gravity of the situation

Devoted mje followers will surely remember a prior post titled “things I hate,” a list which seems to grow longer by the day. I really have nothing to complain about, which I hate, but the #1 thing I hate is gravity. Not to rehash the whys and wherefores of my antipathy towards ole Isaac’s big ass law, but folks, gravity is what makes your scale read at least five lbs. more than you actually weigh. Hate that.

Gravity, I guess, is kinda fundamental. Everyone understands it, even babies who sit in their highchairs, stare you right in the face and slowly and deliberately slide their bowls of mashed carrots off the edge of the tray. Or drop their favorite toy, knowing you are going to sprint over and put it back in their tiny grimy hands before they blow a gasket, and then wait until you are settled back down again to complete their elder siblings’ science projects, to drop it again. And laugh. It really never gets old.

So the other night mje was vegetating in front of the idiot box and was intrigued by a program about a guy who buys old buildings around charleston sc that are dilapidated, derelict, condemned, and restores them. It’s an incredibly noble cause, reclaiming long abandoned architectural gems that display beautiful features seldom used in contemporary buildings. On the episode I watched, he had bought an abandoned “queen anne craftsman style” house that was originally built in about 1890 and had been uninhabited for 60 years.

It was exciting to see him pulling down the plywood from the windows, discovering the unusual interior spaces, uncovering long hidden bead board or flooring, etc. But if the televised version of events is correct then this guy don’t know shit from shinola. Look, mje does not claim to be a master builder, although I did construct a fabulous “camp kitchen” out of half inch ply back when I was a girl scout leader (yeah, I know, hard to believe that anyone would want mje to be responsible for their gaggle of tweens and more confounding still, that I would ever volunteer to do such a thing) which was a marvel of carpentry, however it weighed in at about 75 lbs and took up almost the entire back of the car so we used it once and left it on the sidewalk.

But I digress, this guy shows off re-staining wainscoting (way too dark, in my opinion), painstakingly piecing together old beadboard, subdividing rooms into walk in closets, yada, yada. So he’s about halfway into restoring the interior when he and his pal start to pull up some linoleum flooring and discover water damage and rot. Only then idoes it occur to them that there just might be termites lurking within the structure. As mje has stated, I ain’t no builder, but I ain’t no dope neither, if you live in the south where termites (and roaches) rule the roost, you’d probably have a notion that an abandoned wooden house with a leaky roof would be party central to both of them. And sure as shootin’, they called the termite guy and the little buggers are all over the place. Pause for extermination.

Bugs gone (but ARE they really?) time to install a contemporary kitchen, complete with a cement countertop which weighs in at 150 lbs per square foot (keep this in mind for later on). Done, looks great!!! Then onto finishing out the master bedroom and bath, putting pretty tchotchkes all over the place, you know feathering the nest.

So the renovation is complete on the interior when the builder finally decides he might have a look see at the brick piers holding the whole shebang off the ground. Surprise, surprise, surprise the century old bricks are crumbling. oh no. So NOW the guy realizes he needs to jack the house up and replace the piers. Crank, crank crank…..alarm, alarm, alarm!!!! Everybody out of the house!!!!! Like cockroaches (or as they are colloquially, and totally adorably called in south carolina, “palmetto bugs”) fleeing under the counters when you turn on the kitchen lights, workers are blasting out of there like they’d been shot out of cannons.

And not a moment too soon. A terrific cracking sound starts, builds to a crescendo and godamn if the whole freaking front porch slowly peels away from the house and collapses in a massive cloud of dust. The guys stand there stock still, mouths agape until a piercing, profanity laced scream comes out of the builder’s mouth. WTF??????

Gee, wonder if all of that meticulous interior work could have miraculously remained intact. All the delicate piecing together of bits of beadboard and wainscoting, the patched and refinished floors, the meticulously reconstructed chimneys, the expensive and extremely weighty cement countertops….the months and months of slaving away in the charleston summer heat in an old dusty house only to have it literally brought down by gravity, oh and stupidity.

So what have we learned?

1. Termites and roaches will outlive everything else on the planet.

2. Nothing can escape the pull of gravity.

3. Before you pound the first nail, you dumb ass, you forking call a structural engineer and terminix.

sheesh