The deal finally closed.  We worked our way through two thick stacks of paperwork, probably signing away spare organs in lieu of bankruptcy, and then it was done.  We were home owners!  No more squatting, we could finally begin making home repairs.

We had been camping out in the house for weeks.  When I say camping, I mean this in the most literal sense-no hot water, no heat, no refrigeration, no oven, no front or back door. The security screen doors let the wind blow through, and on cold nights we would crawl into sleeping bags on top of our mattress.

We did have a toilet, cold running water, and spotty electricity in a couple of the rooms. This meant that we slept in sweat pants and wool socks, performed critical personal washing, listened to a lot of NPR, and ate an inordinate amount of microwave popcorn and Top Ramen. It was like being a college freshman, but with a four-year-old child constantly complaining that he was BORED.

During the squatting days we would pass the evenings listening to the radio and pulling up carpet tacks from the unfinished subfloor, but now, weeks into homesteading, we would still find the occasional staple when it would push up through our shoes and into our feet.  Asa still reminds me of one of his only memories from that time-a nail in the foot before bed.  When at night, if nature called, he would hold it until morning, for fear of stepping on something sharp on his way to the toilet.  Asa will have some great ‘back in the day’ stories to tell his kids and grandchildren.

The house was uninsurable like this, so the bank agreed to finance our mortgage on the condition that we fix the place within three months of closing. The list of required repairs included:

Replace roof
Install front and back doors
Fix plumbing
Install wall heater
Install water heater
Replace carpets
Repair water damage (the black mold)

I am pretty good at working with tools, so these jobs looked like the perfect excuse to expand my tool collection.  I could buy the tools and materials to complete each of the tasks, do the work, and still come out ahead of the cost of hiring a professional.  I bought a big yellow lock box on casters and began to fill it the way a child might fill the toy box in his dreams.  Like many, I deal with anxiety by buying things, so camping in the house with looming repair deadlines inspired the purchase of all kinds of unnecessary shit.  I bought cordless and corded drills, a jigsaw, a worm-drive circular saw, a chain saw, pneumatic nail guns for framing and finishing, a pneumatic chisel, an angle grinder and a 28 gallon air compressor.  These were just a few of the bigger purchases.  The smaller purchase list, too long to recall, included wrecking bars, hammers, cocking guns, paint brushes, gallons of primer and paint, hedge clippers, and many hundreds of dollars worth of other miscellaneous stuff.

We moved into the house in September, enjoying the last few warm weeks of the year.  It was early autumn in L.A. and we had more important things to do than patch drywall, like getting out of our squalid quarters to kick back at the beach and enjoy a few hours of sunshine before the rainy season.  Life was already much more comfortable now that we owned the house and were able to buy a refrigerator and stove.  Still, I was in full procrastination mode, circling around the other projects by planning them out on paper and buying tools and supplies.  We had completely forgotten that in spite of L.A.’s typically mild climate, it can actually get pretty damn cold once the seasons flip.  I was a regular grasshopper, content to dream big and dawdle away those rapidly shortening days.

My first task, though it wasn’t on the list, was to trim the front tree. The low-hanging canopy created a tent-like space in our front yard, providing refuge for drug deals and prostitution. I bought a small electric chainsaw, a long extension cord, and a pole trimmer.  I climbed into the tree with the chainsaw and began to work. By the end of the second day, I had managed to defoliate half the tree, making a significant improvement to the house and yard.  In the process of cutting out a heavy limb, the falling wood slammed into my leg, knocking me out of the tree from ten feet up. I had tied a knot in the extension cord and looped it over a branch, and I had tied the chainsaw cord to the extension cord, so the chainsaw ripped out of my hands at a quarter of my fall. Asa, who had been watching this testosterone fueled insanity, asked in all innocence, “Daddy, are you dead?”  From my supine position, staring up at the swinging chainsaw, I reassured him that I was fine.  The piles of downed branches had broken my fall.

By October I had fixed the plumbing and installed a hot water heater. Few things make a bigger difference in one’s life than access to hot water.  Showering and shaving with cold water sucks so profoundly that I can not find words to adequately convey the profundity of the suckage.  Most importantly, with hot water came regular clean laundry!

October was also when an early rain fell, causing us to realize just how badly the roof needed to be replaced. Because of the mold, we had filled and sealed up the water-damaged rooms with unessential items like books, photos, miscellaneous electrical equipment, and extra clothing and bedding. This made more living space in the rest of the house, and gave us a sense of protection from the black mold spores. I came home from work on the first rainy day of the year to find hundreds of dollars of water damage to my library, destroyed photos, and piles of soggy clothes and bedding that would turn into a mildew love-fest if we didn’t act fast. This started a game of moving-box Tetris, laying out wet goods in dry places and replacing waterlogged boxes with buckets to catch the rain. I fell into bed early the next morning, and called a roofer a few hours later.

By mid-November we still hadn’t replaced the roof. Sticker shock from the roofer’s estimate had left me once again convinced that I would hire some labor near the Home Depot and get up there and do the job myself. The rainy season officially began, but not before we rented a storage unit and filled it with most of our crap. This made the bucket wars a lot easier to fight. The dripping rooms, now empty but for the array of buckets and pots on the floor, came alive with the incessant *PING* *PING* of water looking for the ocean. That water had come a long way, down through the jet trails and miasma of car exhaust, trickling through the dirty cracks in the built-up asphalt roof, dropping down onto the soggy pillow of moldy pink insulation, percolating through an equally moldy layer of painted gyp board, and finally coming to rest with a loud *PING* in a 5-gallon bucket. Depending on the location in the house, the contents of these vessels were every shade of piss-yellow from ‘I drink 64oz of water daily’ to ‘amber tar.’ They filled quickly, forcing us to make regular rounds where we would swap buckets and send the waste down the toilet.  This went on all night.

From all of the leaking, the ceiling may as well have been made of cheese.  I poked at one of the overhead blisters with a crowbar, easily penetrating the plaster skin. Pulling the crowbar out, the ceiling puked down chunks of wet gypsum and yellow slime, exposing the mold-covered backside of the sopping insulation.  Susan’s face registered this with growing disgust and horror.  Had a rotting toe fallen from the hole in the ceiling her reaction would have been the same.  At the site and smell of the effluent she recoiled, “I can’t handle this! It has ALL GOT TO GO!”

Thus began the filthy process of stripping out all of the drywall and insulation from our walls and ceiling. Throughout all of this, one bedroom was spared any water damage. We would come home at night, park Asa in front of a tiny television in that one bedroom, and spend hours pulling down and bagging plaster and insulation. When we could do this no more, we would shower, never able to wash away the itch and irritation from the fiberglass, dust and plaster, and finally collapse, the three of us, into the family bed. By the end of December, the plaster and insulation lay settling in bagged piles in our back yard and we could now look up into the rafters and clearly see where the water was coming in.

It was around this time when the bank finally called to schedule an inspection to verify that we had completed our repairs.  We hadn’t come close.  In fact there were mornings then, in our uninsulated house, when we could see our frozen breath hang in the air.  I hadn’t taken the bank too seriously about the repairs.  The house was ours.  We had already received the title, and we were living there.  Why should the bank care if we were living in a dump?  What was the bank going to do?  I probed the lender with a few questions like this, and he could see that I was dragging my feet, so he turned up the heat.

“Look man, do you know what I had to do to get you into that house?  When no one else would help you get a loan, I went the extra mile to help you out.  You said you would get the house fixed up within three months, and that is what I told my supervisors.  Now it has been three months, and you still haven’t done what you promised.  Do you know what would happen if the house burned down and it wasn’t insured?  The bank would eat it, and then they would ask me questions.  Failing to fix the house is not an option.  Now how much time do you need to get this done?”

“Uhhh…. two weeks?”

“Fine.  I’ll keep in touch.”

The race was on.  I have never worked harder and accomplished so much in so little time.  In the next couple of days I called three roofing companies, received bids, and hired a crew to complete the job.  Before the roofers started I cut a hole into the roof and installed a new skylight in the living room.  I also installed new recessed lighting, dimmer switches and a wall heater.  These jobs were all much easier because the walls and ceiling had been stripped down to the studs.  The roofers were in and out after two days, leaving me $1500 poorer, but also leaving me wondering why I had waited so long and endured so much trouble over such a trivial job.  With the heat and wiring in place, I bought new insulation and started stapling it into place.  That was done after two days, and the walls and ceiling were now ready for drywall.  After hanging all of the gyp board in one small bedroom, I went to the Home Depot and hired a laborer to hang the rest.  He completed the work over seven days for $700, leaving us little time to finish the remaining jobs.  We picked colors and painted.  I installed a front and back door.  We bought cheep carpet for the bedrooms and a pallet of bamboo flooring for the living room.  The last weekend before inspection I rented a flooring tool from Home Depot, and Susan and I installed the bamboo in a single day.  A carpet crew installed the carpet in the bedrooms for about $200, leaving me again wondering why I had let so much time pass before getting this done.  The work was complete.

We passed the inspection, no problem.  The house was now warm, dry and comfortable.  We could launder our clothes, take a hot shower, and cook a meal.  As the nights grew colder we could turn up the thermostat, read a book under the new recessed lighting, dim the lights romantically and listen to the gentle *Ping* of the rain hitting the skylight.  We were finally home.