The Big, Scary Project

This afternoon, after putzing at the computer and attending a small holiday festival, I concocted a Virgin Mary and stretched out on a recliner in the back yard.

It’s lovely, but it doesn’t feel that summer will be with us very longer. It’s been a muted season, in any case. Not cold, but cloudy and drizzly. The rare occasions the sun’s come out, we’ve been blasted with 95-degree surges, not our usual balmy 70 degrees. But mostly … it’s been just what outsiders think of when they think of the Pacific NorthWET, a land without summer. We already had several days of rain in the last week.

So the evening was beautiful but in the most fragile way.

I laid back in the folding recliner, let it swing me, gravityless, off my feet, and felt satisfied.

For about two seconds.

I felt, in that moment of satisfaction, that I’d made a pretty good finish of summer. Though I’d planned no big projects this year, I got all the planned small ones taken care of. And more. And quickly. Only one, an indoor project that could be done in winter or spring, isn’t complete. I’d had luck — and I’d had the help of the Wandering Monk. When I’d reach some part of work that I couldn’t do (as when I discovered a large patch of rot in a wall whose old surface I was prying off), in he’d come. Reliable. Affordable. Skilled. Personable. And fun to work with. So with his help, stuff happened.

And now … I’m done.

Now on this soft September day, I can ready myself for winter. Hunker down. Read the stacks of used books I just bought at the festival’s Friends of the Library sale. Think about labor soon to come that’s no harder than it takes to make a strong, thick beef stew to enjoy in the cold.

So rarely do I just ever relax like that. The mind always churns. Some worry turns up. It was so nice to … Oh. Wait.

Because of course I realized with a jolt … I wasn’t done. Because, having accomplished so much so early, and having gotten your generous support (to my spirits, to this online Mission from God, to my house), I’ve committed to doing the first half of the biggest, scariest project left on Ye Olde Wreck. Starting next week.

—–

There I was, gazing to the sky and down to that unfinished, tar-papered, but no longer covered with old, warped crud, feeling so pleased.

And my eyes flicked to the left, toward the narrow span of earth behind the house … and doom descended. Because the next two weeks, if we’re lucky and that’s all it takes, are dedicated to earth moving and retaining-wall building, preparatory to the final Big Scary — raising and repairing the foundation on the 16 x 24 bedroom/bath addition.

I haven’t mentioned some of the complications.

The job is too big for shovels. It requires taking a 12 x 30-foot section of ground down as much as two feet in the worst spot; the Monk swears it’ll be three. Then comes turning a corner and carving an even deeper path just three to five feet wide. In which a newly filled propane tank now sits. So, a job for machinery, though augmented by shovels on the tricky parts.

But the 12-foot dimension has to be carved from a spot with only about 16 feet of space between the house and a steeply sloping hill. And on the hill are several alder trees that already lean slightly houseword (which, for various reasons I cannot have removed). They lean gently. But they lean right over where large, clumsy steel equipment arms will be raising and lowering. Mess up on the other side of the narrow strip and you gouge walls or damage the existing house foundation.

So first order of business was to try to find the right guy and the right small equipment for a job this tricky. I won’t go into detail (though it was at times high comedy), but it took months to find anybody and when I did, they wanted minor fortunes.

The Monk kept telling me about this old guy he knew in a nearby town. I’ll call him Lester. Lester owned the proper equipment and had years of experience. But every word the Monk spoke about Lester made me want to run. The guy’s 80-some years old with multiple health problems. He’s just gotten out of the hospital again. But he’s desperate to earn some money to pay his bills and he’ll do it much cheaper. And the Monk will supervise and they can get the job done.

This does not sound good, but after talking to the other potential contractors, I’m increasingly open to anything. So last month, I say okay, I’ll meet Lester. And at the appointed hour, the Monk escorts into my driveway this poor, doddering man who literally takes five minutes to get out of his SUV. And even longer to creep from there to behind the house. When he speaks, I can’t understand a single word. He’s had tracheotomies so many times he has to use an artificial voice box and he’s left it at home.

I feel for this man. Heaven spare us all from such a fate — particularly when you’re either too proud or too desperate to realize you just physically must stop.

But with the Monk’s absolute assurance that together they can get this done, I say okay.

I trust the Monk. I really do.

Then Wednesday morning, the Monk calls with the proverbial good new and bad news.

The bad news is that Lester finally got that sad realization and bowed out of the job. The good news is that he’s allowing the Monk to use his earth-moving equipment after endlessly denying him.

But now the question is: how competent is this more fit but less experienced operator going to be, there between the wall of my house and a mini-grove of leaning trees? Not to mention the propane tank? Does he, as he assures me, know what he’s doing?

So you see the sense of doom here?

Then if that part goes okay, we build a long block wall and I’m in charge of making sure its resistance to soil and water pressures are up to snuff. I don’t know how much the Monk knows about earth-moving in small spaces. But I know exactly how much I know about about building retaining walls. (Some decent news there, though. A Commentariat member with civil engineering experience dropped me an email roughing out what he’d do, and it was very much what I’d already decided from my research or intuited. That was a relief.)

So yes, dooooooooom fell on the lovely, if watery, sun of my September afternoon.

Now I tell myself I’m looking forward to October’s rains. After the earth is carved, after the walls are built and hands and bodies have recovered from cement burns and heavy labor. After that I’ll be able to relax and enjoy life, watching through the Olde Wreck’s big, beautiful windows as the rains fall.

Will I really be able to rest my mind, come October? I swear it will be so. I always swear it will be so. But my ever-stirring worry-warty introvert brain has a mind of its own.