Measuring Up

by Dan Robson

  “Music?”

  When I was young, Dad used to play his acoustic guitar every now and then. He mentioned he’d been in a band as a teenager, but I never really asked him about it. I only remember him playing “Douglas Mountain,” a song that Raffi, the Canadian children’s performer, sang on his Christmas album. It’s a melodic lullaby of a song, and Dad would sing it beautifully as we lay in bed about to fall asleep.

  He often put on albums by artists like Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, Boston, Chicago, America, Steely Dan, Deep Purple, and The Who. He’d always turn up the volume while cleaning the house or cooking. In the summer, he’d keep the windows open so he could hear the CD player while he worked in the garden.

  Music was undoubtedly a big part of Dad’s life, but I’d never thought of him as a musician, or as someone who ever dreamed about being one.

  The band was together for only three or four years, Bill tells me.

  “What did you call yourselves?” I ask.

  “I came up with ‘Rubber Bacon,’ ” he says. “But I don’t think we had a name.”

  They started in middle school, back at Beatty-Fleming, he continues. My father wanted to be a guitar player. His good friend Dale Taylor wanted to be a drummer. Charlie Yuhle, another neighbourhood kid, played the bass. Bill played a knock-off Farfisa organ. Sometimes they had a singer named Carol Millen, but other times Dad took the mic, depending on the song.

  “I’ve always been into music,” Bill remarks. “It was all about the sound with me.”

  The band practised in Charlie Yuhle’s basement, playing songs like “Walk Don’t Run.”

  They would perform at battle-of-the-bands events and school dances. During one show, Bill says, my dad told him he’d come down with a cold at the last minute and stuck him with singing “House of the Rising Sun.” But Dad scribbled down the lyrics for him. “I don’t know the words, so he gave me this sheet of paper,” Bill says. “And I’m up there singing ‘There is a house in New Orleans…’—and it was a fucking disaster.”

  My dad lost his voice a couple of times before their shows, Bill says. “I’m not sure if it was planned or not.”

  I have a difficult time imagining my father standing on a stage, belting out a song. He rarely liked attention. Once, when he was running for a position on the board of our church, he nervously practised his speech and even sent it to me for revisions while I was away at university. I worried about him when I knew he was supposed to be up at the podium, speaking to the congregation. So although I didn’t like the idea of him balking in front of a crowd right before a gig with his middle-school band, I didn’t find it surprising either.

  “I was a hacker anyway,” Bill says. “Rick was a pretty good guitar player, but probably mostly rhythm. We didn’t really have an outstanding guitar player who could play lead or anything. It was mostly Dale and him and Charlie, doing whatever.”

  I should find those guys too, Bill suggests. They’d have tons to tell me about Rick and the old days.

  “I will,” I say. “I’ll find them.”

  Bill tells me again that he had tried to reunite, but never heard back from my father. He called the other guys in the band too, but they never reconnected.

  I ask Bill why their friendship had waned. It’s just a thing that happens in life, he says.

  It’s true—sometimes people head over the horizon and never look back, as I remember reading in On the Road during my obligatory Jack Kerouac phase: “What is that feeling,” he wrote, “when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—It’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

  Maybe, for Dad, it was easier to leave the specks dispersed as he grew up and his life became full and busy with a wife, kids, and career. But I wonder if he’d ever longed to return to the past. If he ever dreamed of those summer days running through a farmer’s field.

  “I would love to talk about my father’s life,” Bill says. “But who am I going to talk to about it? He’s gone…”

  He pauses.

  “I’d rather it was you interviewing your dad,” he says.

  My voice catches.

  “Me too.”

  11

  We’ve started day two a bit later, slowing down after our non-stop first. The crew gathers in the basement to receive their marching orders.

  Matt is wearing black and white flannel, a modern take on Al from Home Improvement. Tim wears shorts and deck shoes as though he’s heading to the Caribbean. Jonathan’s also in shorts, but matches them with steel-toe boots and, curiously, a fleece zip-up. I’m rocking old jeans, a Henley, and Dad’s boots, which is the proper way for a style-conscious contractor to dress.

  Yesterday went a bit slower than planned, Matt says, so we need to be more efficient today.

  Considering how exhausted yesterday left me, I’m a bit concerned about what he means by being even more efficient today.

  “What issues did we come across yesterday?” I ask.

  “Well, I wouldn’t call them issues,” Matt says. “I’d call them challenges.”

  I get the sense that by “challenges” he means me.

  “I think everyone was getting a feel for the, uh, space,” he says. “And also to get the design just right. I think we’re all pretty happy with how things turned out. But I mean, as a leader”—he puts his hands on his chest—” I always want to see more get done.”

  “Well, these guys were standing around too much,” I say, nodding to Jonathan and Tim.

  They both huff.

  “So we gotta work faster today,” Matt says.

  We all nod.

  “We made some good progress yesterday. So we’re going to finish up the framing and make this all nice,” he says, looking around at the bones of what will be the bathroom.

  The end walls of the bathroom are almost done, aside from the alcove where the throne will sit. And we still need to frame in a closet for the bedroom, which will align with the bathtub. But the big job today is really the plumbing.

  “We’re going to break up the floor and tie in the toilet drain. And we’ll also break up the floor to put the drain in for the shower—and then break up another trench over here for the vanity.”

  Supposedly, beneath this very solid concrete, we’re going to discover pipes that have been buried since the house was built. The key here seems to be busting up the floor, but I have no idea how we plan to get that done.

  Nonetheless…

  “All right,” I say. “Let’s do this.”

  * * *

  —

  The morning brings my first significant contribution to the renovation, one that comes by way of the toilet.

  In a moment of architectural ingenuity, I notice that there’s enough space beside the furnace to build out a small alcove into the bathroom, like a closet with no door, where the toilet could fit. It would create a comfortable little space in which one could go about their business without taking up any of the bathroom’s existing floor space. It’ll take us a bit more time, but everyone agrees that it’s as sound a plan as we’ve made so far. I bask in quiet satisfaction.

  Tim and I get started by finishing off the framing. Matt gives us careful instructions on how the studs in the corner we’re piecing together need to line up with the concrete wall so that the drywall can be properly fastened on both sides. This process is crucial, Matt says. He marks out the alignment he’s looking for on the joists above us with a pencil.

  I immediately screw it up. Certain that I’ve measured twice, I cut the studs at two different lengths, with one standing at least an inch shorter than the other. It doesn’t come close to connecting to the frame vertically. Even the longer stud is too short, by about half an inch. I’ve wasted both time and wood.

&nb
sp; I return to the sawhorse, pick up the circular saw, and try again. I’m incredibly nervous about screwing up twice. But this time, after obsessively measuring and remeasuring and double-checking, I manage to get it right.

  Then I stand the pieces in place—and they seem half an inch too tall. I’m flooded with frustration. Still, it’s better to go long than short.

  Matt shows me how to give the studs a proper whack with the hammer to smack them into place. “You just kind of feel the swing, right?” he says, lining up the hammer with the bottom of the stud and cocking it back with his wrist. He’s bent over, his ankle right behind the wood he plans to whack. Seems dangerous. But he hits the stud with one perfect arc—thud—and it shifts right over the lines on the joists he sketched out in pencil. He throws in a couple more whacks at the top and bottom to make sure it’s in place.

  “That’s it, eh,” I say. “All right.”

  On the other side of the room, Jonathan and Tim have run into a problem with the far wall beneath the window. The partition we built wasn’t properly checked yesterday, and now they’ve discovered that the studs aren’t plumb. The imperfections will have a domino effect: as soon as one piece of the puzzle isn’t exact, it creates future problems that become a huge headache to fix. The stud that’s supposed to anchor the door to the closet is particularly off. If we don’t take the time to correct it now, the closet will never open correctly.

  Everyone is frustrated. Errors like this erase hours of work.

  I’m learning that there’s much more complexity within the walls around us than I’d ever considered. You can’t frame a room without the complete picture in mind. One mistake affects everything. Each move impacts the next. Everything is connected. Carpentry isn’t just hammering and sawing—it’s foreseeing.

  “If you guys want to fix this, you take the Sawzall and cut all of these out,” Matt says, tapping the top of each stud in the row with the long silver level in his right hand.

  “Make all of these plumb and then bang it back in,” he continues. “Somewhere along the way it kind of got pulled out. But that’s an easy fix for you guys.”

  “Yeah,” Jonathan groans.

  He takes the Sawzall to the studs one by one, jamming it into the thin line between the joist and the top edge of each stud to cut away the nails that bind them.

  Matt double-checks the frame on the other side of the room, at what will be the entranceway into the bathroom and the bedroom. The studs aren’t plumb there, either. We’ll have to cut those pieces as well and do it all again.

  As Jonathan and Tim redo work that I’m fairly certain I had a hand in messing up, Matt and I frame the new throne room—the little alcove in the space beside the furnace.

  The four of us come back together shortly before noon, eager to move on from all our framing visions and revisions. It’s time to smash up the floor.

  * * *

  —

  On his way to the house this morning, Matt dropped into Home Depot and rented us a jackhammer. It’s a Bosch. It looks like an oversized drill with a massive steel drill bit—probably a foot and a half long. I’ve never come close to using a tool built for nothing but destruction. It seems like the kind of thing you should need a licence to operate. But apparently all it takes is a driver’s licence and a credit card deposit.

  Under the yellow work lights, one of which has burned out, we’ve measured out the rough area where the toilet is going to go. There’s no real precision involved. Now Tim, Jonathan, and I stand in a circle around Matt, who presses the pneumatic drill to the concrete floor. It blasts to life, quaking the ground beneath us. Small cracks break into pieces that shake away from the epicentre. Even with the orange plugs stuffed in our ears, the metallic rat-tat-tat sounds like a machine gun. It continues for nearly a minute as Matt moves the bit all around the area, tilting at different angles and smashing out the grey rubble.

  The violence echoes in my head as Matt relents and we assess the damage. Despite the mess of concrete bits scattered around, it doesn’t look as though he’s gotten very far.

  “Lucky for us this floor is pretty thin,” he says.

  It seems pretty thick to me.

  Jonathan is holding a pickaxe. Tim has a sledgehammer. I’m not sure where they got them—and I wonder where the hell they were yesterday when I had to use my fists and feet to take down the wall.

  “If you just start whaling you can make a nice hole,” Matt says to Jonathan. “Just imagine where the toilet bowl is going to be.”

  Jonathan steps in. He centres himself in his workboots and bends his bare knees, readying the pickaxe in his polar-fleeced arms. The first strike is timid, bouncing back with a sad clank. The second chips away a few loose pieces, but gets us nowhere.

  “Give ’er,” Matt says.

  Now Jonathan raises the pickaxe high above his head and slams the blade with force.

  This time there’s a muted thud. He strikes again and again, gaining strength each time.

  After a few blows, the hole seems to sink down and break wider.

  Jonathan steps back, huffing. Now Tim moves in, clearing out the debris with his boot as we take a few steps back. He crouches, turning his feet inward to find a grip in his old boat shoes. Then he raises the hammer and smashes it down repeatedly, getting off five swings in ten seconds, which seems like a pretty pro pace. His blows make a considerable impact. The concrete breaks away easily and the hole starts to widen beneath a cloud of dust.

  It settles while Tim stops to catch his breath. A rough hole has opened in the floor, exposing layers of what seems to be gravel that rests beneath our house. We step in with a giant broom to sweep the debris aside.

  “How do we know when to stop?” Tim asks.

  A good question.

  Matt’s on the other side of the room, where the tub will sit, marking out the spot that will become the drain. He comes over to survey the situation.

  “Here’s the stack,” he says, bending down and pointing to the big black pipe that extends vertically up the side of the wall that runs along the stairs beside us, parallel to the hole we’ve started.

  I’ve never even noticed it before. It seems as if it’s appeared out of nowhere. Matt explains how it allows air into the waste pipe through the vent, which prevents a vacuum from being created in the pipe.

  “We’ll tee off this guy,” he says, making a motion from the pipe to the hole. Then he pulls out his measuring tape, extending it from the back stud in the alcove to the hole.

  “The centre of the toilet is fourteen inches off the wall,” he tells us. “So get, like, a nice big hole here.” He makes a wide, entirely unspecific circle with his finger.

  “And then kind of work your way over.” He brushes a line with his foot and then kicks in the hole a bit.

  “Once you break up around here, it will start getting easier and easier. And then take away as much dirt as you can. Just get a big hole like this”—he draws another wide circle with his finger—“and work it this way. Because once this is big enough, we’re going to have to dig out underneath the floor.”

  “That’s the plan?” I ask.

  “We’ll see how it goes…”

  Tim hands me the sledgehammer. It’s my turn to swing. I grip the handle too tightly on the first crack and don’t lean into it enough. It barely makes a dent. It takes a few more swings to get the feel of it, sliding my leading hand down the handle as the velocity of the hammer takes over. My pace is much slower than Tim’s, but the rhythm comes. The floor breaks with each long, deliberate swing. The crumbling concrete is wildly satisfying. It feels as if I could swing all day, but there are much more efficient ways to get this job done.

  When the toilet hole is wide enough, I start to hammer out a small path to the stack that rises up beside us. Bashing apart the untouched concrete floor feels even better than widening the loose pieces that we
re already broken off in the hole. The smooth surface cracks with each blow, one after the other in a line, like a river stretching out from a lake.

  But while the destruction wrought by the sledgehammer has been rewarding, it’s nothing compared to the obliterating force of the jackhammer. After I push the bit into the hole and press the trigger, the bit jumps and dances on the uneven bits, exploding them in a metallic staccato. It’s obscenely loud, the vibration so strong that minutes later I can still feel it in my hands.

  When the hole is about a foot deep, muddy water starts to seep through the layer of exposed dirt that sits beneath the concrete.

  This strikes me as concerning, but Matt doesn’t look worried. “That’s why, as you can imagine, water can easily come up through your floor,” he remarks, sloshing the water with his shovel.

  “Right,” I say. “Right…”

  “But this house seems pretty well built,” he continues. “With older houses it’s more of an issue because of drainage and stuff, and over the years they’ve maybe changed the slope of the land—they’ve done landscaping, say—so then you have problems with water running underneath the house. At my house in Orangeville, I opened up the floor and there was, like, this much space underneath.” He makes about a two-foot gap with his hands.

  “And there was tons of water. And the foundation, they had actually extended it even lower than what would be to code. So they must have dug down and had serious water problems, and had to pump out water—and then lay the foundation probably six to eight feet below grade. Four feet below grade is normal—it’s the frost line; frost doesn’t reach under your house at four feet…”

  He trails off, digging into the hole with the shovel.

  “So when you found all the water under the house, what did you do?” I ask.

  “Oh, I just filled it with as much aggregate as I could and closed it back up,” Matt says. (Aggregate is what contractors call gravel, instead of just calling it gravel.) “Because it hadn’t been a problem for twenty or thirty years.”