“Get the scaffolding set up. I’ll be out in a minute,” I said to Drew. He knew the drill when it came to putting up siding. Jada ran after him, eager to help. The only siding left was high up, but unlike me, she was fearless in high places.
Hope and I looked over an estimate one of the cabinetmakers had taped to the kitchen window. I had selected simple, unfinished cabinets and drawn the basic plan myself. The extra-tall cabinet doors would go all the way to the ceiling and have more drawers than doors on the lower half. Pan drawers, towel drawers, utensil drawers, and bread drawers. I didn’t like digging in back cabinets on my knees. To offset the plain style, a decorative wooden hood over the stove would act as a centerpiece. I had ordered a custom marble-tile image of a Da Vinci sketch, a study of five characters in a comic scene, to set in the backsplash above the stove top. We needed a comedy set in stone.
It was a big kitchen, and since Hope did a lot of the cooking, she was excited. “This is the lowest estimate so far,” she said, measuring her excitement against my skepticism. “Is everything the same?”
“He moved the wall oven. We’d lose the floor-to-ceiling cabinet, but placing the oven away from the refrigerator makes a lot of sense.” I flipped to the computer image of the appliances. “I like it. What do you think?”
She nodded, future baking days dancing in her eyes.
“I’ll call him before I start on siding.” I wasn’t thrilled with the kitchen, but it was good enough. Ain’t no church, my dad would have said with a mock Southern twang. Honestly, I was just tired of making decisions by the armload and didn’t have the energy to linger over this one.
The electricians showed up around suppertime, smiling and barely lifting their feet off the ground. They drilled holes and pulled wire with surprising efficiency. I was actually impressed with them for once, until Hope came out with Roman on one hip. “I think there’s a problem with one of the pipes.”
I thought right away that she must mean a water line, because there wasn’t much that could go wrong with the drain lines when nothing was draining into them yet. But I’d forgotten that Tweedledum and Tweedledee were back on the job. They had drilled a hole in the four-inch sewer line running down from the kids’ upstairs bathroom through a wall in my library.
“Just get one of them couplers, cut it in half, and glue it on over the hole,” Tweedledee said. “Put the seams against the studs and the inspector will never notice.”
The proper way to fix the hole would be to cut out the section of pipe, and replace it with smaller sections of pipe and couplers to hold it all together. It was going to be a real pain, since the bottom was set in concrete and the top was wedged against the ceiling. We had no wiggle room. And the asinine suggestion that I try to slip a spliced-together fix past the inspector wasn’t going to fly with me.
“We’re talking about sewage running down a wall in my library!” I said. Okay, I may have shouted it, actually. I took a deep breath. “We’ll have to cut this section out. Splice in a repair, and retest for leaks.” Damn it was left off but implied by my tone. They didn’t offer to help do the work or pay for the parts, and I wasn’t in the mood to discuss it. I would subtract the replacement parts from their final payment and attach the receipts.
We had electricity in the house, at least in theory, but wouldn’t be able to flip the switch and use it until after the Sheetrock was up and the electrical fixtures and outlets were installed. My confidence well was shallow when it came to the likelihood that the electricians had done things right, and making repairs after they were covered up would be next to impossible.
The times when we were overwhelmed with things to do were tough, but it was always more difficult when we were waiting for other people to complete tasks. So the next few weeks had us all on edge while the cellulose insulation was blown in the walls, the final bricks were laid, and the Sheetrock was hung and finished. We did a lot of cleanup and planning inside and out, and on a hot July afternoon, we put fiberglass insulation in the ceiling of the garage so my room above would be more energy-efficient.
“It’s literally a hundred and ten degrees,” Hope said, checking her phone. “This is a deep layer of hell.”
I didn’t want to tell her that carrying the insulation rolls into the garage and setting up the ladders was the easy part. We’d bought six-inch rolls that we’d double in the twelve-inch-deep ceiling space. But the fluffy fiberglass had a paper backing on it that would create a moisture barrier between the layers if we left it there. Not good. I started ripping the paper backing off half of the rolls, marveling at first over how easy it was compared with how difficult it had seemed in my mind. Drew took my prepared rolls and started shoving them in place, layering the paper-backed layer underneath with Hope just behind him stapling the paper to the ceiling joists to hold everything up.
When I finished peeling away paper, Jada and I started our own assembly line, with her handing insulation up to me while I shoved and stapled with an electric staple gun. She also kept the cord and long pieces of insulation from tangling. Thankfully, Roman napped in the back of the shop through the worst of it.
The job would have been miserable in the dead of winter with us wearing full protective clothing. But covering every inch of skin with thick clothing in the heat would have killed us, so we bargained between heatstroke and discomfort with thinner gear than we probably should have. We were overheated and sweaty, with tiny shards of fiberglass coating us; it was the worst I had felt in my life, truly a task I wouldn’t wish on an enemy. A layer of hell, indeed.
“Worse than being tarred and feathered,” Drew said.
“I feel like fire ants are all over me!” Jada whined.
“I want to die,” Hope added, and I silently agreed with all of them.
We traded jokes for a while, then complaints a while longer. But before we were halfway done, we were too miserable to speak. Drew’s CD stopped—someone must have forgotten to hit the repeat button when they started it—and no one bothered to turn it back on. We gestured when we needed something, grunted when we smashed a finger, and rehydrated when we started blacking out from heat exhaustion. As horrible as I felt, seeing my kids so far past fatigue and discomfort that they couldn’t even bicker and complain made the whole thing worse.
Roman woke up and toddled out of the shop clenching his grungy cat, Peek-a-boo, in one fist. He stood in the doorway watching us, and no one had to tell him to stay out. He could see that whatever was happening in the garage, it was not fun. I handed him a juice box from the cooler, and he sat under a tree in his Tweety Bird lawn chair, perfectly silent in honor of our obvious suffering. Hershey sat with him, whining now and then over the unhappy tension.