DIY? Bah Humbug!

Everything in our house starts with the best of intentions. And, I suppose, that’s true for most everyone, right?

For instance during my wife, Jackie’s, wounded chair interventions when she would bring home stray chairs with broken legs and busted bottoms, she was seeing what they could be. How they could be salvaged off the trash heaps and brought back to life as a useful member of the household. Alas, she was aware of my distant carpentry skill history and just knew I would be able to heal the wounded seat no matter how far gone or shattered its life had been.

And there was a time when I probably could have done just that. But knowing how way leads to way, I foreswore returning to such menial tasks that carpentry offered. I turned from that wonderful profession (in hindsight) and moved to the more fragmentary and somewhat less rewarding field of the newspaper reporter.

And so I would try to explain that fixing a chair leg or bottom or back is not the slam-dunk it appears to be. No not indeed. So many times the new leg is too long, or, worse yet, too short. And if it’s turned on a lathe, I never seem to get the dimensions quite right. But maybe that’s why I don’t do carpentry work anymore, hint hint.

So when we decided that the carpet on the second floor had to go to be replaced by wood, about two years back, it was a no brainer to think it was a DIY project. You know, do it yourself? Ha! We could do it, we led ourselves to believe. It took virtually no time at all to strip the old carpet from the floor in one of the four bedrooms. Zip zap. The really nasty carpet was up, the foam padding was keel hauled, and out went the carpet strips and extraneous staples. The room sat waiting for phase 2 to begin, but several intervening years got in the way.

It wasn’t that we didn’t want to do it. In fact, to prove how much we were in favor of the project, we stripped the carpet out of a second room. I too sat waiting, bare subflooring gasping for some kind of cover—any would do at this point, really. Part of the problem was we didn’t really know what kind of flooring we wanted. Another part was the trickledown effect of the enormity of the DIY project.

We needed to know just how much flooring would be required. Enter the assistance of our longtime friend, Doug Harris. Doug had been around floors all his life. It seemed to me that if anyone could help us with this project, Doug would be the man. DIY went out the D O O R when the preliminary figure came back 970 square feet. That’s 10x100, 20x50, 25x40—anyway you looked at it installing the floors wasn’t DIY it was J O B.

As most people hope to do when faced with such a dilemma, we cut a deal. Now this is where things get really interesting. We offered to tear out the rest of the carpeting, and move all the minor furniture and extraneous collectibles we had accumulated over the years. Two men and a table saw took care of the rest.

In all honesty, Jackie did most of the work involved with this project. I helped some, but I am sure I didn’t help as much as I probably should have. So, as the DIY part of our new floors swung around, Jackie started to realize that we had collected a bunch of stuff we probably didn’t need. In particular, we had a whole wall full of books that we had collected from throughout our years together. There were left over books from every stage of college, odds and ends picked up along the way, and those 50 cent yard sale specials that we just knew we would have the time to read—once we finished the floors.

I suppose the best term for what happened in our house is purge. Jackie set a stack down on the bed, I went through it like a scythe to fresh wheat. The Letters of Archibald McLeish—gone like a bad poem; The Life and Times of T.S. Eliot—out like the contents of the cat litter box; 20 Great Philosophic Ideas—thud; and on and on. When the sickle made its final pass, I was left holding a mere 15 books. Gone were five boxes chock full of all kinds of research, English, Science, Math, you name it books.

I’m not really sure that The Goodwill store appreciated all of its newfound book wealth. Perhaps, out there, some graduate English student can use a copy of The Letters of Archibald McLeish, I don’t know. What I am pretty sure of is that the floors are done, the stacks have been cleared, and I sit in my woodshop pining for a broken chair.