Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

Anyone who is a regular reader of this column from back in The Voice days knows about my complete love of home improvement projects! There was the infamous bathroom remodel that took four…oh wait..five, five years to complete. I’m sure no one can forget that disaster, and yet I get the bug from time to time after I’ve spent hours walking around Menard’s or Home Depot to get a little fixer upper project going at home.

Really any reason to spend hours in those kind of stores is a good thing, and only can mean the joy of buying something powered and manly in order to complete the task properly. Come now, can anyone really drill a hole in the wall with just an ordinary drill? Heaven’s no! You’ve gotta have a drill that can go through bedrock if need be!

The latest project has entailed gutting the entire living and dinning room in the 100 year old farm house and tearing down the kitchen ceiling. Sure, it’s a big project, but I’m a handy kinda guy and I can do it, right?

So a couple of weeks ago I started in tearing away lath, plaster, years and years of dirt and mice nests every night for a few hours after work. Yes, I didn’t get far into it when the enormity of what I was doing began to take hold. In fact, for a brief nanosecond I actually began to think I had bitten off way more than I could handle. I’ve kept plugging away though and suddenly I realized that in a way the demolition of the walls in that house were almost like a therapy for me.

There is the excitement of tearing into things, making a mess…being a man. And the discovery of wall paper long forgotten. From flowery print that remind me of grandma’s couch, to a deep red Victorian paper that is gorgeous, to the paper I remember my Mom putting on the walls when I was a boy. Each in it’s own way, those layers, are a little story in themselves and if the house could talk to me and tell me them, what amazing stories I bet they would be.

Of course, I’ve learned some amazing things along the way. First, I know now why the heating bills were always outrageous there. Not a lick of insulation in most of the outside walls. There have been some strange finds. The two..yes two…snake skins in the living room ceiling were certainly somewhat startling and not nearly as interesting as the bees nest I found that had been there so long the honey had actually pulverized into powdered sugar which came raining down all over me one night. At that point I began to worry that someone had put some sort of cyanide powder in there and was trying to do me in.

The coolest find though has been the postcard dated August 10, 1897. Just a penny to send it all the way from Atlantic, and I wonder who Mary Best was, and if the “pig” made it on the train with her sister that week?

A nice long weekend brought me to tonight as I sit at my desk with heating pad on my back. The walls are torn out, and have a little insulation back in them. The electric is run and waiting for me to install boxes. And I even got one new window installed, although I’ll admit if it wasn’t for Mom’s friend Gary I’d probably just taken a piece of paneling that I had pulled down and tacked over the hole I cut in the side of the house.

Yes, it’s taking me a little longer than I’d like to get it finished, but I can’t wait till it’s done and I’m nice and toasty this winter. Now if anyone could tell me where I can find Bio Freeze by the 55 gallon drum I’d be thankful.

See you next week…remember, we’re all in this together.