The hardest job that I ever had was when I went to Cincinnati to work on a house for my friends and clients Lindsey and Mike. I had worked on their house here in Austin a bunch of times. Small stuff, like painting and repairing broken stuff, reworking their fence, painting the playscape, and erecting a back porch shade cover. 
One day Lindsey asked me to come by and talk to her about a large project that she needed my help with. Mike wanted to move back to Cincinnati, where he (and I) are from for a new job he was taking on. So they had bought a house up there, and needed help fixing it up. It had been built in the 1920’s, and she wanted me to go up there and do a major upgrade on it. She had heard my stories about going to distant places from Austin for jobs that interested me, and wondered if I would be willing to drive up there, and live in their new house while renovating it.
Me: I don’t know, Lindsey. It seems to be a pretty big job. It would be hard for me to give you a price on the work without actually seeing the house and some plans.
Lindsey: We are going back up there in a month. You could go with us and see it then. The architect’s plans will be ready then.
So I took some of my credit card miles and bought a plane ticket. It could be a fun job. I had childhood friends all over the Cincinnati area, and had not been back there in a while. And Cincinnati is a great city, with lots of things to do.  Covid was just making its’ first round, but they were still allowing plane flights at that time. 
I met Mike and Lindsey at the new house. They had a copy of the plans. The architect, contrary to my usual experiences with them, had put together a seemingly useful set of plans. Mostly I dislike architects. They never seem to have actually worked on the things that they drew plans for. And their lack of practical knowledge often made it hard to do what they had drawn. Theory is one thing, but reality is another. And I found it annoying when an architect specced something that was more their personal decorative ideas, than anything pragmatic. Granted, I am not an aesthete, and don’t want to be. But over the years of working on peoples houses, I have been called on to repair things that were poorly designed to begin with, and destined to fail because of things like exposure to sun and rain, and poor support for the structure. In general, when someone tells me that they have architectural plans, I roll my eyes and shy  away. But my biggest strength as a contractor is my problem solving abilities. Frequently, I arrive on a job, at a house that I have never seen before, and have to decide how I can do what the clients are asking me to do. I am a creative and pragmatic problem solver.
Lindsey and Mike and I walked through the house, discussing the plans and their ideas. I would need to break a passage through the kitchen wall to allow access from the kitchen to the living room without walking around through the dining room and entry foyer. The whole inside would need to be painted. The upstairs bathroom needed renovation. So did the awful olive drab colored kitchen. The downstairs half bathroom which had been built in what must have been a passage at one time between the office and the kitchen, would have to be closed on the kitchen side, and renovated. Who in the world would want a bathroom door to open into the kitchen?
Then we went down into the basement. It was a typical old fashioned basement, dark and creepy, with the furnace and water heater on one side, and a tiny room with a toilet and a light bulb hanging down on a wire, with a pull chain. There were two small rooms with the kind of plank wooden doors that you would expect a guy with a big knife and a hockey mask to jump out from just before he stabbed you. It reminded me of the basement of the house that I grew up in, where I would only venture down there under duress. The plans called for a new full bathroom, and a laundry room, and the removal of the walls of the small storage rooms where Jason would be hiding. Or Michael. The guy with the knife. Lindsey looked me in the eyes.
Lindsey: Sam, I want this basement to not be murdery.
I knew exactly what she meant. It was dark and creepy down there, and we both jumped when the furnace whooshed on for its heating cycle. The ceiling was dirty uneven plaster, with wires and pipes and ducts and cobwebs. Creepy.
We went back upstairs and talked some more, and the next day I flew back to Austin. I spent 3 days pouring over the drawings, trying to come up with a plan of action and a timeline to do the things necessary. It looked to me to be at least 5 months of work.  Then I had to put a price on my work. 
Putting a price on work is something that I do all the time. I go and look at the job, and then draw on my experience of similar things, and basically guess how long it might take me to do them. And make a list of materials necessary. Most times my guesswork is fairly accurate. 
This job would be complicated by the fact that the job would need to have a building permit. Though I can do plumbing and electrical work myself, and do it all the time with remodels, and have studied building codes so that my work is always compliant with the code, I am not a licensed electrician or plumber, and with a building permit, it is required that I engage licensed professionals for those things. Once you engage subcontractors on a job, the timeline is subject to their availability, and often that messes up your timeline for completion. 
I almost decided not to take the job. There were so many unanswered questions. The day that I was there with Mike and Lindsey, my superman x-ray vision was not working, and I was unable to see inside the walls to know what I would be exposing when I tore into them. The house had plaster walls. Here in Austin, because it is a younger town, I rarely run into plaster walls. Mostly they are drywall, and I am a pro at drywall repairs. Plaster walls look flat, but they are not. And plaster is not soft, like plaster of paris, but instead, is a cementitious medium that is difficult to break out with any degree of accuracy without causing cracks to shoot off in various directions. The job seemed to be just above my abilities. I went to bed thinking that I would call Lindsey in the morning to tell her that I was turning down the job.
I am an optimist. It is not a good survival trait, but my optimism springs from my heart unbidden. Though it gets me into trouble a lot, it is just who I am. Every day, I wake up with a smile. Really I do. It drove my wife Jenny nuts the whole 14 years that she was married to me. I love mornings. And it is very hard for me to use the N word with clients, and I sometimes go for weeks without saying NO. Well, I woke up the next morning with new solutions to some of the problems that I saw in the Cincinnati job, as I often do because my brain always keeps working, even when I am sleeping. So I sat there that morning trying to put a price on my work. I finally settled on a monthly fee that would, I thought, allow me to make a fair living from my labor, and yet allow for unseen roadblocks. As always with bids, I looked at my price, and asked myself if I would pay somebody that much to do that job for me. Though it seemed a little high, I was afraid that if I lowered the price, I would wind up not making much money from the job. Or worse, coming to the end of the job not having made enough for me to have done it. 
I girded up my loins and went to give Lindsey the bid. After all, she could just think it too high, and turn me down. Which was ok, I had plenty of work waiting for me to come and do it with my local clients. The job itself looked to be interesting and challenging. I was also thinking that though this job would cause me to work above my skill set,  I would be learning new stuff, and it was a challenge to rise above my fears. That is basically why I have the abilities that I have. Working above my skill set always taught me new and useful things. Thanks to my years at Wilmington College, I learn quickly and am confident in my ability to do so.
Lindsey did not scream or gnash her teeth when I gave her the bid, which I thought was a good sign. I like her and Mike a lot, and they have confidence in me, and after some discussion, they accepted my bid. Yay me! Now it was up to me to walk my talk.
Meanwhile, Covid was in full swing, and the state of Ohio had instituted a fairly strict lockdown. I finished up what I had going on in Austin, and loaded up all the tools that I thought I would be needing, up in Cincinnati, and set forth in my truck. It was very heavy. It was springtime. As I drove north, the covid restrictions became more severe. Masks were required in public, and I wore mine, though, in states below the mason dixon line, people were not taking it very seriously. Lots of people were dying, and the hospitals were overwhelmed. On NPR one morning, driving through Tennessee, I heard that the first cases of covid in the Cincinnati area had been found. Later that day, I got a text from my sister in law that it was her daughters family that was the one on the news, that had covid. Two days later, she had it too. Fortunately, they all got through it ok. 
Cincinnati was like a ghost town when I  finally 

drove across the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River. I got to the house, and with great difficulty, and much backing and filling, managed to back my truck down the extremely narrow driveway,  barely not scraping the chimney that stuck out of the side of the house, and around the sharp turn to the rear of the house, and down the slope to the garage. As I alighted from my truck, my first thought was, “I am never, ever backing down this driveway ever again.” 

I unloaded my tools into the two car garage under the house, and pulled my truck up and around the sharp bend and squeaked past the chimney again, back to the street end of the driveway. Phew. I didn’t scrape the chimney, nor hit the fence on the neighbors side of the driveway. Thank goodness that was done. Forever.I got the key out of the lock box, and opened the front door and went inside. There were packages and large boxes stacked everywhere, the things that Mike and Lindsey had been buying online for their new place. The new stove and fridge and dishwasher were still in their boxes, blocking the kitchen almost completely. I was going to have to get them hooked up and working if I was going to be able to eat any time soon. As I walked around the house, alone in it for the first time, I kept thinking, “well, Sam, you might have bitten off more than you can chew this time.” The scope of the work I was to do was daunting. 
Well, first things first. I brought up my sleeping bag, air mattress,and suitcase, and set up my sleeping space in the upstairs back bedroom. If nothing else, I had a place to sleep that night. Then I went back downstairs and spread the architect’s drawings on top of the stove box, and spent a couple hours pouring over them trying to get a foothold on where to start. 
The next morning, waking up smiling like I usually do, I raced down to the creepy basement, hoping nobody would jump out of one of the storage rooms and stab me, and dug my coffee maker, grinder, and beans, out of my pile of stuff in the garage, and made myself a pot of Kona. I love coffee. Even bad coffee is pretty good. Though black coffee is less good than coffee with creamer, it is still good, and I sat on the back deck and drank me a cup, and reflected that here I was again, away from Austin, getting ready to start a largish job.
I have done this in the past, as often as I have been able to make it work, traveling to some distant location, and working on someone’s house. Though never as big a job as this one. A working vacation outside of Austin. Don’t get me wrong, I love living in Austin, Texas. It is a great place to live, and I have had plenty of work. But getting away every now and then makes me enjoy Austin even more. Because of my variety of skills, and not having a wife or kids, I am uniquely able to do this. Over the past 20 years or so, I have worked in Lubec, Maine, and Seattle, Washington, and Denver, Colorado, and Naples, Florida, and many places in between. Sort of an itinerant contractor. I have remodeled bathrooms and kitchens, built an apartment for a mother-in-law in a basement, designed and built a large deck and outdoor kitchen, made concrete countertops in a kitchen, put in laminate flooring and an oak nail-down floor, built a fancy outdoor shower, turned an ugly basement into a family room and entertainment space, and even built a three room tree house. Sometimes the projects offered were so interesting that there was just no way I could have said the N word. Not all of them were profitable, but all of them were fun adventures. I am a lucky boy. 
To get started here in Cincinnati, I cut the fridge out of its box, and plugged it in. Then unboxed the stove, and hooked it up too. And pushed the new dishwasher into its space. Now I could walk through the kitchen. It was time for food, so I went to Krogers, and bought supplies. Things were moving forward. I had already contacted a plumber to come over and look at the plans. He had been the plumber for years for Mikes dad, who lived around the corner, and turned out to be a gold mine of ideas. Mike and Lindsey had already been working with an electrician by phone from Austin, to come in and deal with renovating the old knob and tube wiring in the house, after they bought it a couple months ago. He was a curmudgeon, but his guys were great to work with as the job went on.
I was out in the driveway getting something out of my truck, when a very attractive woman who lived next door came over to talk to me. She wanted to know if I was the new owner, or the next renter. It was a pretty upscale neighborhood, and there had been some less than wonderful renters over the last 10 years, living in the house. I surprised her when I told her that I was the contractor, and here to do a renovation of the house. And she smiled when I told her that the new owners were going to be great neighbors for her, when they moved up here in 6 months. I became friends with Kate as the months went by. She is a pediatrician, with a husband who is a lawyer, and has a young son. 
Now having a working stove, and supplies, the next morning I baked up a batch of Sam’s Magic Muffins. Chocolate Muffins with a banana and some chocolate chips and coconut thrown in the mix. And colored sprinkles on the top. Yum yum. I was sitting on the deck, enjoying a muffin and a cup of Kona, and Kate came out of her back door going to work. I hollered at her, and ran in and got one of the nice warm giant muffins, and took it over to her. “Here is something for your morning break between kids.” After that, Kate always smiled at me when we would see each other. 
Since, if you are gonna ride, you have to get on the horse, I decided to take on the most scary job first, that of busting a hole through the kitchen wall into the living room. It has to be done carefully because if you don’t support it properly, while you bust the hole through and build a beam to carry the weight, you could collapse the second floor and the roof into the kitchen. And that would be unseemly. I built the false walls for support, and got busy busting a hole. At first I whacked with a hammer, like I would do if busting a hole through a sheetrock wall. After an hour, I knew that I needed a different method. Plaster is hard. It does not bust easily. For all the effort expended, I had managed to only make a row of hammer holes across the top and partly down one side of where the opening was going to be. On one side of the wall. I had a sawzall, but it would not cut cement, and the first blade wore out on a two foot long cut. Hmmm. I went and got my grinder, and put my diamond blade on it, that I use for cutting tile, and though it created a lot of dust I managed to finish the kitchen side of the cutout with fairly straight lines. Then I went around and cut the living room side as well. Using a hammer and a crowbar, I started breaking out the plaster between the cuts, resulting in large chunks of incredibly heavy plaster and lath. Miraculously, as I removed chunks, the holes that I had cut on each side of the wall, actually lined up with each other. Before too long, I could see between the studs into the living room. I built a beam to carry the load, and hoisted it into place, and finished tearing out the studs. The kids were gonna love this. Lindsey and Mike had two boys who loved to run, and I could imagine them running the loop from kitchen to living room, through the foyer and dining room, back into the kitchen. And the opening went a long way toward making a cramped kitchen look spacious. A good start, and a success, making me feel like maybe this wasn’t gonna be that far above my skill set.
Things got faster after that. As I waited for the plumber and the electrician to come and get started on their parts, I worked on painting the rooms in the house. Lindsey has great color sense, and the new paint was perfect. It made the house look new inside, yet accentuated the architecture of the 80 something year old house. Each day I could choose from a hundred things that needed to be done. I could tear out some kitchen cabinets so the plumber could bust a hole down the wall to replace the cast iron drain pipe from the upstairs bathroom. Tear out the two murdery rooms walls in the basement, making it one big open, though still dark and creepy space. Or build new stairs outside, going down from the deck to the yard, and get rid of the crooked old steps that I had fallen down a couple of times. Or I could enlarge the closet in the kitchen where the new refrigerator was to finally live. Every  day was something new. I love that about my job. Variety is the spice of life, and there was so much to be done, that I rarely did one specific thing for more than a day or two. The upstairs and ground floor were looking better and better. I had not addressed the murdery basement yet, but it’s time would come.
There was an issue that had not been part of the architect’s drawings, that I had been chewing on. The master bedroom “closet” was a small room that was only 3 feet wide and 6 feet deep, with a window on one of the long sides. A person needs a window in a closet like a fish needs a bicycle. And you entered it on one end. Mike and Lindsey both were nice dressers, and had lots of nice clothes, and there was no way that this closet was going to be anything functional. Even if I put a clothes bar along the long wall, opposite the window, it would leave about 12″ of space to squeeze through to get access to the clothes. That was not going to work. And a 6 foot clothes bar would not hold even half of their clothes. I got to wondering if I could expand the closet, and found that the adjacent bedroom had a closet and attic access, which was on the other side of the long wall of the 

master closet. I could take out the common wall, and make the master closet larger, and make it a walk in closet. I decided to do it without asking what they thought. It would mean that the other bedroom would be left without a closet, so I framed a wall in the end of that room, and closed off the door to the old closet, and made a closet that took up a little of that bedroom floor space. But if you didn’t know how it had been, you would never know that the new closet had not always been there. Meanwhile back in the master closet, it was another round of grinding and busting out plaster chunks, and lugging them down two flights of stairs into the garage, where the other plaster I had torn out was piled. Once the wall was gone, and I could see the space I had created, I was thrilled. It would be just right. I eventually put double clothes bars on two of the walls, with shelves above them, and a motion detector light, so that you would just have to open the door to have the light come on. I personally think that it was my best contribution to the job. Lindsey might not agree, but I was proud of myself.

Lots of things were going on. The electricians were wiring in the circuits I had sketched, for the new can lights in the ceiling that were going to de-murdery-ify the basement. The plumbers were busting through the basement floor to put in the drain lines for the new bathroom and the new laundry room, and running the water lines. I hired a company to come and cut a chunk out of the 8 inch thick solid concrete basement wall with a gigantic hydraulic water saw, so I could move the exit door to the garage over about 16 inches, which would allow me to build the dividing wall for the new bathroom and laundry room where the architect had drawn them.  I hired a guy to build stud walls against the inside of the concrete basement walls so that they could be insulated and drywalled. I was running new ductwork in the basement ceiling, for Heat and A/C to the new bathroom and laundry room. There were things going on in every room except the one I was sleeping in. Tools and extension cords and piles of dug out dirt, and boards were everywhere. I was thankful that it was only me living there. 

Then, a phone call.

Lindsey: Hi Sam, How’s it going?

Me: Great! Lots of things getting done. What’s new with you? How is the hot summer in Austin? 

Lindsey: It is hot. We sold our house down here, and we are coming up there!

Me: Um, No! You can’t move in yet! It is not ready for occupancy!

Lindsey: Well, we are coming. But we have a place to stay, across the river, while you are finishing.

Me: Um.

What could I do? I was already working 12 hour days or more. I just had to keep on working. And that is what I did. Mike and Lindsey came by almost every day after they moved up to Covington. They pitched right in. Mike would come over after a day of telecommuting, and bust out yet more plaster in the kitchen, so that new water lines could be run to the upstairs bathroom, which had corroded old galvanized pipes. Discovered after I started showering up there. One night he and I put the insulation in the basement walls, stapling fiberglass batts to the studs for hours. It was amazing how quiet the basement got, the more insulation we got hung. Another night we worked at screwing 2×4’s to the basement ceiling with stout 8″ long construction screws, in preparation for  hanging drywall. Lindsey painted the things left unpainted. And worked on the aesthetics of the upstairs. They were great. Eventually we got the upstairs habitable, and they moved in with their two boys, Ford and Grant. And their furniture arrived from storage. Which filled half the garage, and every room on the first floor all the way to the ceiling. There were just narrow alleys between mountains of boxes.

Back in the basement, where I now lived, things were coming along nicely. A crew hung the drywall on the walls and ceiling. I painted them all white. The first time that I flipped the switch, and all 6 of the can lights came on, it was breathtaking. Not a speck of murdery-ness left. It was open, and bright, and friendly. The bathroom was great. The shower was hot and steamy, much better then the shower on the second floor, with the old 1929 curved bottom tub. The laundry room was bright and functional with a folding table. beside the washer and dryer. One wall of the basement had the water meter, the gas meter, and the electric panel on it. Lindsey found the sight of them unseemly, so I cobbled together cabinet enclosures that hid them behind the cabinet doors. And used the space between them for shelves for storage.

There were many other things that happened on the job, like the driveway flooding the garage in hard rain and needing a new drain, and the basement wall seeping from the rain. Having to redo the top of both chimneys. Painting the kitchen cabinets Navy blue. Getting quartz counters installed. Tiling the backsplash. Hanging the wallpaper in the half bath, with a really difficult match pattern. Redoing the can lights in the kitchen with nice LED lights in better locations. Painting the red deck gray. Through it all, Lindsey and Mike were the best. They had good ideas, and helped me finish the house. It was their dream house. I got to be a small part of that dream. Even so, it was the hardest job I ever had. When I got back to Austin, a week before Christmas, I was tired to my bones. And I was grateful to not have to juggle a hundred things at once for a while.

I did it!     <3

A life full of new knowledge is a wonderful thing.   <3