did-you-know? rent-now

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

did-you-know? rent-now

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

We're the #1 textbook rental company. Let us show you why.

9781573221740

Renovations A Father and Son Rebuild a House and Rediscover Each Other

by
  • ISBN13:

    9781573221740

  • ISBN10:

    1573221740

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Copyright: 2001-05-07
  • Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
  • Purchase Benefits
  • Free Shipping Icon Free Shipping On Orders Over $35!
    Your order must be $35 or more to qualify for free economy shipping. Bulk sales, PO's, Marketplace items, eBooks and apparel do not qualify for this offer.
  • eCampus.com Logo Get Rewarded for Ordering Your Textbooks! Enroll Now
List Price: $23.95

Summary

An award-winning journalist recounts the grand adventure of rebuilding a house with his father, of finding new faith in their relationship, and of living out the American Dream. "A thoughtful, sensitive, funny mid-life odyssey". Carol Saline, author of Sisters and Mothers & Daughters Like many American men, John Marchese arrived at his fortieth birthday feeling a mixture of pride and anxiety. The son of a construction worker, he'd been the first man in his family to graduate from college, the first Marchese after three generations in America to make his living with his mind, not his hands. Despite his achievements, he had never really settled down-after college he'd lived in seventeen places. And, disturbingly, he sensed that a subtle estrangement had developed between him and his working-class father. Now, as he approached midlife, he wondered if they had anything in common. Determined not to be a rootless cosmopolitan who'd never done an honest day's work, John approached his father for help in finding a house they could renovate. His father would teach the s

Author Biography

John Marchese has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times and a contributing writer for Philadelphia magazine, where he shared a National Magazine Award for special interest and won a National Headliner Award for feature writing. His work has appeared in dozens of other publications

Table of Contents

Tearing Down a Wall
1(8)
I Should Have Listened
9(8)
Where I Lived (If You Call It Living) What I Lived For
17(9)
Home Again
26(13)
Dream House
39(16)
Floyd's House
55(10)
My House
65(6)
Working
71(22)
Woodchucks and Squirrels
93(19)
There Might Be a Name for It
112(15)
Sheetrocking Through the Midlife Crisis
127(26)
They All Fall Down
153(13)
Scaffold
166(16)
John and Tully's Excellent Adventure
182(17)
Chalk Lines
199(19)
Finish Work
218(11)
Epilogue: Another River 229(12)
Acknowledgments 241

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

Renovations, Tearing Down a Wall Tearing down a wall is easy. I mean the standard wall in a modern home-half-inch Sheetrock over two-by-four wooden studs. I have ripped down a few now, and I can outline the procedure. First, I poke a hole in the Sheetrock with a short knife, a serrated eight-inch blade that looks as if it could be on display in a museum of horrible felonies. It looks like a bread knife gone bad. The proper name for it is keyhole saw, and I use my father's. Most of the tools I use are his, except for a sixteen-ounce graphite hammer that friends gave me for my thirty-ninth birthday, just before I left New York City to renovate a house in the country. After I've cut a small hole with the keyhole saw, I stick my hand inside the wall and feel around for wires to make sure that further cutting doesn't send me flying across the room like an electrified human wrecking ball. If all is clear, I extend the cut through the wall's skin with a regular saw, running as close to a vertical stud as possible. Sheetrock is a sandwich of gypsum and paper. It makes good walls-solid enough to hold family pictures and mirrors-but a person could easily put his fist through it in a fit of rage. Since I've started working on this house I've understood the urge, but never indulged it. With a sharp tool, it cuts easy. When I've sawed a channel from floor to ceiling, I start pulling on the wallboard, trying to make a sheet open out like a door, prying and working it back and forth until it breaks off. As I do all this tugging and twisting, white gypsum dust pours to the floor and piles in small heaps. It fills my throat and nose. It covers every horizontal and some vertical surfaces. There have been times during the months I've spent renovating when I've padded bleary-eyed and hungover into the kitchen to find a coat of white dust lining the bottom of my coffee pot. This never bothered me because it seemed to illustrate a large and important truth: Renovating anything is a messy business. Sometimes the mess is most of the fun. For someone like me, who has spent nearly two decades constructing nothing stronger than sentences, the idea of tearing down a wall and building another is filled with romance and danger. The tools I use-hammers, saws, crowbars, catspaws-seem like an arsenal fit for some swashbuckler. Simply walking around with a tool belt strapped on makes me feel different, more competent and masterful. One doesn't need to have a great interest in etymology to appreciate the significance of the word "renovate." The definition is full of the promise of new life and vigor, the notion of something better springing out of the dust and dirt. When, for the first time, I picked up the keyhole saw and jabbed it into a wall, I felt that I held in my hand the key to my own renovation. From an inchoate mess of wood and plaster, nails and wire would come a new and better structure, to be inhabited by a new and better man. After all the Sheetrock is off, I attack the studs. I watched my father do this first, in the damp chill of an unheated second floor as we began to gut my house. He approaches demolition as he approaches much of life, with a dogged, impatient stubbornness, hoping that force and perseverance will make up for subtlety and grace. His idea of tearing out a stud is heavy on the tearing, and I've come to believe that he enjoys the demolition process simply because it gives him an excuse to curse. He whacks, he hammers, he pounds-great thudding blows. "You bastard," he'll yell. Whack, whack. The doomed wall lets loose a a shrill scream as a sixteen-penny spike, a nail the size of a pencil, is pulled inch by painful inch from the wood that has been its home for four decades. I have seen him in the midst of a frenzy of destruction, unaware that blood is dripping to the floor from a dime-size patch of skin hanging from his fin

Rewards Program