My telephone rang.

Me: Hello?

Voice: Hi Sam, my name is Susan and I got your name from some friends about having you work on my house.

Me: Ok, How can I be of service to you?

Susan: I have a house in Maine, and my friends say you are just crazy enough to take on a job far away from your house here in Austin Texas.

Well, yes, I am that crazy. I love to be an itinerant carpenter. I have traveled all over the United States for work when that type of job comes along. It drives my bookkeeper nuts, but if I can make enough money on a job in another state to just break even after travel expenses and paying my bills here in Texas, I will take the job on, load up my pickup with tools, and drive to the job, and live there while completing the work. What is not to like? I love my job anyway, and to be able to do it in a new place, and to be able to explore the new location on my days off, it is a win-win for me. I have traveled to Seattle Washington, Naples Florida, Denver Colorado, Tulsa Oklahoma, Cincinnati Ohio, McKenzie Tennessee, and many places in between, to do various jobs. I love the U.S., and to have the opportunity to drive across this great country on the way to a new adventure is just wonderful.

As it turns out, the Maine job came along because there was a meeting of a group of women lawyers one day in Austin. After the bidness aspects of the meeting were concluded, the women were just shooting the shit about life, and one of them, Susan, was complaining to the others about not being able to get anybody to seriously come and talk to her about what she wanted done on her house that she had bought in Maine, about a year before. One of the other women said, “I know this guy Sam, who can do almost anything to a house.” Another woman said, “Yes, I know Sam too, he has worked on our house before, and does good work for a reasonable price, and I know he has traveled before for work. He is just crazy enough to drive up to Maine, and fix your house. You should call him.” The two were regular clients of mine. Word of mouth is where most of my work comes from anyway. So, Susan called me for a meeting.

I went to see her, to find out what were the issues about her house. She had 3 polaroid snapshots of her bathroom which she showed me. You can’t tell much about things from a polaroid, but the problem seemed to be that she had a small bathroom on the second floor of her house, a turn of the century two story block house, and the plumbing and fixtures needed upgrading to modern standards. The bathroom was a narrow slot of a room, with the bathtub, then the sink, and then, by the window, the toilet, all lined up against the wall, with just enough passageway to walk back to the toilet. Which, by the way, looked out on to a wide panorama of the Bay of Fundi, where you could see dolphins and whales and seals, and foghorn buoys, and the occasional ship.

We talked about solutions, but in that small slot of a room, there was no space for moving things around. At most, I could upgrade the fixtures, put in a modern toilet, sink, and tub, and tile the floor. There were a couple other things she wanted addressed in the house too. So I gave Susan a price for a 5 week contract, to come up and do my best to make things better. She agreed and we set a date for me to arrive. I had never been to Maine before, and it looked like it could be a fun journey.

I loaded up my tools, and my young helper, and headed across the country, up the Shenandoah Valley, and across New England and Maine, to Lubec, Maine, the very easternmost point of the U.S. It was a tiny town on the edge of the bay, and Susan’s house was a two story house near the top of the hill that Lubec had been built on. Susan was up there for the summer, where she had been going for several years, to participate in a Music Workshop.

I arrived and spent the first day exploring the potential for the changes she wanted. There weren’t a lot of options. The bathroom was tiny. Just getting rid of the old cast iron tub, and 1940’s ugly cast iron sink, and the old not very efficient toilet, would make the bathroom less ugly, though not more functional. As I explored the house, I saw that right next to the bathroom was what had been the maids room at the top of the back stairs coming up from the kitchen, that Susan had labeled the Sewing room. The sewing room was the same depth as the bathroom, running from the middle room to the window wall, and about 8 feet wide. I crawled up into the attic to see how the roof was supported, and found that the wall between the bathroom and the sewing room was not a supporting wall, and could be removed without affecting the structure. An idea was born. I could tear out the wall, and expand the bathroom into the adjacent room, which would open up a whole host of possibilities for design. I went down to the basement, and found that there was a new service panel for the electric, that had plenty of expansion room for new circuits. I walked around the house, and crawled around in the attic for the rest of the day, and when dinner time came, I had a plan to offer Susan.

As we sat in the kitchen eating dinner, I pitched my idea to her. She grasped the possibilities immediately, and liked the plan. I had drawn a floor plan with the dimensions of the changed space for her to consider. The sad thing was that the back stairs only went up to the sewing room, and did not connect through to the front rooms, and closing off the door to the sewing room to expand the bathroom, would render the back stairs moot. I gave her an idea that I could cut off the corner of the adjacent bedroom on the back of the second floor, and make a short hallway that would allow egress to the whole upstairs from the back stairs. She wanted to think about it for a day, and would let me know. Meanwhile, I worked on some other small things that needed fixing.

Lubec is at the farthest eastern reach of the Eastern Time Zone, and the sun came up at 4:30am. From day one, I had been getting up as soon as the sun hit my windows, and taking my binoculars, and quietly heading down to the shore, and bird watching while walking the shore until 7:30 am, when Susan would be waking up.

Susan was a pretty amazing woman. Intelligent and beautiful, and very self possessed, she was cool with two basically strangers living in her house, and sharing meals. I came to really respect her and really enjoy her company as the days went on.

The fourth day at breakfast, she told me she had a meeting with a local (in Maine, “local” was a fairly large area) interior designer, over in Machias, about 26 miles west. She wanted to see if the designer had good ideas about how to arrange the new space. She took my drawing, and drove off.

That afternoon, when she got back to the house, she was smiling and excited, and had a whole new plan to make the space beautiful and way more functional. We sat down and discussed it. There was no way I could implement her plan in the 5 weeks that I had contracted for, and I told her so. She asked if I could stay longer, and do the work.

Back when I had given her the original contract, I had bought a plane ticket from Austin to Belgrade Serbia, to visit my old Peace Corps buddy Mike, who was living and working for an NGO there, and the ticket was non-refundable. I had been planning to drive back to Austin after the contract, and immediately head to Serbia for two weeks. Susan thought about it for a while, and said that she was willing to buy a round trip plane ticket for me to fly back to Austin with my helper who could not stay longer, leaving my truck and tools in Lubec, and then fly me back to Lubec after I got back from Serbia, to finish the job. Jet Blue, in the early days, $99 each way. Yay. I agreed to do it.

Over the 4 weeks left before I had to go, my helper and I tore out the wall between the rooms, pulled out all the old bathroom fixtures, broke through the walls to create the passageway from the back stairs, and got the space ready to implement the as yet unseen new plan. She was working with the designer on ordering the things she wanted and designing the space to within an inch of its life. She promised to have a final plan ready for me by the time I got back to Lubec.

Off I flew to Austin, then off again to Serbia, where I spent a great two weeks with Mike, and his new (to me) wife and two kids. That is a whole other story, an amazing adventure, and I arrived back in Lubec refreshed and ready to get to work.

Susan showed me the new plan, and it was beautiful. There was to be a double width shower, with fixtures on each end, his and hers, with shampoo niches in the tile walls, and a glass wall and door. By the west window, which looked over the top of the hill down on west Lubec, she had a soaking tub. On the wall between the now two windows of the bathroom, she had bought a European towel heater that was large enough that it actually added heat to help keep the bathroom toasty. New lights, a pedestal sink, a tile floor, tile wainscotting on the walls, and a linen cabinet. The plan was fancy, as designer plans are wont to be, and I spent the first two days just pouring over the plan, making drawings, and figuring out how to run new electric circuits, the plumbing for the new shower, and a million details necessary for bringing her plan to fruition. It was complicated, and honestly, though I never said this to her, a bit above my skill set. But I girded up my loins, and figured the ways to make it all happen.

Another add-on was replacing the three 100 year old windows that leaked air and didn’t open because of age and broken sash weight pulleys. I took measurements and drove to the Home Center in Machias, to order the new windows. Since they would have to be custom built to fit the openings in the block walls, the guy at the center kept trying to get me to order the windows two inches smaller on each side so that if the openings weren’t square and plumb, the new units would fit. I argued with him, because I only wanted a quarter inch space on each side, to give me the most glass expanse possible, because the views were amazing. He finally relented when I told him I would take responsibility for them fitting, and we put in the order for some high end windows with insulated glass and good weatherstripping. As the weeks passed waiting for the windows to come in, I worried about my decision, but I felt like the openings would be perfect because the house was built back when builders knew how to use a tape measure and a level, not like today’s builders. The day that I went to pick up the windows, the guy was all over me, saying, you bought them, they can’t be returned. I assured him I was ok with that. I didn’t sleep much that night, because if I was wrong, it would cost me a lot of money to reorder them, and I would have to listen to his I told you so. The next day I tore out the old windows, and the moment of truth had arrived. I nervously unwrapped the new ones and carried them carefully up the wrap-around back stairs. They slipped right in, giving me my quarter inch space, and looked great.

There were two issues that I had to solve, to make it work. One was getting the drain and water supply to the new shower and the soaking tub, which would have to be run inside the kitchen ceiling. The other one was that I discovered that in the 100 years of its life, the floor in the two rooms that now made the new bathroom, had sagged about 5 inches in the middle, making a curved floor, on which it would not be possible to set tile. 

And I had to beef up the floor anyway, so that it would support the weight of the new tile and tub and water, and in some way, make the floor above flat. I have mentioned before that I am an optimist, and don’t often let the word “no” come out of my mouth, so I put on my thinking cap, and designed new joists for the load support which I would retrofit on the structure of the ceiling below, over the kitchen, which also allowed space for the new plumbing to run to the corner of the kitchen and down the wall into the basement, where I could connect them.

That done, after tearing out the kitchen ceiling, I still had to deal with the curved floor above. I spent a day using the SWAG method, and jigsawing 2×6 runners that were curved on the bottom to match the shape of the floor, leaving the tops a nice flat plane for the new floor.

I hung a piece of cork board on the wall outside the bathroom, and tacked up my plans, and all the peripheral info about the new stuff going in, and color swatches for the new paint. Susan tacked stuff and new ideas on the board as the job progressed. It became something I looked at first thing every day, to keep me focused on the big picture.

During all this, Susan and I were using the second bathroom which was a small space off the kitchen containing a toilet, a small sink, the washer and dryer, the water heater, and the smallest shower stall I have ever seen. I came to refer to it as “the vertical coffin”. It was so small that it was narrower than the length of my upper leg, and when I tried to lift my leg up to wash it, my butt would be against one wall, and my knee would bang the opposite wall. Even so, we managed, a testimony to her grace and patience.

Susan never complained about having to share this tiny bathroom with me. In fact, we got along very peacefully, and she was an active partner in getting the job done. She would telecommute her lawyer stuff all day, or be off at music classes where she was learning to play the piano better, and I would work on the job. We would discuss the job over dinner each day. Sometimes I would cook, and sometimes she would, or we would eat at a local restaurant. 

Every morning I would wake up at sunrise, and go exploring along the shore, and out to the lighthouse, and to the nearby park, and birdwatch, and whale watch, and would arrive back around 8, where we would eat breakfast, and get on with our separate days.

I became kind of known in the little town. Everybody knew my maroon Ford F-150, and knew that I was from Texas where no sensible person would ever live if they had half a brain. I ate lunch at the couple of local restaurants, bought stuff in the hardware store, bought evening ice cream cones at the ice cream store down by the bridge to Campobello Island, and enjoyed walking around the town when I needed a break from working. People saw me walking along the shore with my binoculars. I was the outsider, who people loved to gossip about. Strangers would walk up and address me by name, and chat me up. They knew who I was. They were endlessly curious about me. I was the only Peace Corps volunteer that anybody had ever heard of. I made friends with the shopkeepers, the (one) plumber, the (one) electrician, and would sit and drink a beer with one or the other and pick their brains to help me solve the issues of the job. They gained local status, because they knew more about me than anyone, and people would ask them about me. Life in a small town.

Meanwhile, back at the job, the bathroom was coming together. By the end of May, I was starting the tile work. I never use a tile wetsaw inside a house because it throws tiley water everywhere, so I kept it chained to the porch rail outside the kitchen door, and would cut tiles out there. Up until the middle of June, the temperature outside was so cold in the mornings that I would wear long johns until mid day. There was a lot of tile going in, with lots of cuts, and each time I needed to use the saw, I would trot down the back stairs to the kitchen and out to the saw. The back stairs wrapped around in the corner, and had those treads that were wide on the outside and only two inches wide at the center. I slipped and fell down them half a dozen times until I remembered to stay to the outside. Down the stairs with 4 or 5 tiles to cut, then back up the stairs with the cuts. I must have gone up and down those stairs 400 times that summer, and my legs were in the best shape of my life.

Susan and the designer had chosen beautiful tiles, with rope tile borders and colored accent tiles amid the 6×6 white tiles making up the bulk of the wall. I had the freedom to put in the special Sam ideas that occurred to me as the job went on. Susan wanted a stub wall beside the toilet to give some privacy. Her husband Lou came by for a visit from Mississippi, where he was doing his doctoral studies on echinoderms, like anemones, and told me that if I was going to put a privacy wall there, on the toilet side I should be sure to have an inset magazine rack for reading material. On the opposite side of the stub wall was the pedestal sink, and I built a space in the top of the wall with two electric plugs, and a drop down door, in which they could put their electric toothbrush charger, a blow dryer, and stuff like that, and lift the door closed when they were done using them, and they were out of sight. I built a custom cabinet for towels and bath stuff in the corner between the shower and the door.

Eventually the bulk of the work was done, near the end of August, and I was working on the final details. The shower was finished and looked great, except without the glass wall and door. The closest shower glass guy lived in Connecticut, and Susan engaged him to do the work, but he would not be able to come and measure until september. I hung a temporary shower curtain up, and Susan began using the shower. I sent the glass guy a detailed drawing of the area where the glass went, with detailed dimensions, and how far out of plumb the outside wall was, and everything he would need to make the glass panels. He refused to make the glass without personally driving up and measuring first. I put Susan on the phone, and somehow she convinced him to make the glass from my drawings, with the caveat that when he brought the glass up to install, if it didn’t fit, she would have to pay him more to go back and remake it.

The bathroom was beautiful. It was the fanciest schmanciest bathroom that I had ever built, and I was so proud that I had met the challenges and pulled it off. 

The last day, after I had loaded my tools into my truck to head back to Texas, I took a shower in the new bathroom. I had held off, and stayed with the vertical coffin, but that day I cranked on the towel heater, got into the shower, turned on the fixtures on both ends, and took a shower with water hitting from both sides. It was absolutely luxurious, and as I stood there in rhapsody, I thought, “This is the height of excellence, and way above my trailer trash roots.” It was an amazing experience, and I had built every part of it.

Two weeks after I got back to Texas, the shower glass guy arrived with the glass panels. Susan told me he was sort of a curmudgeon, and got out of his truck with a sour look on his face, and went in with his tape measure and level, ready to say, “See? I told you so.” But he couldn’t. The glass panels made to my dimensions from my drawing fit perfectly. (of course. My mama didn’t raise no fool) and he got them installed with no problems in a couple hours. Susan sent me pictures and it came out gorgeous.

That job was probably the hardest job I ever took on. My skillset had to improve to get it done properly, and it did. It was almost a work of art. Kudos to Susan and her designer for designing it. Even though I was mostly just the mechanic, I was really proud of myself, and the glow of that stayed with me all the way back to Texas.

If you believe in yourself, almost anything is possible. 

If you can’t do a good job, don’t do the job. Anything less than my best effort is not worth doing. I have not heard from Susan for some years. Last I heard, maybe three years after the job, she sang my praise and told me everything was working just like it should and it was the best part of coming up to Maine.