Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes (9 page)

Modern science has been unable to determine where workmen disappear to. At one
time it was believed that they went to other jobs, but we now know that there are no “other jobs,” because if there were, then eventually, somewhere, some homeowner’s house would actually get worked on, and you would read about this astounding event in
The New York Times
.

WORKMEN WORK ON HOME
, the headline would say, and huge crowds of worshipful homeowners would flock to marvel at the worked-upon home, similar to the way the religious faithful sometimes flock to rural communities when somebody has discovered a bale of peat moss shaped like the Lord.

• 4.
  Approximately six weeks later, the contractor returns and notes with displeasure that the workmen have failed to disconnect the plumbing and electrical systems. “Always disconnect the plumbing and electrical systems, even if you are merely building an outdoor deck!” is a rule that is stressed repeatedly at the Contractor Academy. Angrily, the contractor performs these vital tasks, then, assuring you that he will be back “Thursday,”
  he disappears. You cannot grab him. A skilled contractor can actually cause himself to
  dematerialize
  , into hyperspace, right before your eyes.
  

What ultimately may happen is, you’ll get so desperate that, despite my stern warnings, you will attempt to actually do things yourself. One Saturday morning you’ll get up bright and early, and you’ll go down to the Homeowner Hell. This is a nationwide chain of stores, each of which is approximately the size of Indonesia and is filled with billions and billions of random and obscure hardware objects such as “toggle bolts,” which are packed inside special plastic blister packs, which you cannot open except with special razor knives sold only inside blister packs at Homeowner Hell. It is a comical sight indeed to see hundreds of homeowners peering at these objects with a total lack of comprehension, like fish examining a nuclear submarine. The contractors love to watch this via closed-circuit television from the Parallel Contractor Universe. It is their favorite show.

The best way to get decorating ideas is to buy several glossy interior design publications such as
Architectural Digest
(“The International Magazine of Homes Much Nicer Than Yours”) and cull through the articles to obtain useful tips. The main tip you will pick up is that if you want your house to look really nice, you do not necessarily have
to have professional training or even a special “flair” for design; all you need is more money than the human mind can comprehend. You will learn this from eight-page color photo spreads featuring homes the size of Baltimore—always called “villas”— situated on dramatic mountainside real estate accessible to ordinary citizens such as
yourself only by telescope. The accompanying articles sound like this:

And so on. After you have read a few articles like this, you should have plenty of nifty ideas for the kind of furniture you want, although of course, given your price range, you will have to buy it at a store with a name like Big Stu’s Discount House of Taste, where the dinette sets are made from compressed oatmeal.

Besides money, the other thing you need is time. Nobody has ever come up with a good explanation as to why this is, but it takes longer to obtain a piece of furniture than to construct a suspension bridge. My theory is that furniture is not actually built by human beings, but rather is
grown
, probably in some intensely humid Third World nation where they have giant furniture trees that can take years to produce a single ottoman. When you place your order for, let’s say, a teal love seat, the order is mailed via boat to a furniture plantation, where a worker, who speaks little English, frowns at it, wipes the
sweat from his brow, straps on his machete, and walks into the jungle. He halts briefly as a ripe armoire thuds into the earth ahead of him, then he continues along the narrow path, squinting upward into the dense mass of vegetation overhead. He spots a dark shape far above him in the gloom; it could be a love seat in the early stages of formation. Or it could be a coffee table, or a Barcalounger, or a gorilla nest. “Who knows?” the worker thinks to himself. “And what the hell is ‘teal’?”

So we’re talking about a slow and inexact process, with one piece arriving years after another, which is why most people go through their entire lives without having all their furniture look nice at the same time. My advice is, order your furniture
now
,
even if you don’t even own a house yet, even if you are in fact an unborn child, because if you are lucky, the last piece will arrive just in time for your great-great-grandchildren to spill Zoo-Roni on it. Not that you will care: you will hate it anyway. This is because of:

I recall the time my wife, Beth, finally got fed up with the brown sofa we had for many years, which looked like a buffalo that had staggered into our living room and died from a horrible skin disease. So she decided, the hell with our son’s college education, she was going to get a new sectional sofa. She took many measurements, then she went to many, many furniture stores, then she ordered the sofa, then we waited through several presidential administrations for it to arrive. And finally it did, and it was exactly what she had ordered, and so naturally it
made her almost physically ill to look at it. I told her it looked fine to me, but it was no use. When she was looking at this sofa, she was looking at Jabba the Hutt. She would lie awake in bed at night, thinking about this
thing
squatting out there in her living room, and it was only a matter of time before she went insane and attacked it with a steak knife. So I was very relieved when she decided to sell it through a classified ad, which was a pretty interesting experience in itself because of the call she got from the sex maniac. This is the truth. First he asked her a bunch of questions about the sofa, which he seemed sincerely interested in, and then, lowering his voice about two octaves, he said:

“Are you wearing loafers?”

Beth failed to notice anything particularly unusual about this, which shows how crazed a person can become when she is desperate to get rid of a sectional sofa.

“Yes,” she said. “Now, the sofa—”

“Are they brown?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But about the—”

“Do they
smell bad
?” he asked.

At this point Beth, even in her furniture-induced
derangement, realized that this person was not a Hot Prospect, and she got off the phone. Eventually she sold the sofa, so it wasn’t such a bad experience after all, though it probably would have been easier and more relaxing if we had just gone out into the backyard and set fire to a small pile of hundred-dollar bills.

Of course there is a way to obtain nice furniture without the frustration and high cost of buying it new, provided you are willing to put in a few hours of honest “elbow grease” and possibly suffer permanent disfigurement. I am referring, of course, to the time-honored Thrifty Homeowner art of …

No doubt you have at one time or another visited the home of people who have a number of nice older wooden pieces, and you have said something complimentary, and your hosts said something like: “Oh, thank you, we bought them all for a total of $147.50 at garage sales and refinished them
ourselves in the garage and now they are worth, we conservatively estimate, nine million dollars.” They are lying, of course. They stole all this stuff from the Museum of Nice Old Wood Furniture. Nevertheless, it is inevitable that at some point you will get the notion that
you
can have nice furniture via the refinishing method, so you might as well know the correct procedure:

1. You go to a garage sale and you find a bureau covered with hideously ugly orange paint.
   

2. You call your spouse over, and you say, in a quiet voice so the garage sale person can’t overhear you: “Look at this! You know what this is, under this paint? This is (CHOOSE ONE):
   …solid oak!”
   …solid bird’s-eye maple!”
   …solid walnut!”
   …solid oaken maple eye of walnut!” (It makes no difference what fine hardwood you claim the bureau is made of, because it will forever remain an elusive dream that you never actually lay eyes on, similar to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.)
   

3. Your spouse, shocked, whispers: “Whoever would be so foolish as to cover up such beautiful wood with
   paint
   !? With a minimum of effort, this could be a
   lovely
   piece!”
   

4. Feeling like thieves in the night, you pay twenty-five dollars for the bureau and scuttle off with it. You do not hear the cynical laughter of the former owner.
   

5. You go to the hardware store and purchase some steel wool and some refinishing product with a name like “Can o’ Poison” that has skeleton heads all over it and a prominent Consumer Advisory like this:
   

   WARNING—DO NOT LET THIS PRODUCT COME IN CONTACT WITH YOUR SKIN. DO NOT BREATHE THE FUMES. DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN AFTER USING THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT EVEN READ THIS WARNING.
   

6. You go home, put on some rubber gloves, and start scrubbing the paint
   with the toxic substance. It is hard work. It is dirty work. The gloves dissolve quickly, and it is clear that large patches of your skin will have to be surgically replaced. But it’s all worth it, because after just a few hours you have scraped away a small patch of that hideous orange paint, and underneath it you find …
   a layer of hideous green paint
   !
   

7. You repeat this process for two, maybe even three more layers of paint, and finally the truth dawns on you:
   This is not really a bureau
   . This is an enormous, bureau-shaped wad of paint.
   

8. You decide to hold a garage sale.
   

• To make a dark room look brighter, try turning on the electrical lights.
  

• A small carpet stain where the cat vomited in 1979 can be made to “disappear”
  when company comes by having a predetermined family member stand on it and refuse to move.
  

• Squares of corkboard stuck on the wall will often turn an “ordinary” room into a room that smells like corkboard.
  

• If you’re planning to paint a room, remember that “oil-based” paint is the kind that is supposed to come off with paint thinner, but does not; whereas “latex” is the kind that is supposed to come off with simple soap and water, but does not.