I woke at 5:30 with a sore body and a satisfied spirit. A sensory cocktail that I’ve grown to love. As I shuffle out of the guest bedroom and down the steep stairs of my 50’s wartime home, I’m reminded that I am not as young as I once was. I’m not quite old yet, but having spent my 20’s working in an office, hard physical work makes my soft “young professional” body feel every single one of its 30 years. I’m glad that I gave my parents the main bedroom though, the futon sucks.
I’m the first one out of bed but I hear the rustling upstairs already as I get the coffee going. My parents packing their bags to head back home. Dad made fun of my “complicated” coffee all weekend but I can tell he likes the result. 1500 grams of water, 90 grams of coffee, freshly ground to medium-fine and into the “complicated” coffee machine. Perfect result for the whole family every time. I think wheying everything on a digital scale makes the process look more complex than it is.
After a quick bite to eat and a second cup of coffee for the road, mom and dad head out for the 10-hour drive back home to New-Brunswick. As my wife and I stand on the freshly built front porch and wave goodbye, I’m simultaneously relieved to have the house to ourselves again while feeling a hard mass of sadness in my stomach. I miss them already.
The car leaves the cul-de-sac and I look down at the deck below my feet. It’s a beauty. 16’x8’ of gloriously level and square pressure-treated lumber. Just three days ago there was no deck. There was just a muddy path to my front door and a pile of overpriced lumber in my driveway.
The front porch of our house was problematic even before we bought the place. It was a good size but poorly built, rotting and completely falling apart. We noticed it in the home inspection 3 years ago but it was never a priority until now. We did some foundation work last summer that forced us to demolish the old monstrosity. I made a temporary path through the mud from old paving stones that we found in the backyard and built three steps from wood scraps to get through the door. It did its job until three days ago when my parents drove into town and the real build started. Easter weekend, the first long weekend of spring. Perfect time to start outdoor projects before summer, if the weather cooperates, which it did.
Though the build started just a few days ago, this story is decades old. I learned to build things from my dad. Self-proclaimed jack of all trades and master of none, he is of a generation that are masters of their own stuff. Growing up in our old beachfront family home in the Maritimes, I was immersed in the DIY lifestyle from day one. My parents had moved into the old house with my brother shortly before I arrived in the world. The house was my great-grandfather’s. An amalgamation of extensions tacked onto the 1920’s bungalow that grew at the same pace as the Baldwin family. It had been abandoned for years when dad got hold of it. He had to demolish the eastern addition and cut a foot and a half out of the whole north wall with a chainsaw to salvage the parts of the original house that were sound enough to build upon. Baby photos of me are often on a backdrop of vapor barrier walls and partly finished rooms. Our family home was a work in progress that progressed over a 25-year period until the modern kitchen addition was finally built and the project was deemed to be “done” in 2015. Just in time for a bathroom reno.
Growing up in this work in progress and being around my dad as he took on project after project, doing the things he could himself and contracting out what he couldn’t, shaped the adult I would become. It’s taught me to see the potential of a diamond in the rough. It taught me to build and repair stuff. More importantly, It gave me a strong sense of identity as someone who knows his way around tools and is able to build something with his hands.
As soon as I was old enough to swing a hammer I was drawn to the labours of our family property. My first paying job was working with dad on the house and the gazebo that’s now a rental property. I was at an age where I wanted to work during summer break and earn my own spending money while he needed to hire some help. Instead of hiring someone else, he decided to pay me.
I enjoyed the work but I didn’t realize how important it would be to my development. As I worked hard on landscaping and building decks, gazebos and fences I learned how to handle tools and build things square and solid. Living by the ocean is a fantastic luxury, but it also supplies you with a yearly subscription of things to fix as the salt air and humidity constantly grind through everything. Spending my early teen years building things with my dad taught me to be a man and to get things done. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Although the scenery of my suburban home has little in common with the beach town where I grew up, getting up and outside the house at dawn, in the crisp springtime air, to build a deck with my dad feels a little bit like a time machine. Even if technically we were building my deck and he was there to help me, the old dynamics of our workflow immediately fell into place as if no time had passed.
One of the big differences between living in the city and living in a place without neighbors is that you need to get a permit to build almost anything.
Want to paint your front door? Need a permit.
Want to put in a clothesline pole? Need a permit.
You might even need a permit to walk your dog. I’m scared to check.
For this particular project, the permit required building plans. This means that once the plans are approved by the city, you need to use the materials that you specified on said plans for the project to pass inspection. The first hurdle in the build came while putting together the very first component of the project: the ledger beam. The ledger beam is the 2×10 piece of lumber that will be used to support the house side of the deck. The other side is supported by screw piles that go into the earth and beneath the frost line. This ledger beam needed to be attached to the foundation with ⅝’’ concrete wedge anchors. I had ordered ⅝’’ concrete wedge anchors but ⅜’’ anchors were delivered instead. This is the great time waster when building stuff: running back and forth to the hardware store to get what you forgot last time. Luckily this was the only store run and the biggest problem that we had all weekend.
When I got back 45 minutes later, dad had kept going. He’d cut almost all of the 2×6 joists that make up the frame of the deck and they were ready for assembly. In the same way that we operated in my teens, I took on the grunt work while he made most of the measurements and cuts. We tacked the 16’ long ledger in place and I started to drill the 13 holes that would accept the 13 wedge anchors that now hold up our masterpiece. Drilling holes in concrete isn’t a distinctly fun thing to do. Each one takes a few minutes of consistent pressure on the bit and the vibration from the hammer drill burns through your forearms and shoulders. I put my head down and kept going. I’m sure to have forearm cramps for the next week.
In his life as a jack of all trades and master of none, my dad’s physical strength had been one of his main assets on the job market since he first left home and started to work at 15. This made things difficult for him when he injured his back while throwing bundles of roof shingles around in his early 40s. A big part of my job as a teenager was to do the heavy lifting where he couldn’t do it anymore. I was an athletic kid so I really didn’t mind. I loved the feeling of going to bed exhausted after a hard day’s work. Each task was a different workout. Carrying large beach stones one day and digging holes for fence posts the next. It was always easy to see what I had accomplished at the end of the day because it was right there in front of our eyes.
Now, almost 20 years after his back injury, dad can do more than he could when he was 40 although he still has slipped discs. Through dedicated exercise and learning to work within his limits, he’s able to get his projects done. Each week during our regular phone calls, I am impressed by how much stuff he gets done, consistently doing what his body allows him to do each day, nibbling at the big projects that he decides to start just when “everything was good enough” and he was planning on “taking it easy”. A man needs a mission and sitting around watching TV isn’t one.
Keeping with tradition, I shoveled the clay earth to slope the ground properly for drainage under the deck, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow while dad kept cutting and fitting each piece of lumber. We kept a steady work beat all weekend, not straining, not running around. Nice and easy but relentless until we had finished building something to be proud of.
As I walk back into the house and up the stairs to the nursery that my wife painted with my mom while we were working outside, I can’t help but wonder what kind of role model I will be to the future member of the Baldwin clan. Will I be able to teach them to use their hands to make things of their own? For years to come, I will be reminded of the lessons that I learned from my dad as we use our front porch coming home with our new baby for the first time, or after soccer practice, or when my kids walk out for their first date. I will use our own projects to build fresh memories while forging their life skills and character, and I will make sure to create opportunities to put grandpa to work so that they might learn from who taught me.