Our friend Don is hard at work on our remodeling project. Thank goodness he knows how to put houses together. Now that he’s taken our family room down to the studs and started putting it back together again, I had no real concept of all the pieces a house has. And how many new pieces go into changing anything.
Insert Tab A into Slot A, for instance, only works if Tab A and Slot A exist as part of the new configuration. For example, there used to be trim around the door, and there will be trim again. But what was there before had been applied to a wall of a different thickness than the new improved wall. So Don will need to add a spacer before he can trim the door out again. Tab A still exists, but Slot A is no more. Now Tab A needs Slot A1.
Even better than the fact that Don knows about all the pieces of a house is that he knows how to make them. The flooring didn’t extend under the space where cabinets now need a floor to stand on? Not a problem. The join where two sheets of drywall abut needs to be perfectly flat to accommodate the new finish? Done. We need concrete to terraform the room to our vision for the space? Don’s department.
I asked Don if, while he’s working on a project, he ever thinks of it as a puzzle. “Only all the time,” he answered. “For me to quote a project, I have to think of how I’ll do every step. By the time I get to doing the work, I’ve already built it once, sometimes twice. It’s definitely a puzzle.”
When this project is finished, what we’ll have is a family room. It will look like it’s always been the After picture. Only folks who know what it looked like Before will realize the extent of the change. And even they will have only a glimmer of the work involved. That fact reminds me of the first change we made to this house when we moved in, three decades ago.
At the time we took possession, the foyer sported a sort of foil-like wallpaper, very similar to the kind of wrapping paper that’s too flimsy for its job. I’d peeled wallpaper before and hoped removing it would be a quick project. It wasn’t. The paper had formed a bond with the walls. We rented a steamer. At first, we squabbled over whose turn it was to try using the new tool. That didn’t last. The steamer didn’t make much difference in ease of wallpaper removal.
We kept steaming, though. Steaming and scraping, steaming and scraping. It took a long time to get the gold foil off the walls, and longer still to get the adhesive off. What did we want instead of the paper? Plain white walls. No one will ever know, we told each other, what it took to get to plain white walls. Sometimes the work is only important to the people that do it.
Don is painting the ceiling today and, while he’s hard at work, my husband and in, in fits and starts, have been working a jigsaw puzzle. We started the puzzle last Saturday when a couple daughters were visiting. One daughter and I, working together, can generally knock off a thousand-piece puzzle in a single sitting. Not this puzzle, even with a second daughter lending a hand. This puzzle we may not finish till this coming Saturday.
This isn’t important work, even to those of us doing it. It’s just a jigsaw. But the image is beguiling. The colors are pleasing. We work on it together, making measurable progress toward a shared goal: creating order of a thousand small pieces of chaos. In this, the time of the omicron variant, decreasing chaos seems a non-frivolous goal.
Tomorrow, we’ll go a step farther and help create something lovely. People have started decorating Sugarbush Woods for the holidays. Here, someone’s added a bit of color and gleam. There, there’s a miniature red helicopter. Deeper in the woods, a couple of blue spheres with white glittery snowflakes.
We’re ready to hang our little ornaments from branches, pinching the hooks tight so the adornments will withstand the buffeting of winter. We’re delighted to be part of a community buoying itself at the end of the year. This is part of the human puzzle, a mosaic made of bits of hope. Now is not just CoVid, it’s Advent.
10 December 2021