Measuring Up

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Measuring Up Page 9

by Dan Robson


  My introduction to the mysteries of the measuring tape gives me a sense of just how much I have to learn. Surely this was the safest, least complicated tool I’d have to master? What the compound mitre saw and the Hilti drill have in store for me I can only guess. The tape cracks as Matt snaps it back into its metallic case.

  There is work to do.

  A wall (or “partition,” as carpenters say) is assembled on the floor. Although it won’t actually partition a space; instead it will stand against the concrete along the existing back wall. (Later, Matt tells me, we will be constructing the wall that’ll divide the bathroom and bedroom.) I lay out the plates side by side on their edges and mark off sixteen-inch centres (using the red marks on the tape). Next, Tim and I measure out the height between the floor and the ceiling and between the floor and the duct, where the ceiling will drop. Then, with the Skilsaw, we cut the studs we’ll use to make up the wall (subtracting three inches—an inch and a half for each plate; I am reminded that two-by-fours are actually an inch and a half by three and a half). Finally we line up the studs between the top and bottom plates, aligning their ends with each mark. It looks like the bars of a jail cell.

  Now Matt unveils his prized Home Depot rental: a nail gun powered by an air compressor.

  “Just get your hands at a safe distance,” he says, crouching over the top plate and placing the edge of the nail gun against its bottom, right in the middle of the stud that extends vertically above it. He grips the stud with his right hand.

  “And push in.”

  Thwack.

  The nail shoots through the top plate and straight up into the stud, securing the two at a right angle. It’s a startling sound—harsh and final. There is no taking this bolt back.

  “And that’s it.”

  He lines up the next stud on the floor and gives two quick, confident punches with the gun into the plate: thwack, thwack.

  When the frame is complete, Matt and Tim lift it off the floor together, looking like homesteaders raising the walls of a barn. When they nearly smash into the ceiling light bulb I shout to warn them, fulfilling my duty as the frame-raising bystander.

  After some jostling, the bottom of the partition bumps into place on top of the chalk line we laid on the floor. If you’ve never felt the satisfaction of seeing a partition line up with a chalk line—the moment when a plan turns into a wall—you might be surprised by the joy such a seemingly simple moment can yield.

  For us, the moment is brief. As we try to slide the top of the partition into place, it doesn’t take.

  The top plate leans back towards us, because it’s a fraction too tall. Matt takes a hammer and gives it a smack at several points to see if he can knock it in. The frame bounces with each smack, uncooperatively.

  It’s the first time we realize that one of the ceiling joists hangs slightly lower than the others, preventing the partition from slipping under. (This also explains the squeaky floor upstairs: there’s a gap between the hardwood and the plywood where the joist sags, and the weight of each passing step bends the hardwood down to close the gap, forcing the wood to squeak along the nails that hold it down. Now I know.) We try to bash the joist up with the hammer. No luck. We try to knock the top of the frame at the joist, hoping to force it in. It doesn’t move.

  There’s only one solution. I grab the red Skilsaw sitting on the floor in the other room. Matt plugs it in and sets the stepladder beneath the rebellious joist. We need to shave off less than an inch.

  Matt revs the saw twice, then twists it sideways and lines up the blade against the bottom of the joist. The saw squeals as he cuts into the wood, making a small, wobbly incision that creates a large splinter. Then he pulls the severed wood down and back, snapping off the sliver.

  But the surgery fails. He can’t cut out deep enough with the circular saw and so has to switch to the Sawzall with its long, narrow blade. Matt takes it to the joist, carving off a good inch and creating a new wobbly edge. It’s not a model of precision, but this time when we lift it, the frame fits snugly in place.

  Now Tim holds a level to the side of one of the studs. It’s plumb. We’ll take the small victory, though I’m not convinced the now compromised joist would pass a building inspection.

  Matt leaves the room and comes back carrying what looks like a small model of a tower, with an orange base, a long frame, and a narrow peak.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “It’s like a hammer punch,” Tim says, recognizing it. “It’s awesome.”

  “It’s a Ramset. It’s like a twenty-two-calibre little thing you load in—kind of like a bullet,” Matt says. He’s holding a metallic cylinder, which actually looks exactly like a bullet. He loads it into the barrel.

  “If you manage to do it right you look like a badass,” Matt adds. He pulls the handle back, which opens the barrel where the bolt was loaded. “The casing goes flying. You feel pretty cool. Let’s see if we can do it…”

  He places the end of the barrel on the bottom plate supporting the frame and whacks the punch with his hammer. There’s a spark and a crack, like a muted gunshot. A bolt drives through the wood into the concrete.

  Matt pulls back the barrel quickly and the casing drops to the floor.

  “Ah, that was all right,” he says.

  He hands it to Tim, showing him how to load a new bolt in the front of the barrel. Tim then presses the mouth of the Ramset to the stud and gives it a whack—followed by a clanking metallic echo. He wasn’t holding it strongly enough to keep it pressed against the wood.

  He tries again.

  Pop! The bolt drives in effortlessly.

  “That’s awesome,” he confirms.

  I note that this is precisely the kind of tool that can get the wrong kind of person into trouble. And Matt has a story about that, of course.

  He used to have a captive bolt pistol that had a trigger on it, he says. One day he went out with a couple of his friends, guys I know, and was goofing around at a Fall Fair in town. Naturally, he brought the pistol along. They decided to see how far they could launch the bolt, so one friend held back the mechanism at the end of the barrel, as though it was being compressed against a piece of wood, while the other pulled the trigger. It fired, and the bolt disappeared somewhere into the sky. The guy holding the barrel felt his fingers vibrating for the rest of the day. They don’t know where the bolt landed, but thankfully they never heard about it again.

  “That was funny,” Matt concludes.

  “You’re a bunch of idiots,” I say.

  But Matt doesn’t hear me. He laughs to himself.

  “That was hilarious,” he says.

  In the middle of the partition we use the hammer gun to bolt smaller pieces of two-by-four to the insulation next to the studs. Then we attach another small piece of two-by-four, this one extending from the wood affixed to the insulation to the stud, adding extra support to the partition. It creates an extended arm from the centre stud to the concrete wall behind the old insulation.

  Tim and I use the level to check that the first frame is still plumb. It’s not—it’s off the mark in several spots. I groan.

  But we all agree to leave close enough alone.

  For the next wall, I’m tasked with marking every sixteen inches on the two-by-fours that will be the plates for a fourteen-foot wall that runs from one of the doors to the back of the room. It’s probably the same job Dad would have given me when I was a toddler stumbling around behind him, but I’m much more adept at it now—especially armed with the useful tip that sixteen-inch distances are already indicated on my measuring tape.

  We have the second partition cut, nailed, and standing in place in less than half the time it took us to do the first. But the opposite wall won’t be as easy. We have to work around the fuse boxes and the narrow window at the ceiling that brings in light from the backyard.

  Matt
says the solution is to build two “headers,” another term I’m not familiar with. Basically, he explains, a header is a support beam that runs horizontally over the top of a door or a window opening in order to support the weight of the joists above. It’s supported by two studs on each side—a “king stud” and a “jack stud.” The king stud is full length, meaning it reaches from the floor to the ceiling. The jack stud is shorter, holding up the ends of the header and nailed flush with the king stud that extends beyond.

  After building the headers, Matt explains that we’ll carry on with a regular frame all the way down the wall, past the bedroom to the far end of where the bathroom will be. And to do that, we have to take down a long narrow fluorescent light that hangs from the ceiling above where the new bathtub will go—a light that Dad had hung above his old workbench back when we first moved in.

  The table was really just a rough-edged piece of plywood whose corners, for some reason, Dad had taken care to mark with an A, B, C, and D to match the legs he’d cut. The workbench that held all his old tools in milk crates, because even though he had newer ones, he just might find a use for the retired ones. He always did. The bench is in the garage now, taken apart and stored away, one of the many items I’ve refused to part with. I plan to put it back together one day in a place of my own, where I can hang his tools around it and build dollhouses and easels for my kids to use, just as he did.

  As the guys work around me, I stop and think about what this process really means. The space where the workbench sat will now hold a bathtub in a new bathroom, and I know that no one but me will remember that it was ever there. The table he built and the tools it held, will be forgotten. We’re building over him.

  I know it’s weird and it’s wrong—but as they work I feel some resentment towards Matt, Jonathan, and Tim for being here. I resent them for doing what I think no one but Dad should do. To them, this is just a job to get done. And I understand that, of course. They didn’t know him like I do. They can’t see him like I do. They don’t see a man standing at the workbench while we mark out plans for a bathtub around him. And for a moment I wish they weren’t here, not because of anything they’ve done, but simply because they’re not him. This is not their job to complete. It’s Dad’s. It’s mine.

  I want to close my eyes and go to sleep. I want to find him again and ask him how it’s done.

  9

  Matt has sketched out a rough plan with pencil on a piece of plywood that sits on the kitchen table. The scribbled design seems more like a suggestion than an actual guide. The crew stands over it, munching on pizza and sipping beer during our first break, examining it as if we were explorers journeying into a new land.

  He’s drawn in the doors that sit at the bottom of the stairs, the ones that Dad put in long ago. Our initial idea was to keep the current wall and door frames in place. But the doors sit about a foot and a half back from the bottom of the stairs, creating a rectangular alcove of useless space. And with the wall Dad put up, there isn’t enough room to fit a toilet, a tub, and a sink.

  “The problem is there’s not enough room to walk here,” Matt says, circling the tiny gap between the crude sketches of a toilet, a vanity, and a tub along the back wall. If the completely not-to-scale drawing on the piece of plywood in front of us was close to correct, a regular-sized thirty-inch door would bang into the toilet every time it was opened, he explains, confirming something I’d worried about earlier.

  “So we need to move this wall back as far as possible,” Matt says, pointing to the original doors.

  I remember that wall going up. I remember the plans to finish the job we’d started years ago—plans that kept getting pushed back until they were forgotten entirely. I’d viewed those two doors that sat uselessly to the right of the stairs as a sort of tribute—a heritage centrepiece at the heart of our rebuild. The edit will mean taking down a wall that Dad had put in place.

  This wasn’t something I’d agreed to. We were supposed to build on what Dad had started, not tear it down.

  I stare at the plywood blueprint. It’s clear that we’d gain several feet this way. There really isn’t a choice. But the boys have to wait for me to say it. It takes me a few moments.

  “I’m concerned that we’ll have tried to fit a bathroom into space that isn’t there,” I say. “This gives it more room. It will feel more natural.”

  Tear Dad’s work down, in other words.

  They each nod dutifully. And we shift from framing something new to demolishing a piece of the past.

  * * *

  —

  For years I’d watched Dad sketch out plans in his exact, careful hand. If he drew a line, he’d use a ruler. If he drew a circle, he’d use a compass. Always. If he messed up he’d erase the pencil marks, and if he used a pen he’d make corrections with Wite-Out. It was meticulous. His handwriting was impeccable, too. It hadn’t always been. But in his early twenties, when one of his first bosses told him that neat handwriting was a sign of professionalism, he worked on it. It was the kind of thing people noticed, like always showing up on time.

  I remember him telling me that: It’s about the impression you leave.

  I’d found his old green notebook from junior high in one of the boxes in the basement. It was from an algebra class. His writing was young, then. Shaky and uneven, drifting off course, aimless. In other words, it was like mine. When I was seven my parents brought me to a special tutor because I kept scoring poorly on penmanship. This lady made me draw circles, over and over. She made me connect the lines of triangles and squares and print out every letter of the alphabet one by one, pages at a time. And because I kept trying to hold my pencil with every finger but my pinky, I was given a special grip for my pencils that held my fingers and thumb in place. It was like wearing braces for spelling class.

  I never really got the hang of it.

  My parents must have thought I was hopeless, and were probably legitimately concerned about my prospects in school. Teachers constantly commented on how messy my writing was. Often, I couldn’t even read it myself. My sentences drifted off the line, taking their own angles—following their own course. Even today, it’s mostly illegible. Unlike my father, I never took the time to slow down and perfect the craft.

  Dad’s handwriting was not only flawless, it was beautiful. He’d practised it until it was measured and symmetrical, with perfectly straight lines and elegant ribbons that curled gracefully from the end of his R’s and bowed down the shaft of each D. Even when he was in a rush and scribbled, the slant would increase without sacrificing symmetry. He used the boxes of the graph paper he always wrote on as absolute bounds—taking up a single row, or stretching over two, but always, always, the same throughout that entry.

  And there are many entries. He kept notes daily. Meetings he took, calls he made, tasks he needed to accomplish, sermons he enjoyed, points he might need to recall.

  He left stacks of black notebooks—dozens—many of which I read by lamplight, sitting at his desk, line by line. Dad’s notes went back more than a decade. Every sentence became a riddle I felt I needed to decipher. There had to be some message in there, I thought—some final letter telling me all the things he needed to say in case he died before he could.

  I even looked for some sort of code in his construction jargon. But as hard as I tried, his perfect cursive told only the story of job sites. Measurements I didn’t understand. Dimensions noted on sketches with little context. Names of people he’d called and people he needed to call. Lists of things he had to get done. The sermon notes offered the most potential—he had to have been thinking inwardly then. But he’d written out only the pastor’s points that had flashed on the screen above the pulpit. He underlined some and made note of a few verses. I read them all, but couldn’t connect.

  It was something he’d said he admired in me—the practice of putting feelings into words. When I was a teenager I spent a couple weeks�
�� worth of our road trips to hockey games typing out on his laptop what I thought would be a small book as a gift for my girlfriend. I was sixteen and felt something like love for the first time. It was insatiable. I was captive to the scent of her Tommy Girl perfume and her cigarettes and to the maze of making out on her bed to Chantal Kreviazuk songs. I just had to write about it. I had to get it out, on paper, to let her know—and so I wrote her that little book, which was probably about twenty pages long, called My Everything. It would be dreadful to see it now, though fascinating if I could endure it. But she had the only copy and I expect she tossed it a year later, when she dumped me, and when I wrote bad poetry about heartache for the first time. Anyway, Dad knew what I was doing and said that it amazed him, because he’d never written out a story before—he’d never recorded how he really felt about anything, really. He didn’t know how. He wrote words that conveyed facts, not feelings.

  When he was on the road, driving between the different construction sites he managed, he used to record voice memos on an old pocket tape recorder he kept in the console between the seats of his truck. It was the kind that used tiny tapes. I had a vague memory of seeing a bag full of those old mini cassettes in the basement years before.

  I’d searched for them when we cleared it out, hoping to listen to his voice as he read out the things he still needed to accomplish before sunset. I wanted to pull my headphones on and fall asleep hearing him in the background just as I used to…Tony needs to review the blueprints for the Sunoco station…Have Steve look into the AC unit at the Belvedere…We’ll need to have the Mavis Road site cleared out before the safety inspector comes in on Wednesday…I’d have given anything to have hours and hours of those daily whispers. And maybe, somewhere in the static, I’d find a message that time, folded over, had compelled him to record years ago for a son who would search for him in the future…Hey, buddy, it’s Dad…I’m sorry that I can’t be there now. But I’m proud of you. Keep your head up. And remember, it’s never as bad as you think it is. Now, take care of your mom and sisters…I love you.

 

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