FIXER-UPPER OR BLOW-IT-UPPER?

Digging Through the Ruins

Dad moved into a retirement home. I had to clean out his old one.

“Where do I start?” Photo by Plesserchick on Flickr.

The year was 2000, Mom’s ashes had been planted in the church rose garden, and Dad had been transplanted to the retirement home. The next item on the agenda was to dispose of the house. That was my job: Dad had delegated power-of-attorney to me, his only daughter. From the look of the house, the strategy was obvious: sell it as-is.

“I didn’t keep her up,” Dad admitted. “Matter of fact, it’s been years since I fixed anything I couldn’t reach from the second rung of a ladder.”

When I opened the front door and looked inside, however, another approach came to mind. Dad thought the house was a fixer-upper. I thought it was a burn-‘er-downer.

She needed more than a facelift. Photo by Rob Henry on Flickr.

Dad realized he wasn’t going to get top dollar. “The old girl was built in 1927,” he said. “So naturally everything’s saggin’ from her roof hips to her doorknockers.” The “old girl” showed her age all right.

• The stucco exterior had cracks.
• The gutters leaked like sieves.
• The front porch was swaybacked.
• The stone basement walls weeped after heavy rains.
• The bathtub wouldn’t drain because burrs in the pipes snagged hair and soap.
• A bee hive was in one cornice. Honey seeped through the ceiling of the adjacent stairway.
• And skunks had set up housekeeping under the back porch.

I was cheesed off with Dad — and Mom, too. They’d committed financial malpractice by allowing their main asset to deteriorate badly. But there was no use getting worked up about it now. Dad couldn’t gamble that expensive repairs would yield a return on the investment. He needed whatever cash could be wrung out of the house as it was to pay his retirement home bills.

So yes, I wanted to take the building inspector’s advice: “There’s no use puttin’ the paddles to this old house,” he said. “Just tack a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ order on the door.”

Instead, my plan was to: 1) clear out the junk; 2) have a contractor hold a living estate sale; then 3) sell the place as-is.

I arrived at the house the day after Mom’s funeral. Dad insisted on accompanying me. I didn’t see the harm. He couldn’t haul stuff out; he could barely manage his walker. But he couldn’t interfere, either. Or so I thought. I forgot the last time he and Mom tried to dispose of their junk.

It was back in 1987, when Dad turned seventy. Most folks his age used the “One in/two out” rule: if they acquired something which took up floor or shelf space, they sold, donated or ditched two other things.

Not Dad. He was a confirmed pack rat. His garage was so filled to the gills, for instance, he had to park his F-150 pickup outside. As a result, he occasionally couldn’t start it on a sub-zero winter morning. Mom was annoyed when that kept her from attending a Sunday worship service. She turned fretful one morning, however, when it threatened to make her miss a radiation treatment following her first mastectomy. Fortunately, they called me, I handed off my Social Studies class to a substitute teacher, hightailed it to their house, and got Mom to Munson Hospital in time for her appointment.

After that little FUBAR, Dad conceded it might be a good idea to free up a bay in the garage. Mom rented a twenty-cubic-yard dumpster. She hired an odd-jobber to fill it.

“I know where everything is,” said Dad. Photo by Joe Mngs717 on Flickr.

Mom feared Dad wouldn’t be able to stand by while the guy pitched his stuff. To her surprise, he didn’t get in the guy’s way. He spent the day running errands in town, drinking coffee at the kitchen table, and watching TV in the living room.

But after the man left for the day, and while Mom was taking an after-dinner nap, Dad sneaked out to the dumpster to reclaim some of his treasures.

• He rescued the Huffy bicycles he’d bought for us kids at a sheriff’s department auction in 1964. They’d sat in the garage since ’72, when we’d moved up to Schwinns. Dad thought he could restore them. Fat chance: the bikes were so rusty, anyone who so much as looked at ’em needed a tetanus shot.
• Dad retrieved a baby stroller he’d found on a street curb. The sun canopy was tattered; Dad said he’d duct tape it. The five-point safety harness was missing pieces. “So what?” he said. “Today’s coddled kids should be able to get by with two points.” And the brake didn’t work. Dad planned to screw some old punctured bicycle tubes onto the frame. If the buggy got away from a mommy, he figured, it’d bounce off whatever it bumped into.
• Dad lacked the strength to drag one treasure out of the dumpster: the battleship gray Steelcase desk he’d acquired at a county “Trash & Treasures” surplus property auction. But he retrieved the oak swivel banker’s chair that came with it. Mom asked why he’d bothered; the thing was missing two of its four wheels. “That chair could still be worth money,” Dad replied, “if them other two wheels ever turn up.”

When the hired man returned the next morning, he quit on the spot. “There’s no point puttin’ stuff in that dumpster,” he groused, “if your husband’s gonna pull it back out.”

Dad knew he’d screwed up. “I’m sorry I’m a scrounger,” he said. “I don’t mean to be a burden.”

Mom just took Dad’s face in her hands and smiled. “You’re not a burden,” she assured him. “You’re my husband.”

So there we were, Dad and I, standing in the foyer, surveying the first floor. There were the old familiar furnishings, minus those I’d had moved to Dad’s quarters in the retirement home.

The living room was like a Roach Motel: stuff went in; it never came out. Photo by Charles Bodi on Flickr.

In the living room, a scuffed and stained rolled-arm sofa was against one wall. A winged reading chair was in one corner, a barrel chair was in another. There were a couple lamp tables and a brace of Shaker bookcases. And the upright piano my eldest brother Steven practiced on as a kid.

In the dining room, there was the distressed cherry dinner table and six blowback spindle chairs. A three-door buffet sat along one wall. A golden oak TV stand was at east end of the room, and at the west end, Mom’s Girl Friday typewriter desk and swivel chair.

Both rooms, however, appeared to be covered by the fallout from an atomic home shopping network bomb. There were stained travel mugs and chipped commemorative plates. Tatty Care Bears and desiccated Chia Pets. Threadbare throw pillows and splintered Longaberger baskets. Dusty tabletop speakers. An untouched under-desk elliptical leg exerciser.

Piles of opened and unopened mail beside empty mail organizers. Handheld LED-equipped magnifiers atop stacks of yellowed newspapers, worn paperbacks, and dog-eared National Geographic and Civil Engineering magazines. Mom and Dad’s Snuggie wearable blankets were draped across their overstuffed chairs. Their hand-held thirty-two-inch grabbers were on the nearby lamp tables.

In general, Mom and Dad had accumulated decades of dollar-store bric-à-brac, gift shop gimcracks and wares from the Walmart “As Seen On TV” aisle. They didn’t just have junk drawers. They had junk bookcases, secretaries, dining room tables, kitchen countertops, linen closets, dressers, nightstands and spare bedrooms.

“Where do we start?” asked Dad.

I suggested the low-hanging fruit on the recessed bookshelves to our right: a twenty-four-volume set of Encyclopædia Britannica. “You bought it for us kids back in ’72,” I said. “It’s safe to say we don’t need it anymore.”

“We can’t pitch those Britannicas,” replied Dad. “I paid good money for ’em. Besides, they’re only 30 years old. The world hasn’t changed much since then. Let’s see if a public school library will buy them.”

I had a sudden urge to play with matches. Instead, I proposed we start in the basement. It consisted of the laundry area at the west end, the massive old furnace in the center, and a workshop which took up the east half of the room.

A great place to raise mice, if they like to eat mildew and sawdust. Photo by John Tornow on Flickr

The workshop walls were lined with workbenches. Their surfaces were strewn with clamps, claw hammers, pliers, hand planes, mallets, tape measures, wrenches, screwdrivers, levels, hand drills, utility knives, chisels, a circular saw, a jig saw, a belt sander and sandpaper.

Wall shelves above the benches were cluttered with baby food jars containing screws recovered from damaged cabinets. Mason jars of nuts and bolts extracted from busted appliances. And rusty five-pound coffee cans of nails yanked from old lumber.

The floor space looked liked a gridlocked parking lot. There was a table saw, band saw and drill press. Stacked cans of paints, primers, thinners, strippers, wood fillers, shellacs, lacquers, varnishes, stains, oils and sealants. Most of them could be identified only by the dried dribbles down their sides. The remaining spaces were covered by stacks of uncut and scrap lumber and heaps of stained and dirty rags.

Give Dad credit: his workshop was equipped to do a variety of woodworking. But from the look of it, he’d mainly made sawdust. Every surface in the basement was covered by it. The place resembled a lunar landscape. Once again, Dad and I wondered where to start. “How ‘bout the laundry area?” I said. “I see something in the corner that can go. The white Maytag top loader that died in 1978. You removed the tub and motor. All’s left is the steel housing. I should be able to wrestle that up the stairs.”

“We can’t get rid of that,” Dad protested. “I can bolt a four-by-four sheet of plywood to the top and paint it. Then someone’ll buy it and use it as a kitchen island.”

I began to realize that I should have declined Dad’s offer to help. But we might yet make progress. I suggested we tackle the attic.

Once upon a time, you could roll a bowling ball from one end to the other. Clear Space Living, screenshot by Catherine La Grange.

The attic used to be a completely open space. That made it a great place for us kids to play when foul weather forced us indoors.

My eldest brother Steven spent a lot of time in the attic when he was a teenager, though no one knew what he was doing up there.

When Steven got his license and was able to get out and about, my older brother James commandeered the attic. He covered two hundred square feet of the floor with a spaghetti network of black two-lane race tracks for his 1/32 scale slot cars. His Circuit de Monaco included guard rails, pit stops, race towers, bleachers and billboards.

When James discovered girls, he checker-flagged his Grands Prix and boxed up the whole shebang. So I appropriated the attic to operate the “Catherine & La Grange Railroad.” I laid out HO scale miles of trackage, plus staging yards and sidings. The landscape included plastered chicken wire hills, high-gloss acrylic lakes, matchstick trestles and green lichen trees. There were balsa wood depots, warehouses and water towers. The C&LG had a variety of rolling stock. In addition to passenger and freight cars, it operated a GP40 diesel freight locomotive, an F3 passenger engine, a dinky Plymouth switcher, a main-line 4–6–2 steam locomotive and an 0–6–0 yard mule.

When I discovered boys, I boxed up my railroad. That was in 1971.

Twenty-nine years later, James’ and my boxes were still in the attic. And they had lots of company.

Mom and Dad used the attic as the Rainbow Bridge¹ for stuff they got from Walmart’s “As Seen On TV” aisle. I could see a George Foreman Grill and a Jack LaLanne Power Juicer. A hot-air popcorn popper, a food dehydrator and an electric fondue set. A set of Ronco Mince-, Dice-, Chop- and Veg-O-Matics. The attic was where those things went when the novelty wore off and the parents needed to free up kitchen counter space.

The attic contained what once passed for the parents’ home gym. There was an Ab Circle, some Shake Weights, a Free Flexor, Mom’s Suzanne Somers ThighMaster and Dad’s SS ButtMaster.

One corner of the attic could have been a Museum of Obsolete Electronics. There was a cassette answering machine, two Sony Walkmans, a camcorder and a Kodak disc camera. An Atari video game console surrounded by cartridges for Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Donkey Kong. And a Nintendo Entertainment System with Super Mario Brothers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Legend of Zelda.

Dad kept Mom’s busted vacuum cleaners in the hope he might repair them and put ’em back to work. There was a 1959 Electrolux canister model. (Dad said, “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”) A ’68 Kirby Dual Sanitronic. A ’79 Bissell Dyna Clean. An ’87 Bissell Air Ram. And a 1998 Hoover self-propelled PowerMax.

Dad kept odds and ends from home renovations, in case he might find ways to use them again. In 1992, he’d reluctantly agreed to replace the twenty-five-year-old living room carpeting after the bare spots threatened to become potholes. But he had the flooring guys roll it and the padding up, and put them in the attic. There they were, to our right, filling the better part of a dormer. Nearby were boxes filled with marbled grey plastic tiles pried from the shower walls during a bathroom rehab in 1986. Atop one box was the retired toilet seat.

Once again, Dad and I asked ourselves: where do we start? I suggested what was right in front of us: roughly twenty-five square feet of old magazines in stacks up to three feet high. There were LIFE Magazines from the 1960s and ’70s. National Geographics back to the late ’60s, and Reader’s Digests back to 1948. And to my astonishment, under a bundle of Boys’ Lifes, we found a bale of Playboys from the late ’60s and early ’70s. (Now I knew what Steven had been doing up in the attic back then.)

“How ‘bout I carry these magazines down to the dumpster?” I said. “That’ll free up some space for us to work in.”

“No way Baby Girl,” replied Dad. “We can sell them on eBay. Collectors’ll buy the National Geographics for the beautiful photographs. That is, if we can find any which haven’t been discolored by the attic’s heat and humidity. The old Readers Digests are worth money too — leastways those which the mice haven’t shredded into nesting material.

“As for the old Playboys, they’re historical documents. They show that gals used to have rugs instead of the vinyl floors they sport today.”

Steven liked the fold-out “articles.” Photo by Moreska on Flick

That’s when I suggested we call it a day. I said it was because I was tired. I didn’t tell Dad the real reason: we weren’t gonna get anywhere because he vetoed every suggestion I made for cleaning out the house.

Dad suggested we at least check out the garage. I didn’t expect to find anything of interest there. Not unless it contained a three-pound tin of gunpowder and a hundred feet of fuse; those might come in handy.

Dad sensed I was frustrated. “I know I’m not helping,” he said ruefully. “I don’t mean to be a burden.”

I was peeved all right. But Dad’s contrition pulled me up short. I turned to him and took his hands in mine.

“You’re not a burden,” I assured him. “You’re my dad.”

Photo by Partha Nandi on Flickr

[1]: “The Rainbow Bridge Poem for Dogs, Cats, and Other Pets”, Daily Paws, https://www.dailypaws.com/living-with-pets/pet-owner-relationship/grief/the-rainbow-bridge-poem

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