Exposed Houses

In an effort to update the house my Mom moved into a few decades ago, the siding is being redone. This is not a complicated process: take off old siding, put on new siding. Of all the things that can be done to a house, this is probably one of the least complicated.

That said, it is really becoming quite an issue in my life.

My Mom smartly hired outside help to do the siding, Champion Windows and Siding (if you need a referral, please let me know). That is, after all, what champions would do: hire Champion to repair your house. The first thing that the contractors did was strip my house of it's siding and backer-board (the Styrofoam padding between the plywood of the house and the siding). At one point, I wandered outside to see how the work was progressing, and there was my house, exposed to the elements, it's siding strewn about the yard.

It was hard not to feel an tinge of embarrassment looking at my naked house. There were spots were the plywood had rotted from weather damage. Some mold damage blackening other spots, generally near where the rotted sections were. Insulating spewing from the vents that lead to the attic and washer/dryer. It was like accompanying my sister to a gynecological exam: I knew all of this stuff existed underneath the siding, but I would rather not have that theory quantified in front of me (and the neighborhood, for that matter). Thankfully, the workers were quick, and within a few hours, the rotted pieces were replaced, the vents were covered, and the whole house was wrapped in a moisture resistant layer of Tyvek.

Besides exposing my house and all it's physicality to the neighborhood, the contractors are required to sporadically bang on my house with hammers. Obviously, many hands make light work, so there are at least three hammers at any given time going to town on the house. For a fun experiment, put your head in a hamper and then pound on it with a shoe. That's sort of what it's like. The walls are rattling constantly, requiring my Mom and I to go around the house and take all the pictures off outside walls. In the hamper experiment, though, there is one important difference: you know when the blows are about to happen. There is no discernible pattern to the workers hammering (the they use actual hammers, so each individual hammer stroke is different). The lack of a pattern makes sense - what with all the up and down ladders.

This starts every morning around 7:30. Now, anyone who knows me (or most of the Lannon family for that matter) knows that the morning is not the best time to engage me in any manner. I tend to be one of two things: 1) really amiable just to get whatever is happening to stop so I can return to sleep (I lived with a girl who abused this horribly, getting me to take out the trash, move the car, and walk the dog); 2) really grouchy and testy. Because there is nothing I can half-assedly do to make the banging stop, I imagine I am leaning toward the second one.

But upsetting my sleeping patterns is not the only problem with having the siding people around the house. The main problem is that they are up on ladders near all the windows.

I woke up the other day and the house was unusually dark. My Mom likes to keep all the shades and curtains pulled tight when the weather turns hot so that the house stays cooler (ostensibly, this is to save on running the air conditioner, but because the house is so dark we have to run all the lights; in the end, I imagine it balances out). Recently, though, my Mom has taken to sitting in the corner of the living room where no one can easily see what she is doing.

I thought this was crazy until this morning when I was sitting in the family room, still in my pajamas at 11:30, watching The Colbert Report. Suddenly, I was really anxious wondering what the workers might think if they caught sight of me eating cookies and watching television in the middle of the weekday. I quickly turned off the TV and started reading.

Then, I started to worry that the workers would start to judge my taste in literature. At the moment, I am reading Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman. Catherine, a friend of mine from high school, and I have recently been talking about writing non-fiction, and it got me thinking that I hadn't read any for a little bit. Anyone familiar with Klosterman's work knows that it is basically the ramblings of a pop culture critic who has seen too many movies, read too many books and listens to too many CDs. He also has an ease with drugs, and writing about his use of said drugs. I was worried that the workers might notice this and assume I was some pretentious snob that would rather listen to The Postal Service and discuss the merits of PBR than do an honest day's work. I could have read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code but I don't want the workers to think that I am a slave to popular literature or that I found that type of writing engaging. I wanted something that said I was intelligent, but not pedantic, like Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or Jennifer Egan's My Life with the Goon Squad. So I did what any rational person would do in this instance: work out.

I was really athletic in high school (another thing that talking with Catherine made me realize has dropped from my life almost entirely), and I used to be able to run long distances at better than average speeds. If pressed, though, I would pick track over cross-country as my favorite sport, and the one I was better at. Cross-country was nice, in that it kept me in shape and gave me a community to belong to, but I really don't have it in me to run miles and miles without complaining. The rational part of my brain realizes that I could drive the same distance much more efficiently. Or walk it, if a car weren't available, and still reach the same result. Running seems to be one of those things that needs to be done in emergency situations only.

Despite this recent change in demeanor, I found myself compelled to use the treadmill that collects dust in the family room. I returned to The Colbert Report, and undertook a thirty minute (or so) walk-run routine. Exercise, I thought to myself, ain't nothing strange about a man running on a treadmill in the middle of the afternoon. Or rather, running on a treadmill makes me less of a loser than sitting in my pajamas mid-day, watching TV and eating cookies.

Or did it? As I cooled down from my impromptu exercise program, I was suddenly worried that maybe it sent the wrong message. Who runs inside on treadmills? Am I the sort of person who is so distant from the working class that I have to run inside on expensive machinery when the world is free to run on? Was my workout suggesting that I was an elitist? I jumped off the treadmill and tried to both make use of the kettle bells and the Ab Circle (my Mom's house is something of a museum for exercise equipment), but neither I felt portrayed the "salt of the earth" sentiment that I wanted to suggest.

I decided the best thing to do was show these judgmental day laborers that I was contributing to society. I was going to take a shower and then get to work editing a document that I need to have submitted by tomorrow. See, I would say with my actions, I am TOTALLY like you.

Unfortunately, the workers by this point had scaled to the part of the house where the bathroom window is, and had, no doubt, begun making judgments about my choice of shampoo and body wash (Shampoo and conditioner in one, eh? Too lazy to use two bottles. Or, Suave Professionals? Is he too good for the regular Suave?). There was no way I could possibly take a shower with these people on the other side of the window, no matter how nontransparent the shower curtain is.

At the time of posting this, I am sitting in my room, away from the prying eyes of these contractors who, probably, have not noticed anything about my tastes in literature, movies or music, and who have more to worry about then what all of these choices say about me. In fact, unless I make my presence known, these workers are more interested in the outside of the house, rather than the two people knocking about inside of it.

That said, I have yet to shower.