This Damn House – Maintenance

Americans have always been good at projects. We can go to the moon. We can take down a foreign dictator. We cannot maintain anything. The space program and our ongoing snake pit in the Middle East are testament to that. And this is where I find myself. I am in the fourth summer of ownership of The Farm and the initial clean-up work I performed is in a maintenance stage.

I must digress. I lived for four years at the address 820 Academy St. in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Upstairs of that glorious college apartment lived three people: a man and a woman (both crazy) and that woman’s brother (legally mentally unstable). Insofar as the brother goes, you’d be off your rocker too if you drank a case of Natural Light beer every day and listed to Gloria Estefan at top volume. Anyway, I’m talking about the couple.

Every spring – and sometimes multiple other times throughout the year – they painted everything in their house, their porch, the doors, and whatever else may or may not have been nailed down. See, cleaning the house is maintenance, but painting is a project. They weren’t foolish… they were good red-blooded Americans. I see those traits deep within me, for painting covers up all the old sins.

(I’m clutching at straws here to defend the fact that in four years, I will be writing about how painting everything every year is such a gas! I can see it isn’t working. I shouldn’t have lead with the story about the nut-job college neighbors. Live and learn.)

So the backyard needed maintenance. Years ago, before PVC, vent stacks for toilets were cast iron. I have one of those in the back of the house, shooting up off of the first story bump-out and going above the roof line. That, now, is a nice clean white. It matches the stucco wall in the back, which also got painted white this spring. This left the deck.

The first project I had in this new house was to scrub the deck with bleach and stain it. That has all worn away. And what luck that I had a pristine day to do the cleaning and staining: 95F and full sun.

I have never liked sun glasses. I wasn’t wearing them this day.

I was on my hands and knees staining the deck itself after two hours of carefully staining each spindle on the railing. I didn’t feel thirsty. I wasn’t sweating either. From what I saw, I was doing a bang-up job. After I went inside, my eyes didn’t adjust for around five minutes. I thought nothing of it and promptly blacked out on the couch for a few hours from dehydration.

When I regained consciousness, my eyes were in incredible pain from being completely burned from the sun reflecting off of the bright white deck (I probably should have stained it last year…). I peered outside in the failing sunlight to see that, apparently, a rabid marsupial had stained my deck and all the work I thought I did was a dream. Then my neighbor reminded me that it indeed was I that did such a terrible job at covering wood with stain. The second coat (the next evening) went on much better.

Lessons: 1) a fresh coat of paint works well if it is done right and 2) never stain a deck in the sun. It’s also a good idea to drink a lot of water in the summertime.

Now I need to get back to the rest of the foundation work. Nothing bad could possibly happen there…