It’s been a while, but let’s see if I can finish
what I started lo those many years ago…
-
God
Only Knows – The Beach Boys
Originally
banned in the UK due to the use of the word God in the title, this is one of my
favorite Beach Boy songs and its angelic vocals bring me to my first house in
Elgin, two houses from the Historic district.
I have the boxed set of Pet Sounds
and it has numerous alternate takes and studio excerpts from various sessions
where Brian Wilson works with the session musicians, trying to get what he heard
in his head onto the tape.
I
love hearing a song come together, as Brian tries to explain to the musicians what
and how he wants them to play.
I transferred the CD’s onto
cassettes and I listened to them on my Walkman as I made repairs and rehabbed
our 100+ year old home. Among the tasks, tearing off four layers of shingles
and them re-roofing the garage and painting the exterior and trim of the whole
house (I found a .45 bullet in the roof as well, perfectly perpendicular as if
someone shot into the air and it came straight down into the roof).
The house had an 8-foot drop ceiling
in the living and dining rooms. I removed them and did my first dry walling by
myself, renting a drywall jack that held the 8x4 foot panels in place as I
screwed them to the joists. Except for a couple places (where the wall curved),
the ceiling came out pretty good, put back to the original 9 foot height.
Putting the ceiling back to its
original height then created a new project. All the trim above the three
windows and six doorways had to be matched, since the drop ceiling had come
down to the top of each window and door opening.
In addition, all the corner trim
pieces (bull’s eyes in the upstairs room and the downstairs “Library”, which
still had the original 9-foot ceiling) were gone. Lynn and I went to Salvage 1
in Chicago and spent 10-15 bucks apiece for 18 corner pieces with numerous
coats of paint on them. There was large pallet in the middle of the floor
stacked high with pieces and you would sort through them to get matching
pieces.
I got longer pieces of the straight
trim (to match the straight piece of molding on either side of each window/door
opening, which profile was much harder to match) by removing trim from the
inside of the closets. I spent many hours removing the numerous layers of paint
from the trim and corner pieces.
Then I made the biggest blunder of
my renovation career. In the dining room, we had chosen corner pieces with a
sort fleur-de-lis raised detail. They were intricate and were a real pain to
strip. They were not square, like the other “bull’s-eye” pieces, but had a
pediment on the square so that the piece became a rectangle.
Pediment should have been the
operative word. I rotated the pieces, placing the pediment on the top, I should
have removed the side trim and sawn them to allow the pediment to be on the
bottom so that the square part met the top trim, but when I realized what I had
done, it was too late. I had wall papered the walls and making the corner
pieces smaller would have exposed the wall behind.
No one ever noticed (or at least no
one ever pointed it out to me).
25
years after we moved, I checked online and a recent listing had photos showing
everything as it was then (though the wallpaper is gone).
Bob Vila wept.
