The Curse of Competence

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”  ---Confucious

I’ve just returned from a three day weekend on Cape Cod.  Idyllic as that may sound, I am exhausted and sore from having spent the majority of that time sanding the wood shingle siding of our house.  Make no mistake, these were days spent working.

Faithful readers of this blog may recall that this began, a few weeks ago, as an exterior painting project.  That was then.  I had intended to start by “roughing up” the paint, preparing the surface for re-painting.  The previous owners of our house had, unfortunately, painted the cedar shakes a light shade of grey.  I say “unfortunately” because this is Cape Cod, where the prevailing architectural vernacular is the unpainted, weathered cedar shake.  ‘Round here, folks paint the trim and shutters, but leave the siding au naturale, the better to withstand the corrosive effects of salty air and wind-whipped storms.  When we bought the place, we had told ourselves that, from ten paces back, the light grey shingles could pass for “weathered.”  Over the course of time, the surface had deteriorated.  Ten paces became thirty.  The paint was peeling.  Those damned pilgrims had it right, after all.  Time to paint.

My first “summer job” as a teenager involved painting.  Specifically, painting motel rooms - in a seedy motel, located on a forlorn stretch of state highway, in New Jersey.  The owner of the motel, my boss, also happened to be our summertime next-door neighbor.  This made commuting convenient, as I was too young to drive.  Our deal was that I would paint every surface – ceiling, walls, alcove, bathroom – in as many rooms as I could complete, as quickly as possible, without spilling anything.  For this I earned $3 per hour, cash.

I became very good at painting motel rooms.  I developed a system.  It was a model of efficiency.  I reached a point where I was able to complete an entire room in one day.  That may not sound impressive, but it was all-inclusive, start to finish – moving furniture to the center of the room, laying down protective tarps, preparing the surfaces (which required copious amounts of Spic ‘n Span in those bathrooms,) one coat of primer, two of topcoat.  Everything cleaned up, brushes and rollers washed, grimy wall-mounted A/C unit left "on" to speed drying, the room back to rentable condition for the next day. 

By the end of the summer, I had become very good indeed at painting motel rooms.  And I promised myself I’d get a different job the following summer – something, anything other than painting.

Roughly a decade later, I bought my first house.  It was a “handyman’s special.”  That made me the handyman.  During the years I lived there, I frequently drew upon my latent skills as a painter, and expanded them to include hanging wallpaper (and very basic plumbing, carpentry, and electrical work also, but those will be subjects for future blog posts.)  By the time I moved again, I had single-handedly painted, papered, stained or varnished every inch of every surface, inside and outside of that house.  It looked great.  And I swore I’d never again pick up a paintbrush.

Suffice to say that this cycle repeated a few more times.  In each case, my mental calculus going in was along the lines of “damn, I can do that myself for MUCH less than a professional would charge.”  In each case, I was right.  And each time I completed a job, I promised myself I’d never do another.

Which brings me to present-day Cape Cod.

We had gotten bids on professional installation of new siding.  That would have looked great, and been so much easier; but for the prices quoted, I could instead have bought a new car.  In fairness, we had asked for new windows to be included in the mix; but still – it was serious sticker shock.  The math just wasn’t working for us.    

And so…

I pressed the electric sander very lightly against the first shingle.  The paint vaporized like chalk dust.  I was down to bare wood in no time.  Hmm.  I continued sanding.  Within a short time, I’d convinced myself that this would be not be a painting project after all – rather, I would sand the shakes bare, restoring them to something close to their original appearance (inasmuch as forty year old wood can be made to look as it did when new.) 

Not a painting project!  Sweet!  I’m not painting!  But it was a Pyrrhic victory.  What had seemed relatively easy at first became more complicated as the job progressed.  Cracked shingles, rusty nails, and multiple layers of near-impenetrably well-protected paint behind shutters all were impediments. And there’s still the trim, and those shutters in need of paint – work still to be done; but the end is in sight.

And I swear,  I’m never going to do this again.  Until next time.