ninanevermore

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"Look!" my husband exclaimed when I came home yesterday, "We have baseboards!"

He has recently started the start-and-stop process of paining the dining room again. It's been ongoing for about 2 years now.

"Neat," I said. The baseboards still need painting. Maybe in a couple more years, that will happen.

"And you know what?"

I didn't.

He pointed to the half wall that divides the kitchen and the dining room. "There are no two by fours in that wall. No stud every 16 inches. None of that. There is nothing anywhere to nail the baseboard to, so I had to #*&!ing glue it on."

"So, it's just a hunk of drywall?"

"Pretty much."

I grinned. "See, you expect studs and boards and all that stuff 'cause you think they were building a house here back in the seventies. What they were doing was creating a home, man. It's not about letting the man tell you where to put a stud, it's about using your creativity to guide you and make a space to live in, man. Look," I pointed to the soffit above the kitchen cabinets that is an inch shorter on one side of the cabinet than it is on the other, "See? You don't need levels and t-squares and all that stuff. That's too square, man, because a square, level space is what people expect. What you have to do is smoke some dope and then do what you want so you can blow their minds and their expectations. It's not about following the rules other people have laid out, it's about expanding their minds by doing the unexpected. And it's about the dope smoking."

"And the drinking," Jeff added, "Don't forget the drinking."

"Well, yeah, when you run out of dope, you have to drink to keep your buzz going. How are you supposed to build a house without a buzz?"

"You really can't. Not if you want great results like you see here."

"Exactly."

It's got me thinking about cause and effect. Obviously, the builders of house were non-conformist type guys who liked to do home construction in creative ways. Maybe if Jeff and I started drinking and smoking a lot of dope, like they apparently did, this place wouldn't make us feel so crazy. The few strait lines would start to look crooked, and we wouldn't notice they were any different from the others.

Thirty some odd years ago, a drunk stoner build a house and painted it bright orange because bright colors look so cool when you're high. When we did some work on the outside we uncovered some of that original paint job and our eyes grew wide with horror. It's been through a few owners (and paint jobs) since then. The owners before us defaulted on their mortgage, no doubt because living in this house drove them to drink and they quit caring about their finances as their lives spiraled out of control. Then it sat vacant for a period of time waiting for the right morons to come along and think, "Hey, it has potential...with enough elbow grease, we could make this place livable," not realizing that the quantity of elbow grease in question would fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

My husband and I were those morons.

Hi, my name is Nina. I am not yet an alcoholic, but give me time.

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