(After last night's struggle to fulfill my writing pledge, I thought I'd try something different -- getting the blogue entry done... in the morning! Before I realize what I'm actually doing...)
Quiet here. I've just gotten back from delivering John to Newark Penn Station, where he's meeting up with an old grad school chum, and spending the day in Princeton. The drive down and back was surprisingly quick and easy -- I'd expected lots more school kids.
Now I'm watching the roofers climbing all over my neighbor's house. An oak tree fell on Ray's sun room, during the hurricane, and I guess he figured he might as well have the whole thing redone. I'm amazed and troubled at how nimbly these guys walk around on that pitched surface, only occasionally seeming to struggle to get their footing. My ankles already ache, and I'm only watching. They're taken all the shingles off, and I'm not sure if they're replacing the underlying plywood or not.
Owning a home has made me aware of, and interested in, things I never gave a thought when I was renting. I've become a big fan of insulation, for instance. When we first moved in here, some ten+ years ago now, and were beginning our first winter, we were disappointed with the heat production on our second floor. John and I agreed that it was probably due to the age of the radiators. I also felt that the basement was really too warm. I checked at a local plumbing and heating firm, and the guy there -- who could have sold me something -- said pretty much the same thing. 'As long as the heat's in the house, you don't have anything to worry about,' he said.
I wasn't totally convinced. So, I went to Home Depot and bought some paper-backed fluffy stuff -- I'm not sure what it's really meant for -- and spent most of a day (I think) wrapping all the hot water pipes leading to the upper floors. Not only did it look neat -- my neighbor John Carter came in and said it looked like an Eva Hesse installation, which thrilled me because it was such a compliment, and because I had a neighbor who knew who Eva Hesse was -- but the second-floor radiators instantly began to pump out heat, and the basement was noticeably less tropical. What a triumph!
Then I took on the dread dropped ceiling in the kitchen -- an eyesore if ever there was one, in my opinion. I got more fuzzy stuff, and, well, stuffed it up between the network of ugly squares of whatever it is, and the original plaster ceiling at least six inches above it, and again, a radical difference. Which difference was explained when I got to the center of the room, and found that, above the new light fixture, there was a gaping hole in the old ceiling, and I could see quite a way into the spaces between the joists for the second floor. A perfect source of falling cold air...
Finally (at least for the purposes of this post), I decided to insulate the space under our current den/TV room -- which had formerly been a porch, I think, and was built out over flat dirt, instead of sitting over the basement. To get in there, I had a choice of crawling out a tiny, two-pane basement window (getting stuck was almost an inevitability, I thought), or opening up the back porch floor, and crawling in under there. I opted for the back porch option.
What an excellent, sturdy and stubborn floor I had to rip a hole into! Tongue and groove, nice and tight. I made a large enough hole for me to scramble through comfortably, and then put on my dirtiest tee-shirt and jeans, as I would be belly-crawling from the porch, under a support beam, and back into the space under the den. The plan being to staple more paper-backed insulation between the floor joists (I sort of love the word 'joist' -- for some reason, it makes me think of a highschool friend, and a medieval contest of valor...), and thus converting the den from a little TV-holding icebox, to a real, snug den. And I was, seemingly, willing to lie on my back, on bare dirt, for hours, to achieve this goal.
The first thing I did was to get stuck, flat on said back, between said bare dirt, and the 6" square beam of (!!!!!) chestnut (!!!!!) holding up the back wall. I'm not exactly sure how I managed to compress myself, once the panic attack had subsided, but I got out, and took a moment. Then I took another moment. Then I took a Xanas, and watered the back yard, until I was in more of a devil-may-care, I'm-not-going-to-let-some-stupid-chestnut-beam-stop-me mood. And I tried again, and slid right through, and began my self-appointed chore, armed with staple gun, bright lights, a barely effective box cutter, and rolls of fuzzy stuff. (John, by the way, was out of town for something or other -- I always try to schedule things like this when he's away, otherwise he tries to talk me out of it) I don't remember how long it took me -- a couple of days maybe, working from deepest to nearest the escape route. As I stapled, I fantasized about digging out all that dirt, and extending the basement -- the lovely, dry, heated basement. Ten buckets of dirt a day? About a million years, I figured. Plus, where would the dirt go? The garage was already full...
And, in addition to fulfilling my insulation goal (which, as it happens, made negligible difference -- it's still like an icebox in the den. But it keeps me awake while I'm watching.... whatever it is), I made two discoveries, one entailing more work, and one entailing a small death.
The work one arose because I discovered that the first floor joists hadn't been capped off at the back wall. (I don't actually know if they're supposed to be, or if you say 'capped off' when you're talking about this, but I think it sounded pretty good, actually) Which meant that, if some industrious or terrified or rabies-ridden rodent -- or even a raccoon -- made its way in under the back porch, it -- or more likely, they -- would have complete access to the cozy spaces under our living room floor, for instance. Where they might, oh, die, for instance, leading to much unpleasantness.
So I bought a couple of sheets of that bright pink insulation, and cut 'boards' of that, and attached them somehow (the details are a little blurry. The Xanax, you know), after stuffing some more of the fuzzy stuff into the opening, for good measure. I felt so virtuous.
The death involved the mysterious plant that I found growing in near-total darkness, and near-total dryness, kind of in the middle of the space under the back porch. I was amazed that it was there, along with a bunch of newspapers from the 1970's - worth zilch on Antiques Road Show -- and a lot of laundry lint. I couldn't really tell what sort of plant it might be, to have the gumption to come to life, and persist in its minimal growth, in so inhospitable a place.
I gently dug around it, and down below its spindly roots, and cradled it in my hand as I brought it out into the light of day, and potted it in nice, nutrient-bearing soil, and put it in a shaded place in the sun-room -- no need to shock the poor thing. Where it proceeded to die in about three or four days. I still don't know what it was. Probably an omen I'm too dense to read correctly.
I think that's all my insulation narrative. For the time being. I'd still like to take out our ghastly dropped kitchen ceiling -- it reminds me too much of the waiting room in the West Orange Social Security office, without quite as much smoke residue -- and restore the room to its proper height. Which would mean insulating around that gaping hole where the light fixture goes. But that'll seem like mere child's play. Oh, and I've also begun filling the space under the den floor with plastic garbage bags stuffed with bunches of old newspaper, to keep the cold air from rushing under the room. But I stopped doing that after a while -- and now I've got the window blocked off with hanging body-like things all over the place -- done in, once again, by my own artwork.
Well, the roofers are still at it -- now they're working with a circular saw and a hammer. The guy with the saw has what looks like the innards of an old sofa cushion, to kneel on as he saws. I wonder what they think about as they work. I wonder if they think about how far they are, now, from where they were born -- most of them are from Central America, I think -- and how different their lives would be, if they could find work in their own countries. Things like this, when I take a minute to think about it, tell me that my life is part of an imponderably complex human tapestry, with all these disparate lives, all these separate systems of existence, converging for a few minutes, or a day, or 26 years, to create mutually-impacted experiences no one of us could have alone, nor, I think, predict. If our individual lives left visible light trails, I wonder what it would look like, from up above?
Well, time for more coffee, and the plan for the day. If any. (Or, more likely, the plan to avoid the plan for the day, is more like it) As long as it doesn't involve crawling under the back porch again, it'll be (mostly) all good.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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