This is a short piece laced with life, graffiti art, home ownership, perhaps humor, and how necessity can often reveal the odd or the curious.
The point of some of this is to illustrate how remodeling work and skills just kind of fell into place through the years.
Part of it just to show how things in those processes may touch your life in an unexpected way.
If I go back far enough I recall some remodel work with my father on a house that could have been built in the early 1900’s. That was during my high school time frame.
Like many, I started off my adult life with little money. I joined the military shortly after high school. I got married, and we survived on the very low military income of that era. For those familiar with military pay in the early 1970’s. It was grossly inadequate. Not that there was a choice in the era of the draft. More like forced army conscripts. Paid in salt. Serving an emperor or king, safe behind castle walls. But we made it work.
I often did, odd jobs for pay, as side work while in the military. Off hour jobs, to augment our income. It was the only way to make ends meet. I remember one such job working on a remodel job at a restaurant. Cleaning crud, hanging drywall, and laying floor. Oddly, most of all I can recall of that job, is gone from memory. I do remember they all called it “sheet rock”. I had always known it as “drywall”. A weird thing to stick in your mind even some 40 years later.
Right out of the military we bought a run down small house. That was to prove to be a lesson in all types of skilled trade knowledge and experiences. All valuable knowledge related to home construction and fixing things. In hindsight that house had everything wrong with it. Had we been more far-thinking we could have made a fortune off a movie similar to “The Money Pit”. In the moment we were just trying to survive.
Then inspiration of some sort hit. We wanted to build our own home…do all of the work. We bought a 5 acre piece of property that was wet and heavily wooded.
Clearing a spot to start building took us a whole season.
From the concrete and block work, to framing, and finishing. We hammered through that project for several years. I remember sleeping on site in a tent while laying the basement block walls. Afraid someone would attempt to steal the material or equipment, or tools like the cement mixer. 1500 blocks and 15 yards of concrete floor later, we had basement walls and I could sleep in a real bed again.
I recall living in the covered basement one winter after selling our old house. The framing of the actual new house started the next spring. We heated the basement space with a wood burning furnace.
The house took several years to complete. While at the same time working a full time paying job with lots of overtime, and lots of call-outs late at night or on weekends. That left little time for other things. Let alone house building time.
But we managed still. The overtime was nice because it afforded us time to save money to pay off major project phases, nearly as fast as we could complete the labor ourselves.
Then life took an unexpected abrupt left turn, and I found myself relocated to another part of the country. Starting over with life, and houses. I was soon in a ‘Used” house again. Never satisfied with the original build.
Backing up into the past somewhat, and remembering some of the remodel work. I remember some of the odd or interesting things you find. Coins under shingles. Coins in the walls over door jams, razor blades in the walls, spectacles in an attic, and so on. I am sure these all have some type of meaning or an unknown story? I heard, or was told, the coin placement is a good luck thing.
Also crumpled up old newspapers stuffed between window frames and framing. Its purpose, I assume, is to act as insulation? To un-crumple such finds, can prove to be real interesting reading decades later.
So back to the present, I found myself cutting into drywall in my bathroom. This current house was built in 1989 and had one previous owner.
Marilyn and I have been working on this house since 2000. Demo’ing out walls and rearranging them. Gutting and completely redoing the kitchen. The list goes on.
I was not real surprised when I cut into the wall to find something unusual. Way more curious as to what it was, why it was there. Just what the heck was the ‘artist” thinking? I assume it was some type of doodling done on the back side of the drywall when it was stacked up, pre-installation, as the house was being built? Perhaps a piece of construction worker art? Created to pass the time while on break or lunch?
Had I not been installing something myself, I may have never seen this. The photo above was how I saw it. The below photo is after I flipped the image 180 degrees. It appears as a 6 shooter to me. Remember this was from back in 1989. What was going on back then to inspire this?
