Entry #59
June 29, 2024 — 1:30 PM
Gray light all day, a flat lid. I made a list to keep the work ordinary: replace two cracked tiles in the upstairs bath, plane the east bedroom door, sand and prime the hall, reseat the parlor outlet. Four things. Stay out of the cellar. Do not open the wall again. Simple.
The bath first. The chemical stink of grout remover, a chalky grit under my nails. When I scored out the first tile, the hairline in the bed below ran where I didn’t cut it—off true, drifting toward the hall threshold I patched last week. The crack read the room better than my square. I reset the tile anyway. It sat proud on one edge, as if leaning to see under the door.
I took the plane to the bedroom door. The blade rasped over old pine, warm to the touch from friction, resin rising in that sweet-sour way. The jamb has shallow scratches I keep sanding out. Today they flashed again as the grain opened: an S cut low, an E caught by a knot, half-swallowed. Old rental damage, I told myself. Coin idleness. I planed until the shoulder closed. It still caught on the latch, only there.
Parlor outlet next. The box sits an eighth out of plumb, and no amount of shimming made the faceplate flush; one corner kept lifting like a lip. When I loosened the screws, the wallboard feathered and the hole widened in a neat oval. A cool thread of air came through and ran up my wrist. No draft seen anywhere else. Down in the register a metal tick, patient as a metronome. I shut the register. The tick moved to the baseboard.
Measurements for the baseboard returns. The tape ended up snagged in the same nick twice. On the second pull I realized the nick isn’t a nick; it’s a short, deliberate gouge, the sort a person makes without looking up. I wrote 37 5/8 on the scrap and, without thinking, wrote it again beside the S I’d already rubbed out. I do not need letters to cut a return.
Lunch was a heel of bread eaten standing by the sink. The bread tasted like plaster dust. I did not go downstairs. I stood at the top of the cellar steps and said, quietly and without drama, I am not going down there. The light switch is loose; it rattled when I touched it and gave me that harmless snap at the fingertip that tells you all the grounds aren’t perfect. The air from below carried cold and a wet-iron smell that doesn’t belong in summer.
Back to the hall. The sander bucked when it crossed one patch. Not a nail—there is a difference in the note. Over that patch the paper tore, and white pulled away to show old brown with shallow lines under the grain, two strokes that might have been EL before the primer drowned them months ago. I went slower. The lines remained. I feathered more. The machine warmed my palms.
I am not afraid of this. That’s not the word. The work itself is narrowing. Studs are centered until they aren’t, exactly where the wall meets the void. Screws drive straight until the bit walks off into softness at one height, and not at any other. Nails spit back out only along one run. Battery holds charge until I move two rooms away from that wall; then it flags, then returns. The only door that refuses to true is the one that faces the cellar.
I wrote the list again, small, on the back of a receipt. Four things. The house would have me move only in one corridor of it. I know better. A house under repair should not be allowed to choose the work.
— Thomas Hale