strike that

progress

The first three hundred dollars I’m sinking into my new house is all going towards books. When I do something, I like to read about it. I hiked around the Balkans with a backpack full of everything that had ever been translated from Serbo-Croatian into English, and now – against all common sense – I am hauling book after book into the house I am trying to move out of. It started during the search with Jane Smiley’s In Good Faith, a novel about a realtor. Now that I have a real place it’s graduated to real stories: essays and memoirs and lots of how-to.

There are even more kinds of home improvement books than there are home improvement shows on cable. Many of them are not for me. There are a lot of books about building a new house, for example, which I am not doing. And at the other extreme are the books that claim to be about renovation but are actually about selecting some nice new vases. I’m looking for the ones right in the middle: the foundation and the roof stay; the stuff in between is reinvented.

I’ve also been looking for books about sustainable home improvement, but these are harder to come by than I’d hoped. If I were building a straw bale house or moving to the country to live off the land, there would be a mountain of resources at my disposal. But as far as sustainable renovation for my existing urban home, I’ve been pretty disappointed.

So this is the list so far. For recreational diversion and commiseration while this goes on, I chose The Walls Around Us (Dave Barry style) and Gutted (subtitled Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life), and a book called simply House. For general how-to I picked up Black & Decker Complete Home Repair and Home Depot Home Improvement 1-2-3 and, because I couldn’t resist, Bob Vila’s This Old House from 1980. For environmental philosophy I got Green Remodeling and for decorating philosophy I got Time Life Book of Repair and Restoration, and for getting ahead of myself I found Good Green Kitchens and Plan Your Bathroom. The latter has a three-part section like those flipbooks for kids where you match one person’s head to another’s torso to another’s legs. Now I can do that with tile.

I am realizing rather quickly that this project is not going to happen in slow easy phases as I’d imagined. If I’m doing new electrical I’m taking down the walls, and if I’m taking down the walls I’m doing new plumbing, and when I do new electrical and new plumbing I need to know where the sinks and outlets and lights are going to go. So I have to set out with the finished product in mind. And while I do all of these things I have to fix the more egregious shortcomings of the house. Its lack of gutters, for example, and its collapsing chimney, and its leaking furnace. Sometime in my future I foresee a large and multicolored flowchart.

In the mean time, fair reader, I have a feeling this is about to become a house blog. I usually move blogs for new subjects, but since the whole house undertaking is about staying put, perhaps I’ll give that a virtual go as well. Half of strike that’s name came from hitting nails, anyway (in New Orleans) – and the other half came from throwing in the towel on plans with a boy. What is it they say about the more things change?

Probably nothing relevant.

posted by tortaluga @ 9:02 PM