Dispatch From The (Old) Kitchen, Vol. IV: Freestyle Construction

There are certain things in life you expect to be consistent like say, that cup of coffee from the diner to be hot or in general, your wife to be cold and Grammy winners in pop music to be tone deaf abominations that basically suck.

On the nature of unchecked expectation with regard to home improvement, one should reasonably expect:

The location of studs to be 16 inches on center apart. Drive a screw into the wall and you expect the underlying stud to grip the screw like your granny’s mashed potatoes gripped your intestines. You should not expect the lights to go out in the kitchen nor should you expect your upstairs neighbor to knock on your door because his lights also went out at the same time your drill struck something made of metal just before everything went black.

Electrical boxes should be firmly mounted to studs so that when you plug and unplug your stuff the box doesn’t wiggle and wobble and grip the plug like a lover caught in the throes of ecstasy. You should not expect the electrical box to be stuffed into the hole at a 45 degree angle in the plaster and supported by A BOOK OF MATCHES.

During your investigation into The Construction Methods of Yesteryear you discover not just one stud but many many studs running at random intervals along the length of the wall, you may suspect but not necessarily expect a problem. Of course what you find is a series of studs roughly three or four feet in length each and floating beneath the surface of the plaster on bent wood screws. That they are in fact holding outlets and switches at varied heights like points on a graph explains why they jiggle and move and throw sparks like the climax of a Michael Bay movie every time you plug something in or turn on the light.

When the old cabinetry is removed and the walls exposed, you expect them to be intact and solid. You don’t expect to see crumbling materials and the wiring to snake in and out of holes bored into the walls so they can run in front of the studs. Tilt your head to the side and recall that old fuzzy picture of the Loch Ness Monster. Now imagine a Do-It-Yourselfer drilling into the cabinet only to run into live wiring. “Hey, that’s a mighty interesting haircut you got there, bub”…

No, what you expect when starting a project is that the idiots who were here before you were skilled enough to know that under the sheetrock or dehydrated oatmeal or whatever they used years ago there would be uniformly sized studs standing the correct distance apart. The outlets would be mounted to those studs at a specified height, wires coursing along the length of studs like nerves to give them life. You expect to simply take down old cabinets and put up new ones so that the task of remodeling your kitchen would only take a week or two instead of the life span of certain insects and maybe a President or two….

Imagine if you will a bunch of freewheeling beatnik construction guys on the job in 1957 caught between modern progressive jazz and Elvis. They’re on the job with black turtlenecks and bongos and maybe a leather jacket and a comb (Ayyyyyyyyyyyy!!). They’re swinging hammers and tossing studs around while discussing modern art and wondering why everything has to be so uniform, you know, so SQUARE, Daddyo? So they buck convention and tradition (and safety) and start putting up studs anywhere they want. Load bearing beams are holding up the broom closet above while the bathtub above is being supported by papier-mâché and decoupage. Wire sheathing wasn’t used to run wires from the electrical service box to the switched and outlets, they were used to decorate the stud walls. Boxes weren’t mounted firmly to studs so much as suggested gently to be adjacent to a stud so as not to crowd and unbalance the space between the studs.

While all this is going on, some doofus stood in a corner on a box reciting Kerouac and suggested that at lunch they all go “On The Road” in search of enlightenment but only for an hour because that’s all they have for break. Plaster board is layered over gypsum so that the walls are uneven and almost six inches thick of cement and or plaster. You can’t put a nail though it and even if you could, it wouldn’t hit anything because nothing is where it’s supposed to be. In the end you have a modern art project that was graded and long-forgotten by art students at NYU.

Cut to somewhere in the 80’s and the descendants of that crew are crooning Wham and New Wave to each other while ogling the Vanessa Williams Penthouse issue. The new floor is dropped over the old one. It doesn’t level but if you don’t spill anything on it, you’ll never know. An abomination of white veneered press wood cabinets is put up over mistakes made a generation before. This cabinet design will never go out of style and press wood is soooo durable, it will last centuries.

Cut to today; one lone hero with a tool belt, a drill, a drywall screw clenched between his teeth and a puzzled look on his face stares down a job that was to be simpler than the combined minds of the entire cast of Jersey Shore. This is how Clint Eastwood must have gotten started…