HOME STRETCH
Mr F the cheapskate decided he and the Mrs had to move out of their little two-bedroom apartment and into their new pleasure palace (aka “the Casa de Sueños”) no later than May 31st so they wouldn’t get stuck with another month’s rent. This meant they had to pass their final house inspection and receive a Certificate of Occupancy (C of O) from the Town of Payson. The result was a two-week mad dash to the finish line. Week One the Wood Floor guy, the Cabinet Guy, and the Granite Counter Guy finished their work. That left Week Two for finish carpentry (re-hanging the doors; installing baseboard, stair railing, etc.), finish plumbing, finish electric, gutters and downspouts, touch-up painting, final grading, and laying 4,200 square feet of pavers on the driveway and the patio.
I immediately launched a vociferous protest: “No can do,” I said. “Tell the landlady you’re staying put for another month.”
Mr F quoted his favorite homily: “It’s not your aptitude but your attitude that determines your altitude.”
Mrs F told me to roll out of my hammock and grab a shovel.
On the advice of one of their trusted sub-contractors, Mr and Mrs F arranged for the city inspector to review the house at the end of Week One. According to this strategy, Mr and Mrs F would then have Week Two to address any deficits.
So late Friday afternoon Mr. Inspector showed up, a short, slender, soft-spoken man who had the innocuous demeanor of a shipping clerk but the lethal authority of the Gestapo. He knew full well that one little check in the wrong little box could condemn us to another month in the Rainbow Apartments. In other words, this was no time to ruffle feathers with smart-alecky comments. So I was given the afternoon off plus a free pass to the Payson Water Park (only to discover Payson has no water park but I enjoyed the matinee at the Sawmill Theater). Likewise, Mr F was prohibited from sharing with Mr. Inspector any of his barnyard homilies or ingratiating jokes, which pretty much relegated him to the role of the smiling statue.
Mrs F, on the other hand, was the consummate hostess, although (apparently) not quite consummate enough: by the time the inspector had finished his little walk-about, he presented the Mrs with a checklist of 20 items that had to be addressed before he could in all good conscience issue the coveted C of O. Give the Mrs credit: if not for her charm and wit, the final punch list could have been much worse, with 30 or 40 deficits to fix. That said, I can’t help but speculate how a few well-timed wisecracks might have rattled the Inspector just enough to put him on the defensive and knock him off his game enough to shave few black marks off of his check list. And who knows? If he had a sense of humor, he might have granted us the C of O out right. After all, even King Lear had a court jester. Unfortunately, thanks to my temporary exile, we will never know what might have been.
The good news was, only 20 items. The bad news? Mr and Mrs F only had a week to remedy them. Fortunately, most of the items were minor and fixable. For instance, the drop-off outside the basement sliding glass door was ten inches and the city code allowed a maximum of eight inches. So Mr and Mrs F drove to Deco-Stone in nearby Star Valley where Mr F greeted Manny the owner in Spanish and then proceeded to insult him by asking (in Spanish) if he could borrow Manny’s wife to stick on the dirt outside the door? Fortunately Manny (unlike the Inspector? we will never know for sure) has a good sense of humor and knows that whenever Mr F tries to speak Spanish it’s like tossing a verbal hand grenade in a Scrabble factory. What Mr F wanted to say was, “Can we borrow a few of our pavers to put on the dirt outside the basement door?” Manny laughed. He pointed to the 38 palettes of pavers—4,200 square feet--Mr and Mrs F had ordered for their driveway and patio and said, “Michael, they are yours! Take as many as you like.” Twenty bricks (not palettes) did the trick, a nice mosaic landing outside the sliding glass door that reduced the drop from ten to seven inches.
Other items included: paint any PVC and ABS protrusions around the house (call the Painter). Install lighting in the guest bathroom. Call the Electrician, a short, energetic, firey red-head who looks like a cross between the Tasmanian Devil and Yosemite Sam. He works like a whirlwind and talks like one too. He didn’t want to install the light fixture in the guest bath until the mirrors are in. So Mr F called the Glass Guy who agreed to order and install three large bathroom mirrors—no frames, no beveled edges, nothing fancy; just plain flat glass (or as Mrs F stipulated, “As long as it’s not a fat-mirror, I don’t care. . .”). The cost should have been about $7.00 to $7.50 a square foot but the Mirror Guy was charging $8.50. I think Mr and Mrs F were too fed up and time-pressed to quibble, having played the master quibblers through each stage of the project for the past seven months. At that point they just wanted it to be done. “Sold!” said Mr F forgetting he was purchasing mirrors not selling his children..
But there were some big items too. Mr and Mrs F’s kitchen sink which was manufactured in Germany was also stuck in customs. That was one report. The other: it wasn’t scheduled to leave the factory in Germany until the end of the month. Mrs F wasn’t happy. ‘That’s a problem,” she said. Then for emphasis: “That’s a big problem. No kitchen sink equals no C of O—we can’t even get a temporary.”
She called Arizona Central Supply and they worked the phones cross-country until they located a matching sink that was shipped the next day.
More items. The Town of Payson requires a certain amount of re-vegetation to help off-set the total amount of “disturbed land” in a new build. Interpretation: Mr and Mrs F had to plant 15 shrubs and five trees on their property. Fair enough, but the happy couple thought they had all summer to play amateur landscapers, after moving into the house. Mr. Inspector said otherwise: plant first, then move in. Or more to the point: plant first or don’t move in.
So Mr F took pick and shovel to the sloping hillside and started digging holes—or tried to. The house is built on a massive mound of pink granite that does not take kindly to intrusions by sharp objects. Two hours later Mr F (whose biceps look like flea bites on wet spaghetti) gazed down at his handiwork, a one-half inch divot, and speed-dialed a local landscaper. The crew of eight dug and mulched twenty holes and planted the 15 shrubs and five trees in less than an hour for $800. Ex post facto Mr F was kicking himself because he could have hired some local, un-franchised muscle to do the same job for a third the cost. But hindsight’s always 20/20 unless you’re looking backwards at yourself in the fat-mirror, and he was forgetting how long that itemized punch list was and how desperately he and the Mrs wanted to get out of their apartment and into their house. Quite frankly, by the final week, the perpetual honeymooners had reached the end of their proverbial rope which was lucky for me because if there had been any slack they would have wrapped it around my neck and tossed me off their fancy new Evergrain maintenance-free deck. They were sick and tired of people traipsing through the house, cutting and pounding and measuring things; they were tired of the ubiquitous dust and sawdust and the powdery white cocaine-looking dust everywhere; tired of the footprints and granules of pink granite being dragged across the new wood floor; tired of the constant roar of power drills and generators and buzz saws; tired of the perpetual finger-pointing and mutual denials every time they noted a dent in the wall or a crooked drawer or a chipped corner—“hey, we didn’t do that!” They were tired of the daily crises, always something to clean or buy or mend; they were tired of writing checks and watching their bank account dwindling to zeroes. And just when they thought they were tired of everything they could possibly be tired of, they discovered, hiding at the very bottom of Mr. Inspector’s seemingly bottom-less list of to-do’s, one last itty bitty dumb stupid idiotic thing: they needed to install some type of barrier in front of the water heater in the garage.
“Barrier?” Mr F said. “What do you mean, barrier?”
“Well, in the event that someone hits the wrong pedal and runs the car into the water heater.”
“Like that’s going to happen in a hundred years! In a hundred million trillion years!”
Mr. Inspector then cited two recent events in which Payson senior citizens did exactly that: a woman drove her Buick through the glass frontage of the local coin-op Laundromat; a week later an old man took his Honda for a ride through the entrance to the local barbershop.
“Your water heater could be next,” cautioned Mr. Inspector.
“Who the hell cares?” Mr F said, the four-letter expletive further evidence that he had run out of rope. “Do you see where that water heater’s located? Tucked way way over in the far corner. It would be impossible to hit that thing unless you were very very drunk and very very stupid and cranked the steering wheel very very hard to the right.”
“Well, this is Payson,” Mr. Inspector said.
“I get it. But even if someone did manage a head-on collision with the water heater, the unit’s not even gas, it’s electric. No worries. No doomsday Hollywood end-of-the-world ka-boom! The very worst that would happen is a little water spillage.”
“Sorry. It’s in the code. No exceptions.”
“Okay, okay, you can’t fight city hall. So what do you mean, exactly, by barrier?’”
“Well, it could be a bollard. By the time they drilled a hole in the concrete slab, installed a mold, and filled it with cement it’d probably run you about 800 to a thousand dollars. Give or take.”
“Don’t give me that give or take. I’ve heard that line before.”
“Or you could install a parking bumper—“
Yes, one of those big ugly six foot long concrete blocks that scar the face of every parking lot in America. They also weigh a ton, literally.
So much for that. Mrs. F got on the phone and called every bumper outfit from Maine to California until she located an store in Wisconsin that sold rubber parking bumpers in smaller three foot sections at a total weight of 17 pounds. The cost of the bumper was $30. The overnight delivery charge was $67 but worth every nickel. Thanks to some help from the Foundation Guy who drilled two holes in the garage floor and inserted two small sections of rebar, the bumper was in place minutes before Mr. Inspector arrived for his final walk through.
Long story made slightly shorter, Mr and Mrs F passed their final inspection with flying colors.
“You’ve got a million dollar view,” Mr. Inspector said, and for once Mr F agreed. He also began calculating re-sale value.
Before signing off I need to give some very well-deserved kudos because Mr F the ingrate probably won’t. Lost in that final frenzied week were the many acts of kindness rendered by friends and acquaintances who helped Mr and Mrs F move all of their earthly belonging from their apartment to their new home. Brad Muir donated his muscle and his pick-up truck to transport four loads of boxes and furniture, with assistance from four stripling young LDS missionaries.
On Friday May 30th, the good members of the Ponderosa Ward of the LDS Church helped load the remaining items into a U-Haul truck and unload the same at Mr and Mrs F’s new residence, 1109 North Karen Way, thus allowing the couple to lock up their apartment, turn in their keys, and spend their first night in their Casa de Sueños. It was the end of a year long journey that started when Mr and Mrs F rolled the dice and bought a severely sloping lot with a commanding view. That was mid-May of 2013. In July they sold their home in Flagstaff and on September 7th they said good-bye to the pine tree mountain town that had been their home for the past 28 years and drove south through the Coconino National Forest towards a new beginning in the little town of Payson. Mr F looked at the mighty San Francisco Peaks in his rear-view mirror and wept.
The couple spent most of September acquiring permits, paying fees, and interviewing sub-contractors. On October 21st they finally broke ground, and now, seven months later, here they were, lord and lady of a new home on a hill at the end of an almost empty lane overlooking the Tonto National Forest. For the past month, people had been asking them, “Are you excited about moving into your new house?” Their answer was usually a good-natured, “Not yet, but maybe as we get closer to our move-in date.”
But the closer they got to moving in, the shorter and testier their responses: “Nope.” Or: “Not yet.” Or: “Ugh.” Or when they were in a more talkative mood: “Are you kidding? Who’s got time to be excited? We’re trying to locate an idiotic parking bumper for the stupid water heater!”
At this point the question you good readers probably want answered is: was it all worth it?
Ask Mr and Mrs F. In about six months. Provided they are still a living, breathing, fully functioning and legally married couple.. Yes, their compact is still in force: neither of them can file for divorce for at least six months after moving into the house.
“Make that five months and twenty-one days,” Mrs F corrects, drawing another conspicuous X on the calendar.
But it’s a strange thing, building your own home, or maybe the real strangeness is this odd twosome. When Mr F locked up their apartment for the last time, he paused to gaze around at the cramped little living-kitchen area with the moldy floor and the broken blinds and bedroom that was barely big enough for a queen mattress and the closet with the sagging rods and the bathroom with the warped linoleum floor and the disintegrating drywall. He almost looked sad.
“Pretty pathetic,” I said. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“We had a nice little life here,” he said. “Nice neighbors, good memories. Winter nights just the two of us huddled around the space heater watching Turner C lassic Movies. On weekend we could clean the place in ten minutes and we were on our way. I’m going to miss that.”
I realized that Mr F had been having a rough two weeks, but this was a textbook example of crazy talk. I had to snap him out of it.
“Come on,” I said, “you’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
“You’ve got to catch them first,” he said, “and then you’ve got to clean them.”
Now this didn’t make any sense whatsoever. The temperature had climbed into the nineties, so I was beginning to suspect heat exhaustion. Then I realized that maybe it was just a bout of nostalgia.
“We lived in a little apartment like this the first summer we were married,” he said. “A little one-bedroom in a basement. We were deliriously happy.”
I think Mr F was reflecting on the good old days when he had a full head of hair and could run a city block if his life depended on it.
“Okay, well, your castle awaits, Prince Charming. Let’s get out of here.”
Thank goodness he didn’t go all weepy on me and I didn’t have to make a big scene prying him away from his beloved shag carpeting.
We arrived at the new house about 7:00 PM and started the onerous task of assembling beds and moving boxes. By 10:00 PM we were almost too exhausted to sit on the deck and listen to the perfect silence save the crickets chirping in the manzanita bushes and the elk sneaking through the chaparral. The only other lights were two distant pinpoints shining like a pair of animal eyes watching these newcomers settle into their home surrounded by the absolute darkness of the ponderosa pine forest that seemed to stretch from our deck to the end of infinity. And we were almost too tired to sit down and enjoy that. Almost.