I figure the local kids consider me to be an old guy. Maybe not a geezer (and maybe, since I ride a sport-bike, not too pathetic), but definitely climbing the hill if not yet over it. Nevertheless, I don’t think I fit the description of an “old timer.”

To qualify for that title, you need to live in a town longer than most everybody else. I live in a place that had a 90-year-old mayor, so my two decades here don’t cut it. Elmer, who wears suspenders and runs a tire shop/pool supply store down the road, would agree he’s an old timer. If I were to walk into his shop and call him that, he wouldn’t take offense (although he’d probably have some smart-ass rebuttal, and nobody can slap you down like a witty old-timer.)

Maybe I’m getting old, but I can’t remember  which local old-timer told me how – back in the day – they regularly used open flame to strip paint from the exterior of houses and barns. For all I know, it could have been Elmer.

It’s a method that’s dangerous as hell because sparks and flames can easily ignite the stuff stuck up underneath clapboards. Even electric tools can do that, especially heat guns that blow heated and sometimes flaming bits of paint into those tinderbox crevices.

Stripped With Flame, Slathered With Beige

So I tend to leave open flames to the old-timers, the fellows who know how to re-build a house, should they accidentally burn it down, and can do it between fertilizing the back 40, installing a new transmission in the pickup and catching a few 11-pound bass with homemade lures.

However … yesterday, on a whim, I grabbed my MAPP torch, squeezed the trigger and pointed the 5,300-degree flame at the door to the attic which I’d been stripping (outside) with my heat-plate.  The nasty old paint nearly flew off the surface and, by keeping the flame moving, I never left a burn mark. Now that’s cookin’ with gas.

Already pleased with the time I’d saved, I found yet another reason to smile: I decided to paint the hidden (attic) side of the door with the same beige paint from the Lowe’s bargain bin that now graces my oil tank and served as food for my twisted blogger brain just the other day.

The sun was out and I was inspired to write a poem about the joys of discovering ways to make use of cheap beige paint. It seemed that God was willing me to tackle this creative endeavor, but finding words to properly rhyme with “beige” proved impossible.

Having cringed at repeatedly spending $40-per-gallon for paint, I was putty in Lowe’s hands four years ago when the local store wheeled out a cart of orphaned paint. You’ve probably seen them: gallons and quarts that – for some reason – were never sold.

In many cases, the paints are of custom-mixed colors that didn’t match samples supplied by prospective buyers. Maybe the store employee botched the order so that what was supposed to be “Golden Delight” turned out to be “Dijon.” In any event, the customer wasn’t happy and the rejected paint was shoved on a shelf or cart next to a can of “Skyscrape” that was supposed to have been “Sea Frolic.”

I can’t help but poke around these carts of lonely latex. I rarely buy anything. However, there came a day in 2006 when I fell off the “don’t be stupid” wagon and grabbed a couple of the godforsaken gallons. I think they were $5 each. What a deal!

That logic gets me in trouble at the supermarket. I come home with a big jar of mayonnaise, purchased mainly because it was on sale for 10 cents off and because I once ran out of mayo while making tuna sandwiches so I have this fear.  Now there are four large jars of mayonnaise in the pantry and a nearly full jar in the refrigerator. And I don’t even like the stuff.

That’s about the same feeling I had for the el-cheapo gallons of paint I bought at Lowe’s on that thrifty day in 2006. Once I got them home, I realized I didn’t particularly like any of them. I’d wasted $5 that could have been used to buy mayo. Or cranberry sauce, something else I keep purchasing but never use.

On Sunday, I decided to begin cleaning the basement. Cue the marching bands. Launch the fireworks. Turn up the Alice In Chains. I decided to clean the basement.

A Hue Once Known, By Crayola, As "Flesh"

I was doing a decent job, filling contractor bags full of stuff and sweeping dark places where brooms had rarely ventured. Then I took a good look at the oil tank. My God, it was one  appalling, beastly, foul and hideous monstrosity.

At one point in its life, the tank boasted a sparkling silver coating. But the decades weren’t kind. By Sunday, its top was flaking and oil-stained. It’s front was adorned with decals for motorcycle products. So down went the broom, out came a paint scraper and over I went to The Permaladder Sagging Shelves O’ Paint Cans.

Appearing as sad as the day I bought it was a can of generic flat beige latex wall paint. It called to me. All my life, I’d dreamed of owning a beige oil tank. Haven’t you?

I used a small roller and I didn’t waste time. I must say, that inexpensive paint stuck like glue to the dirty metal. In 10 minutes, I created something that resembles a very large pig, a super-sized  chunk of turkey-loaf or a small atomic bomb suitable for desert warfare where, it seems, everything is painted with beige paint bought for under ten bucks from the Lowe’s bargain cart.

I am coming to terms with sanding by hand. I don’t think I’m ready to say I enjoy it, but my tolerance is increasing.

With the exception of dirt biking, I generally don’t like activities that create dust. That places sanding, even the relatively docile practice of doing it without power equipment, solidly in the negatives column. But you have to look for the good in those things you initially loathe, so that’s what I’m doing.

Enter Sandman

I’m focusing on the smooth-as-glass surface I’m leaving behind, not on the arm muscle fatigue. I take the time to glide a finger over the wood now and then.

I’m focusing on the satisfying way I can erase scratches, caused by overzealous paint removal, just by bearing down a little and adding a couple more strokes.

Most importantly, I’m not viewing it as a race. I am taking breaks. The difference this time is that those breaks are being kept as just intermissions instead of  ”that’s enough for today” work stoppages.

Only a little more to go and then I can go get the primer. Yahoo! Oddly enough, priming bare wood is something I do enjoy. It’s like putting a warm blanket around a shivering little kid.

“There, there now, naked door-frame. Doesn’t that thin layer of white feel nice?”

A Day at the Beach for the Box Elder Bugs

I don’t care if you’re harmless. I don’t like you Mr. Box Elder Bug.

Actually, I have nothing against you as an individual. But you never walk alone, do you? There must be a thousand of your look-alike brethren piled atop each other on my once clean lavender clapboards. It happens every spring, when the sun warms the ground or the wood or wherever you and your kind hide out during the winter.

I go outside expecting to be pleased by the sunshine and warm air. I am greeted by squirmy scrums, knots of little black and red ovals or convoys of you guys, lined up nose to tail, sunbathing.

Making matters worse, you never stay outside. You always find a route indoors where you head right to the windows and try to get back outside.

When the sun sets and you retreat to your hidden hives or nests or insect apartment complexes inside my walls, I see Box Elder Bub poop stains on the siding I spent years stripping, sanding, priming and painting. And your poop, once dried, apparently is made of permanent ink.

So here’s the deal, Mr. Box Elder Bug: I’m holding a can of insecticide. It’s the kind that can shoot several yards. It will probably stain my paint worse than does your excrement, but I’m in an “I don’t care” mood. You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya’ punk?

Suddenly it’s spring and that means I can no longer use the “it’s too cold” excuse to not clean windows. It was a bogus excuse anyway because I decided it’s easier to clean these old double-hungs by just taking them apart and doing it inside the house.

That’s a big benefit of having taken the time to strip all the old paint that kept the sashes from sliding up and down. Not only do I now have windows that work, but I also can easily remove the wooden stops and jambs and, in a few minutes, take out both sashes.  It’s a lot easier than trying to clean the glass from the outside, a job that entailed dealing with ladders and screens and storm windows and running in and out of the house and asking for help.

Window Cleaning Stops Here

As I worked my way around the living room today, merrily performing a job that usually doesn’t rise to the top of anybody’s Fun Things To Do list, I came to the window with the broken counterweight rope. I admit it, part of me wanted to just clean the glass and put the thing back together without fixing the counterweight system.

I don’t like that part of me. It’s a part that lies, usually by saying, “I’ll come back and fix that later.”

So window washing is now on pause and window repair has commenced. That’s OK. I find fixing broken sash counterweights to be a really fulfilling job.  I get the feeling it’s a very, very rudimentary form of the satisfaction likely felt by surgeons.

Ready to be Repaired

You remove the screw that holds the narrow counterweight chamber cover. You reach beneath the skin of the house into that dark space. You find the forlorn iron weight that one day plummeted to the bottom of the chamber when the rope broke. You cut the proper length of fresh, new rope. Let the counterweight healing begin.

When the weight is re-connected, when the panes are clean and all the parts are back in place, I’ll be able to enjoy a sparkling view of the spring. And when spring turns to summer, I’ll be able to lift that sash and feel the helpful pull of the dangling iron cucumber as it does its simple-but-ingenious part in bringing a cool breeze into a hot room.

A Ladder Jack

I was a full-time news reporter in September 1999 when Hurricane Floyd paid a visit to New Jersey. As such, I was expected to be ready to hop in my vehicle, during the most deadly phase of the  wind and rain, to capture the story for our readers.

The fact that Hurricane Floyd turned out to be little beyond a lot of rain out here in West Jersey might be the reason I don’t remember it. However, I DO remember making an unauthorized Floyd-related departure from the news bureau right before the storm arrived. I left, without securing the bureau chief’s approval, because I was worried about my ladders.

In 1999, my home renovation attention was focused on the house’s expansive northeast wall. I’d erected a RubeGoldberg combination of extension ladders, planks suspended by ropes, ladder jacks and pump jacks. I used the ropes to lift the planks off the ladder jacks so that I could raise or lower the jacks.

It's a long hike to that northeast roofline apex

It was quite an operation, one that included the use of a super-long extension ladder (possibly a 40-footer) that enabled me to strip and paint the tippy-top peak of the house.

As I sat in the bureau, listening to warnings of hurricane force wind approaching the area, I grew increasingly nervous. The northeast side of the house happens to be the side that includes the main electrical service. I cringed at the thought of strong winds whipping around the house, grabbing my ladders and flinging them into the power line.

I also cringed at the thought of toppling planks and jacks smashing the windows or flying into the neighbor’s nearby house.

So as the sky darkened, I raced home in my Ford Aerostar. For all the newspaper knew, I was at the local supermarkets interviewing panic-stricken housewives as they stocked-up on milk (because we all know dairy cows stop providing milk during a hurricane). Instead of taking notes at ShopRite, I was outside my house, running up and down ladders,  tying them down with any and all pieces of rope I could find.

It got windy, but not one ladder moved that day.

However, there came an evening – about six years later – when I left a ladder standing on the ( by then fully painted) northeast wall and never tied it down. As day turned to night, a summer  thunderstorm ripped through town. The unsecured ladder didn’t stand a chance. Neither did the storm window it smashed. Neither did the big, thick metal lightning rod it took out. And I wasn’t thrilled about the scrape marks left in siding as the ladder made its destruction-filled descent.

I’m grateful the toppling ladder didn’t strike the electrical line. That would have been cute. Maybe it just proves that, when bad things happen in life,  it’s often because somebody didn’t tie down their ladder. So to speak.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a right-angle in this house. Have fun searching for anything perfectly vertical or perfectly measured.

Floors should be flat. Most of mine aren’t. If a grape falls out of the refrigerator (an appliance propped up on one side not by wimpy, little  shims by fat chunks of wood) it rolls away faster than a Derek Jeter line drive to Right Field.

Nothing is square. Nothing is plumb.

Hoping to find something beyond the obvious to say about this house’s many crooked doors, windows, floors and walls (such as, “It’s just part of the charm”) I first became engrossed in several Web sites dedicated to Salvador Dali.  I wasted 30 minutes staring at melted clocks. Isn’t that ironic?

Then I stumbled upon this old New York Times story by Kirk Johnson that talked about how Johnson’s parents’ house was also full of mistakes and imperfections:

I loved that house, and what I’ve come to realize is that I loved it not in spite of its flaws, but precisely because of them, something the Japanese call ”wabi.” Howard Rheingold explores this concept in his book ”They Have a Word For It — a Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases” (Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc., 1988). The idea is that a work’s flaw — its wabi, if you will — is what gives it unity and humanity. Without wabi, a thing is incomplete, imperfect — in the end, deeply flawed. Whatever it means to the Japanese, I think it applies just as well to a sense of home.

Carpentry With Ruler Optional

Yes indeed. I don’t have to look far to find “wabi” around here. In fact, I can just turn my head as I type this and see a wonderful example of a closet door that appears to have been built by a raging drunk who shouldn’t have been near a saw. Not even a hand-saw.

The right side of this closet’s upper frame is amazingly higher than the left side. Somehow the door closes perfectly and somehow the bottom is square. It boggles the mind. Depending on my mood, it can be annoying or enjoyable.

I don’t really mind it. I just don’t get it.

A similar off-kilter situation exists in the door from the foyer to the living room. I’ve spent a significant amount of time just staring at this thing with its one side higher than the other. I mean, it’s ridiculous! Was that door installed by Mr. Magoo?

Wabi Overload

I try to rationalize by telling myself the crazy angles are just the result of 200 years’ worth of structural settling. Gravity takes a toll. The house has poor posture in places. Maybe the wood shrunk on one side only. Maybe the wood expanded on one side only. Maybe the floor is sinking. But why, then are the doorframe sides (relatively) vertical?

Ignoring the way they can make me a little crazy, the imperfections of the house are OK. They do add to its uniqueness and charm.

It’s all good, until the time comes to sell the place. Then I’ll have to brush up on my knowledge of Japanese philosophy so that, when a prospective buyer stops in his tracks and stares at The Door Built By The Drunken Carpenter I can convincingly explain that a house without wabi is deeply and horribly flawed.

I admit it. There’s something wrong with me: I’m way too sentimental for my own good. Sentimentality is fine and might be endearing, but only up to a point. If a man gets misty-eyed when he looks at old pump jack equipment, it’s safe to say he’s running a quart below the dipstick.

The Poor Man's Scaffolding

I explored this personality flaw today while visiting a small, unheated room off of the basement, a room that came to be known as “Sam’s Room.” The area is stuffed with stuff, including six pump jacks and 12 pump jack pole supports.

Sam was a stray Alaskan Malamute we took in. He was sweet but had a propensity to pee indoors. Sam was big and so were his urinations (is that even a word?). So when he decided to water a Christmas tree, Sam was relegated to the room that now bears his name.

Anyway, Sam’s long gone and so are the days of me using multiple pump-jacks to scale the sides of the house for exterior paint restoration. But when I spotted the pile of old pump jacks this morning, I had to  furrow my brow, bite my lower lip and shed a tear.

OK, I didn’t really shed a tear. I actually reminded myself that I should put the things up for sale on Craigslist.

Nevertheless, I do have fond memories of my adventures on those shaky pump jack-supported planks. I’m not a particularly brave guy, but I showed some real bravura at times, especially when the jacks lost their grip on the homemade 4-by-4 wooden poles and dropped the plank a few inches before successfully grabbing the wood.

Pump Jacks in Their Glory Days

It’s been several years since I last used the poles and the jacks. Some of the poles, which were just staggered 2-by-4s nailed together, remain intact. They’re shoved beneath the Post Office. Others were cut up for firewood. They, and the jacks, did a wonderful job allowing me to work in long, horizontal sections, moving  slowly, on wobbly 12-inch-wide planks, down big chunks of clapboard.

So, here’s a shout-out to my old helpers: Hey there, pump jacks. Love you guys.

A large snowstorm shut-down school for a couple days leading up to the weekend. That meant my son was home which, in turn, meant paint-removal couldn’t take place. Even though he’s at school now, he won’t be there for long because it’s an early-dismissal day.

I’m using the available time this morning to keep pushing forward. I’ll be warming the heat-gun momentarily. I’ll be putting on my tattered jeans and see-through old running shoes. I’ll be strapping-on the respirator. This work will be done before March becomes April.

I need to set that kind of goal, especially for interior restoration jobs. When the weather warms, my attention inevitably turns to the exterior. I can’t stand working inside a house when it’s warm and sunny, especially while in the annual throes of Spring Fever.

The last time I worked on these upstairs doorframes I timed myself. I think it took a half-hour for me to strip one of the vertical sides. If I don’t take too many coffee-breaks this morning, if the phone doesn’t ring, if the electricity doesn’t go out and if my arms, already weary from shoveling snow, don’t fall off, I should easily finish the one I started a week ago.

One thing is certain: If I wasn’t sitting here writing about working, maybe I’d get some work done.