I made my own transistor radio when I was ten. My mother’s
boyfriend was an electronics engineer and in his home office, filled with
oscilloscopes and other pre-home-computer equipment, he showed me how to use a
soldering gun and make a circuit board.
That summer, I took my boxy black transistor to the beach
every day. It wasn’t the sleekest radio, not white with a wrist strap and
flower decals, but it was mine, and when I tuned the dial to KKDJ, I thought of
the tiny beads and cubes like Monopoly house wired together and held in place
by delicate silver blobs I had melted.
Right now I am constructing walls. I learned how to demolish
sheetrock down to the studs and insulate walls last year when my husband and I worked
on our writer’s studio. We covered those walls with wood panels.
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| Looking into the old basement from the old den, both now becoming our master bedroom. |
Now we are building a master bedroom by combining an old
downstairs bedroom with basement space, and after sealing the cement block wall
with masonry paint, we’re using traditional materials: wooden framing,
sheetrock, mud, tape, and texture.
My husband built the framing, installed the doors, screwed
in the sheetrock, ran the electricity, put in outlets and switches, researched
heater choices and wired accordingly.
He is teaching me the next steps:
I am working with a thick vat of “mud” that looks like Greek
yogurt. Using flat metal spatulas I dap and swipe over every nail hole. I run
mesh tape to join edges everywhere they meet, in corners, along ceilings,
mid-wall where boards end, and then I cover the tape with wide swaths of mud
that when I’m not careful, splats on the floor, on my clothes, and on my face.
I cover the bullnose tape at window wells and sills, holding
my spreader at odd angles, smoothing out my mud as if it were frosting, and
like the cakes and cupcakes I used to bake, my efforts look uneven, amateurish,
and unappetizing.
The good news is that no one can get it right in one swipe.
The process requires drying time, sanding, and then applying a fresh coat,
repeating each step three or four times, and with each application feathering
out the mud in wider strokes using thinner amounts of product so the walls end
up smooth at every seam, joint, sill, edge, and corner.
It takes a long time to apply just one coat in an entire
room, and it’s repetitive, tedious, the sort of thing that made me wish I was
writing a short story or a novel, because I’d have plenty of time to think
about my characters and their actions while I’m scooping mud into a tray,
dragging my ladder, climbing up, slathering on the mud, climbing down,
repeating.
But I’m not working on a writing project, so instead my
husband and I listen to our Pandora radio stations while we work.
Tonight at dinner he asked, now that I’d been working with
the mud for several days, if I felt like I was getting the hang of it. “I guess
what I’ve become used to,” I said, “is how bad I am at this.”
There’s nothing particularly difficult about the remodeling
work I’m doing, but there’s a difference between simply completing a task and
doing it well. Right now I’m sloppy and unskilled, and it shows.
I think it also takes more than practice and repetition to
become skilled. You need patience and motivation to master anything, from
manual labor to surgery, to high art. I enjoy spending time with my husband working on our house,
and like making my own radio, I am proud that I can say I did it myself.
I’m a little worried though, that someday I’ll have the flu
and will spend the day in bed, too tired to read, bored with TV, and with
nothing to do, I’ll gaze at the walls and notice every imperfection—that the
layers of mud aren’t level from one side of the window to the next, that I
failed to properly cover the tape in the corners at the ceiling, that there are
paint drips along the baseboard.
When that happens, the only person to blame will be me,
which is a problem I’d never foreseen: A do-it-yourselfer forfeits the right to
complain about shoddy workmanship.
I will just have to close my eyes and look the other way.
Unless, that is, I’ve got mud in my eye.
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