right? Except that you can’t paint until you prime… and you can’t prime until you spackle all the holes in the walls… except you can’t do that until you remove all the nails and screws… then that turns into sanding at which point you realize that you can’t really sand until you scrape the loose paint…

You see where this is going right?

If you said, “driving me to the brink of disorganizational chaos…” BINGO. The only way I survive the day to day (I’m not even being dramatic here) is with my to do lists… and not being able to check stuff off, or having to write a fucking dissertation in order to check anything off has been… well it’s been something. And now I realize that I didn’t even mention the ceiling in all of this did I? HA!

Because guess what? That wasn’t on a fucking list… but it should have been because why the hell would I move us down here only to have to work on the ceiling and somehow maneuver the 8’ tall ladder over the sectional or the kids’ beds? What’s going on with the ceiling you ask? I thought you’d never ask… well the ceiling is an absolutely gorgeous maple planked majesty of a ceiling… except that like everything else… she has her issues. Over the last 130 years so many things have been installed on that ceiling… hooks, pulleys (there was an actual pully system up there… very strange…) derelict smoke detector brackets, that non functioning fluorescent light I took down in that last video… AND… a bunch of the planks have come loose… which is fine… unless the kids are running around upstairs and they start falling down from the ceiling in a rain of dust, insulation, and chunks of wood large enough to knock out one of the pets, or maybe even one of us…. So before we can move down here, we have to make sure that roughly 2000 square feet of ceiling… and this isn’t your typical 8’ ceiling by the way… this one is over 11’ off the ground for added fun, is secure… you know… so no one gets a plank to the head.

Is that on a list anywhere?

Nope.

Because who would think to put that on a list? “Make sure ceiling doesn’t kill anyone”… check!

Throw in my fear of heights, my fucked up arm, and David being far too busy to worry about the ceiling and you can see how something as simple as “paint and move down into the basement” could turn into a real fucker of an ordeal. Worse yet… I need to check shit off to feel like I’m making any type of progress in this shit storm… and that checking shit off need is most definitely not being met… Plus I wouldn’t dare add to David’s list… on account of not wanting a fallen maple plank to the back of the head (obviously joking there but still… he wouldn’t be too happy with my additions).

Basically that’s where we’re at… I’ve been saying for two months now, “Oh wow, we will probably be able to start painting in a few days…” and then I realize that I still have a shit ton more work to do. Like just yesterday I realized that before I could paint one of the sections of wall that some paneling and trim had to be put up… then caulked. Which means that everything has to get measured, cut, and installed… and because this area in question is directly above that one spot right near the laundry room where there is no flooring for the ladder to go… we now have to drag the ladder into the crawl space after we level out the dirt floor and put some type of wooden planking down there so the ladder doesn’t sink into the dirt and send one of us flying to our untimely demise. That’s like a full fucking day of work to replace a little piece of trim and a tiny spot of paneling.

And even then… before we can paint there’s the whole issue of cleaning the basement… which turns into so many epic side quests. First off washing the entire floor down here is a two person job that takes a minimum of two hours… and it’s not a cutesy look at me mopping tee-hee kind of cleaning… it’s a back breaking, dragging five gallon pails of scaulding hot water to and from the sink, trying to hoist them into the sink (making sure all the dishes are done and out of the sink too btw) and then scrubbing 2000 square feet of dust that doesn’t want to budge. BUT before you can even do that… (are you sensing the pattern here), you have to make sure that all of the dust and cobwebs are off 2000 square feet of the 11’ tall ceiling… and it would be ridiculous not to clean all the dust off the walls (especially the stone walls that take forever and a day to clean with all of their cracks and crevices) before you got to the floor. But hold on there cowboy because how do you clean the floor when you have to remove all of the salvaged building materials, lumber, and most of the entirety of all of your tools from the floor in question?

Which then… did you guess that that turns into a whole lot of other jobs? Because I hadn’t factored that in… hindsight… am I right? So in order to remove the wood and building materials so we can clean and paint… that turns into cleaning out one of the storage rooms so that nothing gets moldy when we move everything in there (full day of work btw in case you were wondering) and another side project of getting David’s workshop set up so that all of the tools can be put away…and none of these items are on ‘the list’… any list for that matter. Oh and let’s not forget that at this point the tendon in my shoulder is almost entirely severed and that my arm from the bicep up to my neck is more than twice as large as my other shoulder (swollen af) which means that a lot of this work is falling solely on my husband now…. Making shit take that much longer… because we’ve only got three hands at this point LMAO (don’t worry, my surgery is finally scheduled for the end of next month… because guess who finally put, ‘schedule fucking shoulder surgery’ on a list and crossed that shit off? Your gal right here did that! No side lists needed…).

Pffft…. Oh come on Vanessa… just “fix the basement” already and cross it off your list! I’m trying friend… I am fucking trying.

In any event… I’d tell you that we’re close to wrapping up the ‘list’ but who the fuck even knows how many side projects we’ve got left at this point… I could guess… but I’m willing to bet that I’ll miss a whole lot of shit… so just know that at some point… we’ll FINALLY check that whole little basement project off… but for now… I’ve got more scraping to do…