The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 420): The Bathroom Heads Into The Crapper

We spent the morning driving around to estate sales, and ended up finding Great Hill, an “Inspiration Point” like make out spot where teenagers go. I never knew where the place was, so it was weird to just end up there, especially in the daytime. And double especially considering that the only other car up there was full of old people who were probably trying to make out.

We went to look at lights at the local home stores, and had a discussion about what kind of business our town is missing, but couldn’t come up with anything that sounded like a winner. We headed over to the house and found that they had put quarter round all around the house despite us asking that they use a strip of oak flooring to cover a gap in the baseboards. That seemed minor when we saw that they had turned the bathroom from a cool idea into a 70’s nightmare by using a red-brown grout color instead of the specific color that we asked for.

I found myself getting really tired of having things done incorrectly over and over. We went home and watched 21, which should’ve been a lot better than it was. It didn’t help to take my mind off of things, and I freaked out again about the bath being done wrong. I drove over to the house in the dark to look at it again and make sure that I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t. #1GF! talked me down after I got home, but I’m at the point where I think I need to start lifting weights again because there’s way too much frustration that needs to be removed in a positive way.

Monday (Day 421): Writing

I wrote the Life Of Riley all day long and got an e-mail that the Financial Times in Germany wanted to interview me about beards.

Tuesday (Day 422): No More Dumpster?

I picked up four of the eight lights we needed at small light shop, and tried to get the rest at Lowe’s, but the ones that we wanted were out of stock. I drove to another Lowe’s, but that store didn’t even carry the light that we were looking for. The Lowe’s lights aren’t even exactly what we want, but at this point, we’re really tired of looking for lights. I wasted a couple hours of driving and didn’t get a check mark for my list.

I talked to the contractor who wanted the appliances delivered the next day. I had told him before that they take a three day lead time for delivery, but even if I could get them delivered, I wasn’t going to because of all the work that still needs to be done. I’d rather kick a dent in them myself than let new appliances get destroyed in the house. There is still plastering and painting to be done, but the contractor can’t find any good painters. I thought that was unusual for a contractor, especially considering their job is to hire workers to get a job done, but I thought it was more unusual that he suggested that I start looking for painters myself. I’ve never hired a contractor and had to contract portions of the job on the side, but there’s a first for everything. Awesome.

I went over to the house, and it was cleared of tools, swept, and the dumpster was gone. The work isn’t done, but it made it seem like the contractor was. I called #1GF! to tell her about this new development, and during the conversation, I found a soft pocket under the paint of one of our windows. The minute I touched it, the bubble popped, and a fair amount of pine sap or something came out and got stuck to everything.

While I was staring and wondering if I had to worry about what else is going on under the surface of my house, #1GF! suggested that I write problems down and present them to the contractor. I popped like that bubble, because the contractor has had a four page punch list in his possession that he hasn’t even started on. I can tell him, write it down, or etch it into a gold necklace, and I’ve gotten to the point where even if things do get done, I know that they’ll have to be done twice and end up poorly done, anyway.

As I was calming down, I was looking at the floor and noticing that they had removed the quarter round that they installed, and were trying to hide the gap of the old walls with oak flooring as we had requested. Unfortunately, they’re jamming in splinters of oak and squirting silicone caulk in there instead of removing the base board, laying a strip of oak, and putting the baseboard back.

I just don’t get it. If you know I’m going to call you on it when you fuck around, why continually fuck around? I have such a long list of more noticeable issues on this job, that I didn’t even bother telling him about how badly this was turning out. It all looks like shit, but that’s something that I’ve come to expect it on this job.

Wednesday (Day 423): Mowing, Toilets, and Doors (Oh, My)

I wrote all morning and then drove to Cape Cod Lumber to try to find doors for the house because the contractor hasn’t been able to get a set ordered in the last six months. I don’t have any idea why. I didn’t have any luck either though, because CCL didn’t have two doors in the same style in the type that we were looking for. I left there without a check mark. I was supposed to help #1GF!’s mom with something, but she was out, so I struck out on that too.

I ended up going to both Home Depot and Lowe’s to do the basic recon on toilets because I’m way past the point of feeling that it’s safe to leave any choices up to anyone working on this job. I had no idea that there were so many choices in toilets. It’s unreal. After picking out what I thought was good, I thought that I should come back later with #1GF! because it’s her toilet, too.

I went to the house to mow, weed whack, and clean up some of the glass and debris that the contractors have left everywhere. Once that was done, I started cleaning the leaves out of the window wells because they fill up with water and pour into the basement in heavy rain. I didn’t make it that far with that project, because I figured out that gravel in the wells needed to have the dirt sifted out to keep the water from accumulating.

By then it was 7PM, and I headed home to shower. Once #1GF! got home, I sprung it on her that we had to go look at toilets. We went to Lowe’s and #1GF! got overwhelmed with the choices. She’s not a tall woman, and toilets come in all kinds of heights, so I made her sit on one of the boxes to make sure the height was ok for her. You would’ve thought she was really in a bathroom with the way she jumped up off of that box when someone came into the aisle.

After an hour of comparing valves, tanks, and bowls, we picked a toilet out and bought it. It was late and there was no food in the house, so we went out to dinner. Afterward, we dropped the toilet off at the house in the hopes that it wouldn’t get destroyed before it was installed.

Thursday (Day 424): Sent the Plumbers Home

I left the house at 7:30 to go dig out the window wells because the little pictures on the weather forecast showed thunder clouds all week. Had I paid attention, I would’ve known that the little rainclouds meant 40% chance of isolated storms. If the odds of rain are less than 50%, shouldn’t you show a sun? There was no rain. It was humid as hell all day, and I was sweating like a pig.

I had to dig out the wells and sift the gravel from the dirt, but it took me two hours to clear one well because I hadn’t built an actual screen box. I was simply throwing the dirt on the metal screen and sifting out the gravel by shaking it. It was amazingly inefficient, so I decided to go buy some wood to build a real sifting box in the hopes of speeding things up.

When I walked out front, I found a crew of plumbers who were looking to hook up a faucet and dishwasher that I told the contractor I wasn’t going to bring in. I explained to the plumber why I didn’t have them, and they decided to install all the radiators. I explained that the walls still needed to be sanded and painted, so if they installed the radiators, we’d end up having to unhook them anyway. Plus, they were going to install a radiator in front of a window that was taller than the sill. I asked whether having a high amount of heat two inches from the glass would damage the window, but the plumber didn’t have an answer. I apologized, but said that there were a lot of things that needed to get done before we were ready for plumbers, so I had to send them home.

The plumber was surprised at being sent home because he said that the contractor was “hell bent” on getting the job done. Considering that things haven’t really changed in the house in the last two months, I was really surprised. I left a message for the contractor and explained what I had done and why, and asked him to call me back. I am so fucking tired of things being done out of order and creating more work, that it seemed like if the plumbers did their job, going back and fixing what needs to be fixed would get harder.

Once they were gone, I went out to Home Depot and had them cut 2 18″ and 2 24″ pieces of lumber and went home use them to build the gravel screen. I built three sides without an issue, and I must’ve nailed the final side in five times because I kept bending nail after nail on a knot. I ended up talking to the wood asking if it was “fucking kidding me” several times. It had no reply, which was probably best.

To make things a little more interesting, I split the tip of my thumb open with a good smack from the hammer. Blood went everywhere, and I immediately stuck it in my mouth to get the blood off and see how bad it was. The minute it came out, it bled like crazy, and the tip looked like a flap. The only thing that went through my mind was: “I don’t have fucking time for this. The rain is coming.” I went to the car and got a paper towel and some electrical tape and taped the thumb up and finished off the box.

I shoved that hand into a work glove to hold the paper towel in place, and finished off two more wells before quitting at 4:30. The screen made the sifting so much easier that it only took about an hour per well. By 4:30, I was tired and caked in a combination of dirt and sweat, and knew that I didn’t want to do any sort of landscaping for a living. It’s dirty and slow work with little satisfaction. The next door neighbor came out and offered me a Coke, but I refused on the basis that you don’t get a reward until the work is done. She said that she could think of better rewards than a Coke. At that moment, I really couldn’t think of any.

I had done three windows, and my nose was draining like a faucet thanks to the grass and dirt caked up my nose, but I knew that if I cleaned out one more window well, one side of the house would be ready if it rained that night. I stood there for a couple of minutes with work ethic and laziness having an epic battle for control of the situation, and eventually started on the fourth well. I got it done relatively quickly, despite taking time out to ask my nose if it was “fucking kidding me” for suddenly unleashing an unrelenting stream of goo down the front of my shirt. Like the box, it didn’t answer, which was probably best.

I cleaned up some more glass and debris from the yard and headed home. I was supposed to call and interview some painters, but I was too tired to deal with it. I showered, dumped hydrogen peroxide onto my flappy thumb, and flopped on the couch to stare at the TV. TV is generally not my first choice for entertainment, but I couldn’t think of expending energy on anything. I ended up watching a reality show about Scott Baio, which shouldn’t have been half as interesting as it was. Surprisingly, I watched episode after episode, staying up later than I should have. Damn you, Chachi.

Friday (Day 425): Window Wells

I went over to the house at 8:30 to finish cleaning out the last two window wells, before the supposed rain storms showed up. I turned on the FM radio on my phone and listened to a local pop station while cleaning. It’s always upbeat, and I don’t know the songs well enough to hate them, so it just played along. After a few hours, I knew a lot of the songs well enough to hate them, and was tired of hearing about all these people who are “damaged” or have iceboxes where their hearts used to be. When I started wondering who the hell had an icebox anymore, I switched over to classic rock.

I was working on the second window by then, and got a calls from my parents, an ex-coworker, and #1GF! right in a row. #1GF! was anxious about getting the house done and wanted me to call the contractor. I’ve just about given up on the contractor, and admitted that I was avoiding calling him because it’s seems so pointless. I said that I’d call though, so I did. I left him a message saying that I needed to know whether he was finishing the job or quitting, so that I could get out of limbo and get the job moving forward. It’s probably not a good sign that I’m leaving messages now.

I went back to digging and noticed that the windows didn’t look they were caulked on the outside and some of the basement windows were missing sills. I wasn’t all that surprised. When I finished un the last well, I decided to clean the yard a bit and cut down some tree branches. I had to climb a tree to saw one down, and it reminded me of rock climbing in the old days.

When I ran out of steam, I went to Lowe’s to look for gravel because some of the wells needed a little topping off. Lowe’s didn’t have what I was looking for, so I went to Home Depot and picked up a couple of bags. I carried them without a cart because it was like a free mini-workout to get rid of some of those built up frustrations. I don’t know if it was the weather, carrying the bags, or just not having my face in the dirt, but the ride home seemed a lot nicer than usual.

When I got back, a neighbor asked to see the house, so I showed him around. When he left, I dropped the gravel into the wells in a couple of minutes, and found that I had built up some spare energy from the nice ride through Hingham. I decided to trim one of the bushes to make the house look a little less haunted. I laughed and shrugged a lot at my trimming skills, but the bush looks better than the wild mess that it was.

As I was leaving, another neighbor called out her window that it looked good. I know it didn’t, but I thanked her for the encouragement, and said that I was trying. After almost 30 years, I’m getting the feeling that I’ve somehow moved into a real neighborhood. Hopefully, I’ll eventually get to move in to it.

I got home at around 5, and took a real shower for the second time in a couple of days. Manual labor makes a shower more of a requirement than a nicety. If you have to scrub like crazy, and the dirt still doesn’t come off, you put in a good day’s work.

When #1GF! got home, I took her over to the house to get her opinion on my day’s work, and although she wasn’t really happy about me climbing a tree with a saw, she seemed pretty happy with the results. We went to dinner at a local restaurant that is chronically understaffed, so we couldn’t even get menus right away, but it didn’t matter. We were mostly there to sit and stare out at the ocean.

The food came in such an enormous portion that I couldn’t finish it, which is rare for me on a normal occasion and almost inconceivable after a lunchless day of manual labor. They had a guy playing popular tunes on his guitar, so we relaxed and watched the people wander the beach as the sun set. It made me think that the greatest value of work is that it gives you a better appreciation for the time that you’re not working. When you don’t have a job (or love what you do), there is no definite distinction between work and play, which makes leisure time seem less valuable. By contrasting leisure time with work that you don’t like to do, leisure time seems more finite and more valuable than it would without the contrast.

Saturday (Day 426): Run Run Run (Without Any Sneakers)

We went to a local restaurant for breakfast (because I hadn’t done any food shopping all week) and then headed over to a friend’s to see his new house. On the way, I stopped the car to let a flock of geese cross the road in front of us, and they moved so slowly that I took my hands off the wheel and put them behind my head. I was smiling, #1GF! was smiling, and the guy at the front of the opposing traffic was smiling a little even though his weathered look implied that he hadn’t smiled much in the last few years.

We brought the new home owners some iced coffee and home store cards, and got a first hand look at how a house looks when it is decorated in the 80’s by someone who loves pink. The house was big and sound, and didn’t look like it needed much beyond basic paper and paint. It was also purchased, closed on, and moved into within two weeks, which seems unreal to me.

We left there to get me a pair of sneakers because I wrecked mine working in the yard all week. I found nothing at the mall, and then found nothing when we went to a big discount sports store. It’s sad. I don’t want to look like a pimp or a kid, but I’m not quite ready for the velcro sneakers yet. Do they make middle of the road sneakers at a middle of the road price for middle of the road guys? If they do, I didn’t find them.

We zipped home to meet some other friends for lunch, who we haven’t seen in six months. We gave them their Christmas presents and ate at the same restaurant that we ate at that morning. It was late afternoon, and the storms that the weather people were promising finally hit. #1GF! had to run out to babysit for a friend, so she got caught in a downpour. We watched through the window as she lost her shoe in the rain and had to go back for it. She’s so nice, that she got an “awww” rather than a laugh. After she was gone, I unloaded about the house, which I shouldn’t have done. No one needs to hear you bitch endlessly, which is what I feel like I’ve been doing a lot lately. Our friends were heading out on a quest to find a Dairy Queen Blizzard, so they dropped me at home.

I answered some e-mails, and started correcting lost album art and missing tags from my MP3 collection. #1GF! didn’t get home until 2AM, which I thought was a little crazy for babysitting. If you can’t find a sitter, and someone is driving a fair way help you out, don’t leave them at your house until the wee hours. Do them a favor and get home at a reasonable hour. And bring home tapioca and velcro sneakers that she can take home to her complaining, crotchety, old boyfriend who thinks that 11PM is a time past which only security guards and hookers are awake.

What I Learned

• I now know where Great Hill is.
• There’s a lot more to toilets than poop, flush, jiggle the handle.
• Sifting is easier if you just build a sifting box.
• I ask a lot of inanimate objects if they’re fucking kidding me.
• I somehow have acquired the habit of starting sentences with “The problem is…”
• Scott Baio Is 45 & Single is way more entertaining than it should be.
• CMT has somehow become my network of choice.
• Play seems better when contrasted with work that you don’t like.

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Posted in Leisure