Remodeling With Dad
By Jeannine Patané • May 2004

     The home I grew up in is a small, creaking, crooked house that is over 100 years old. As a child, I believed the rooms were large and it was standard for a home to have only one bathroom. I also thought it was normal for fathers to spend a lot of time fixing their house. As I got older, I became aware of the construction of other houses and the relationship that families had with their homes.
     Our house’s construction began as a two-story shack on a hill during the turn of the Twentieth Century. In the 1950’s, the house’s owner did major renovation work and added a front addition, which almost doubled the house’s 20’ x 35’ size. Our family purchased the house in the mid-seventies as a starter home, and my family still lives there.
     We’ve had the house for about 30 years, and my father is still working on some of the original structure. I understand home projects are a labor of love for people who own an old house, because the maintenance never ends as a do-it-yourselfer. My father and mother are at a good point in their lives when they can easily sell the house to eager folks and retire into a relaxed lifestyle. Dad can buy a newer home to spend more of his time pursuing interests instead of having a house consume his life. But I think home improvement is my father’s interest; he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he wasn’t working on the house. His weekend trips to the hardware store would end. He wouldn’t have anything to problem-solve. The only problem with his home improvement list is that it is growing into a major renovation list, and he’s not getting any younger to do all the work himself.
     The latest renovation my father started was the kitchen. The old cabinets that we removed were with the house three decades ago, and they were in desperate need of replacement. Hot glue and duct tape held the broken areas of the cabinets together, and a large burn mark above the toaster reminded us of when my brother was a toddler and he wanted to make toast, but he set the toaster on fire instead. I remember the incident and how my uncle was first on the scene, in his underwear, beating the fire down with his blue jeans. If the kitchen cabinets could talk, they would be the house’s center of conversation. The laminate countertop had also seen better days. It had so much water damage that the laminate was bubbling and peeling up, making the countertop ridiculous to work on. The kitchen was finally gutted down to the original house framework last month.
     No surface was plumb, square or level. Renovation work is more of an art than a science when the entire structure is crooked. The space we worked in was small, so the whole project was pieced together for the crazy retro-fitting we had to do with existing appliances and framework. We added new studs and stickered a lot of the ceiling to even things out before sheetrocking. As my brother and I worked on framing, we asked dad questions about the house and its history like, “What the hell were they thinking when they built that in there?” It was fun to see the old siding from the original shack inside the walls, and other hidden structural items that we did not know existed until now.
     Compared to most other houses, my family house is small and awkward, but it has something that is rarely felt in larger, newer houses. My family home has decades of history and stories. Personal attention and love went into making it what it is today. There is so much heart and character in that shack on the hill, I believe it is the biggest house I know. Whatever my parents decide to do with our family home when they retire, I know their decision will be the right one for them.