20) Skaterz, Haterz, and the Holy Floor

You had some difficulty at first. When was the last time you put these on? Were you thirteen?

“It’s like riding a bike…” you tell yourself. Except that now you’re in your 40s and a fall is a bit more difficult to recover from these days. You loosen the laces and cram your foot in. They’re your size but they feel much tighter than they should be. No worries, you’re going to make them work. Slowly you bring yourself to a standing position. You have always been surprised by how much higher off the ground you feel whenever you put these on… “that much further to fall?” Your brain suggests.

“Mommy?! What are you doing!!” Your middle child wants to know.

“Well… hopefully not breaking my face…”

He laughs at that, “You’re funny Mommy.”

You weren’t really joking but you can also understand the humor. Slowly you slide your right foot forward; you glide easily across the wooden subfloor. Next your left and you’ve moved almost two feet from the chair. You’re wobbly… like that scene from Bambi when he steps onto the ice… but you also haven’t broken your face so…

A few more steps and the muscle memory starts to kick in: those young teenage days at the Roller Rink with friends… the disco ball on the ceiling, the loud music, a large crowd of teenagers, parents with their young children, some older folks… all skating to the music in an endless loop. Now though you’re in your “house” and you have roughly the same amount of space as the old rink.

Your youngest has come into the sanctuary and asks if she can put on some music.

You tell her yes, she grins and puts on “Brand New Key,” one of your favorite songs.

“I roller skate, I ride my bike, ain’t got no car…

Don’t go too fast… but I go pretty far….

For someone who don’t drive…

I’ve been all around the world…

Some people say, I’ve done alright for a girl…

Oh I’ve got a brand new pair of roller-skates…

You got a brand new key…

I think that we should get together

And try them out to see…”

The kids are all there now, gliding along the sanctuary floor on their skateboards, zipping back and forth, careful not to throw you off balance. You’re a little less wobbly now… this whole roller skating thing is coming back to you… and you’ve got a ridiculous grin plastered to your face as you pick up speed, the sound of the skates, the skateboard wheels, and your phone’s playlist bring the old church to life. The acoustics in here are incredible.

You wonder if anyone else has ever roller skated in this grand room… or rode a skateboard? You have to laugh to yourself when you think about the master craftsmen who erected this beautiful building… “I bet they never thought they’d see a roller skating lady zipping under their soaring white oak ceiling…”

When Jackie walks into the room and sees you and the kids gliding through the massive space she tells you that she’s got to get a pair of skates tomorrow. “Definitely,” you say… “This is a freaking blast!” And it is. It’s a bit of fun amid all the weeks of work you’ve already put into this place.

***************************************

David is out looking at sheds. Jackie is outside cutting one of the felled trees she took down into manageable chunks for the city to haul off. You’re just about to go outside and see if she needs anything when you catch Jeremy out of the corner of your eye. You can’t hear either one of them but you can tell that she’s trying to work and Jeremy is doing the Jeremy thing: chain smoking cigarettes, making small talk, and watching us try to work despite his constant interruptions.

You figure you’ll give it a few minutes and if he’s still out there pestering her, you’ll call her inside and rescue her from the small talk you know she despises. By the time you’ve come back downstairs with your fifth pail of fresh water that you’re using to mop the layers of thick dirt and dust out of the entryway, Jeremy is gone and Jackie is tossing logs into a pile.

“So…” you say… because you love to tease her about the parade of men that never seem to leave her alone… She takes out her earbud… “HUH?” She asks, a bit too loudly.

“I was going to ask you… I saw you talking to Jeremy…”

She rolls her eyes… “Yup.”

You chuckle… “Did he tell you that he could be your ‘Ace in the hole’?” An older man back home had told her that when she was trying to enjoy her breakfast in peace and the two of you have joked about that line ever since…

She laughs… “Actually no.”

“So he didn’t ask for your number then?”

“He wanted to know where you were.”

You’re not laughing anymore, “Shut the fuck up.” You say incredulously…

“Yeah… he wanted to know if you ever take off your heels and work…”

“What in the absolute fuck??” You say in stone cold shock…

“Yeah and that’s when I put my earbuds back in and walked away, I can’t stand when men do that shit…”

“If I take my heels off and work! Oh that’s fucking ripe. The guy who watches us work all day while smoking bummed cigarettes… That’s… that’s fucking something for sure….”

“Tell me about it.”

“Un-fucking-believable…” and now you’re both laughing.

This is definitely going to be one of those lines you know you’ll be revisiting… kinda like the whole, “Ace in the hole” thing… “Do I ever take off my heals and work…?” The audacity!

****************************************

“The floor is fucked.” It didn’t need to be said… you’re stating the obvious and you all know it. There’s a long pause as you all survey the fucked floor.

“So… what are we thinking?” You ask David and Jackie, breaking the silence.

The three of you are standing in the basement. David and Jackie had removed all the old drywall and framing, and when you pushed the heavy old dresser out of the way to get to the wall behind it, you all see another problem. The hits keep coming. The basement was supposed to be a quick fix: clean up two little spots of mold on the south wall and then frame the basement out into three bedrooms and your art studio and the dining area and a playroom for the kids… but as you began removing the moldy drywall, you kept finding more mold.

A few weeks later and David and Jackie had pulled a literal six tons of old insulation, drywall, two walls of two by four framing, old iron pipes long ago decommissioned, and a slew of other odds and ends out of the basement. They hauled the old materials out, pushed it uphill - an incredibly difficult endeavor, and then unloaded it all into the dumpster that sat just about as far as it could sit from the demo site. The basement was still nowhere near close to being done. The old plaster and concrete on the north and south basement walls were so damaged from decades of water intrusion that they were crumbling and loose.

David showed you how to find the messed up spots… tap, tap, tap, tap… he went along the walls with a hammer… there was a difference in sound between the compromised and intact material. It was ever so subtle but the bad concrete and plaster had just a touch of hollowness to the tap… “That’s because the old mortar is ruined and there’s a gap between the stone and the wall. You can hear the gap…” and you could. The solution had been that all of the damaged plaster and concrete would have to be removed. You hadn’t considered the difficulty and time it would take to remove all the old material… hours upon hours, upon hours, weeks, of chiseling away… Jackie’s phone propped up on an old shelf or dresser, music echoing through the massive basement, dusty and tired, the two of you used hammers, crowbars, chisels, sledgehammers, and sheer determination to take off both little bits of concrete and satisfying (though far too few) huge pieces of the crumbly material that fell to the floor with massive thuds. Ching, ching, ching, ching, THUD, ching, ching, ching, ching… Weeks of chiseling and still there was so much to do.

And now? After you had heaved the old left behind dresser, some drawers still filled with old tools and pvc plumbing parts, you noticed the floor… it was sagging badly right where the dresser had sat.

“It’s going to have to come up.” David sighs.

“Fuck. More work.” You grumble.

“Ok.” Says Jackie. You’re glad that she’s always up for a longer to-do list as your optimism wanes with each new “fucked” you unearth.

The water damage had not been confined to the walls alone… no… years of dripping had eaten away at a bunch of the old joists, some of which you were able to break apart and squeeze water from with your bare hands. “Fuckin-a” you muttered when you and Jackie had finally gotten down to the joists. “These are so fucked. Now what are we going to do???!!” You were a bit panicked at this point.

“We’re going to put in new joists.” Jackie says matter of factly. David later echoes the same response: new joists…

“We’re going to have to hire help for this one Vaness… there’s no way that just Jackie and I can get the new joists in…”

“You, Jackie and I…” you add…

David looks at you, “No offense Vanessa, but like I said, there’s no way that Jackie and I are going to get these joists in place…”

“It’s the heels, huh?” You joke, your sneakers beat to shit… Jackie laughs…it’s the joke that you knew would keep coming. David snickers…

“No but for real Vaness, this is going to take several big guys to help us get the joists into place.”

Jackie nods in agreement, “They’re really heavy. Really heavy.”

“Ok… well then… where do we find a bunch of big guys that want to put joists into our fucking floor pit?”

“Maybe you can put on those heels of yours and lure some in…” David jokes.

You roll your eyes. Jackie and David laugh. “For real though, we’re going to need help for this…” he says.

“Maybe we can hire the Amish?” You offer.

“Maybe,” David says, “In the meantime though, we’re not there yet… we need EVERYTHING out of here, all the old plaster and concrete removed, the messed up flooring gone…”

You interrupt his train of thought… “And if we’re going to waterproof paint these walls and put in any type of sump pump or drainage in the crawl space… that’s going to have to happen before we start putting shit back together…” you add.

“Yup,” he says, “We’ve still got a ways to go before we need the Amish… or whatever men you manage to lure down here with those heels of yours,” David laughs.

“Well fuck… let’s do this Jackie,” David leaves and the two of you get back to work on the concrete…

Chink, chink, chink, chink, chink, chink… THUD… chink, chink, chink…

Jackie’s phone plays music in the background:

“To the windows… to the wall….”

Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz are the current the soundtrack to your laborious project…

“MAKING ALL THIS FUCKED UP CONCRETE FALL!” You sing through your mask…

“All CRETE, CRETE, Motherfucker!

All CRETE, CRETE, GODDAMN (Ah God what?)!

All CRETE, CRETE, Motherfucker…

All CRETE, CRETE GODDAMN…”

Chink, chink, chink, chink, THUD… a massive chunk of concrete falls to the ground,

“Ooooh that was a big one,” Jackie says, a huge piece lying by her feet.

“Nice,” you manage… trying not to think about how much was still left to go…

ALL CRETE, CRETE, Motherfucker…

ALL CRETE, CRETE, Goddamn…

How it started… (see those ‘screened’ in areas flanking the window? It took us a while to figure out what they were, but once we started tearing everything down we realized that those were installed in the early 80s as a way to let the leaking walls get some airflow and hopefully stay dry… Spoiler alert: didn’t work. We give them an ‘A for creativity’… and an F- for solving the problem).

How it’s going… A close up of the window area from the above picture’s right hand side (massive hole pit not pictured - other wall)… Still a lot more concrete to remove but on the positive side the bare stone walls look beautiful. This will be a gorgeous space when we’re done. Decades of water damage is a helluva thing to contend with.