Many Hands Make More Work

Those of you who have kids know the challenges of home improvement on a more, shall we say, relaxed agenda.  Ours are 8 and 5, and they have their own ideas about how family time should be spent.  Sometimes the projects take a back burner while kids practice riding their bikes and enjoy all the other parent-child pleasures.  On the other hand, some projects just seem to go hand-in-hand with childhood…like when we get a truckload of dirt and they just want to climb all over it.  Or wallpaper removal (what kid could resist the lure of peeling those long strips, like so much sunburned skin?).

The girls have really impressed me with their willingness to work hard with us and endure some discomforts.  One-and-a-half winters without a reliable furnace, during which we kept the house at 55 degrees (the front room with fireplace could reach up to 68), they learned how to dress in many layers.  Rather than complaining, they became grateful for the things they had.  They help around the house more, and some work has become play to them.  I think it’ll be really fun for them to look back someday when the house is fixed up and realize how many projects they were involved in.

There’s more work to do, but because of that we’ve been home more, doing the work.  And so the home improvement has really turned out to be somewhat of a family improvement. 

A Brick and a Hard Place

One of our steps toward the goal of a dry basement is to properly grade the ground around the house (so water runs away from the foundation, not toward it). Last weekend we began in typical Weekend Warrior fashion, with a plan to dig out two saggy basement window wells, cart in gravel for a nice foundation, replace said window wells at proper height, cart in a few cubic yards of topsoil for the grade, spread said topsoil and tamp it down firmly. If we had extra time on Sunday afternoon maybe we would put in some plants and shrubs.

So here’s how it actually went. Start digging, bright-eyed and chatty. Dig, dig, dig. “Wow–these brick things go down pretty deep.” Dig, dig. “You know, we might have a little trouble lifting those things once we find the bottom.” Drive to Pep Boys to get a tow strap so the truck can pull out the brick thing, but first, shop for a tamper, some clay pots and other seemingly unrelated necessities, swing by the local garden co-op for a load of pea gravel, and stop for a picnic lunch in the back of the pickup. Around 2pm, rig the strap and rev up the truck, which successfully tips the back end up, but does not have the intended effect of getting the brick thing out of the hole. “Better go ask our neighbor if we can borrow his bucket loader and lift out the brick thing.” Walk down the street to neighbor’s, who is unavailable. Stroll back home to survey the progress. “Maybe we can tuck some of the gravel under the tipped end of the brick thing, and then somehow pry the front end up and slide the rest of the gravel under the front end.” Two more hours of head-scratching and hard work with no progress. “Boy, they sure poured a lot of concrete in under the brick things.” You get the picture.

In the end, we decided to smash the brick-and-concrete things into manageable chunks to lift out, replace them with plastic window wells screwed to the foundation, and replace the soil in the holes we had dug. We cleaned up the brick-and-concrete pile. That took care of Saturday. The local co-op is closed on Sunday, so we dug around the second brick-and-concrete thing and then spent the afternoon putting in a couple of hours gardening.

Paul made a couple trips to get topsoil on his way home from work this week, and we’ve spent our evenings unloading the truck and filling in that grade (on one half of the designated area). It took more than a cubic yard just to fill in the one corner, since those brick-and-concrete things were really big.

Today we had to see the new Spiderman movie, so we got that done right away (Paul was able to find a 10am showing). So, bright and early (after the movie and lunch, and picking up the kids at my parents’ who needed help moving a huge roll-top computer desk) we started in digging more and smashing up the second brick-and-concrete thing. Also on the Weekend Warrior agenda was shopping for Carmen’s birthday presents and helping my parents pick up a new box-spring and mattress and deliver it to their home. It seemed very important, too, to mosey around the entire yard seeking out poison ivy and honeysuckle with the Roundup can. Grilled out, ate dinner, put the kids to bed, and…the brick-and-concrete pile is still sitting on the lawn, and tomorrow we have lunch plans with some friends.

I’ll write again when this job is done.