<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" My parents were visiting for a couple of days, and yesterday I took them over to the house so that they might marvel at the progress I&amp;#039;ve made. It was a terrible mistake. Admittedly, the house has pretty much hit bottom. I&amp;#039;m about halfway through the demolition \u2014 which, by my definition, means I&amp;#039;m about halfway through each of twenty-seven different tasks. Apart from my badass mailbox \u2014 which has done an excellent job of collecting our mail thus far, in an extremely level and well-fixed fashion \u2014 I&amp;#039;ve added nothing to the house. I have, however, taken away vast random chunks of it. It looks like a whale carcass after gulls after picked at it for a while. The worst room, right now, is our master bedroom. I&amp;#039;ve torn out the en suite bathroom that had been tucked into the corner, leaving a couple of big holes where there used to be pipes and, um, walls. I&amp;#039;ve also started (but not yet finished) tearing down the plaster ceiling, which was sadly beyond repair. Tearing down a ceiling is a heinous, messy exercise. It might be even worse than pulling up subfloor. In our case, first there were acoustic tiles stapled in tight, ugly rows. Then came some seriously intensive strapping held up by goddamn railway spikes. A lot of plaster came down along with them. Then came down the rest of the plaster in great dusty chunks and a few miles of lath. And then, finally, fell the powdery insulation that had been blown between the joists, horrible poison that drops to the floor with a thud, like snow off a roof. Of course, nearly all of that stuff was still piled high when my parents peered through the open door. My dear old dad \u2014 a man for whom being physically subtle means lifting only one cheek to fart \u2014 began sneezing the way cartoon giants sneeze. My mom, a lovely and loving woman who extols the virtues of her Miele vacuum as though she&amp;#039;s seen the crying face of Jesus in it, said, and I quote, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s it for me. I&amp;#039;m out of here.&amp;quot; She really did leave. It was not the response I was hoping for. My parents have never been what you would call... supportive... of my tackling old houses. They are befuddled by my love for it. They own a dustless loft in Ottawa, filled with sunlight and new furniture and drawers of freshly ironed underwear. Their home is precise. It&amp;#039;s the contrast, I think, that&amp;#039;s part of the problem. The bigger part: They don&amp;#039;t like the idea of their professional, university-educated son blowing plaster dust out of his nose. Before my dad figured out what he was going to do with his life, he worked as a bricklayer&amp;#039;s apprentice, because that&amp;#039;s what poor kids like him did. If you had any kind of breeding, you went to the city, you went to school, you went to the tailor&amp;#039;s to get a suit. The mutts laid bricks. My dad, then, holds no romance for manual labor. For him, it&amp;#039;s desperate. He worked hard all his life so that he \u2014 and his children, more important \u2014 would never have to hammer a nail again. He hires painters, for God&amp;#039;s sake. He calls the cable company over to program his remote. But because I largely escaped manual labor growing up \u2014 short, failed experiments with animal husbandry excepted \u2014 it does hold something like romance for me. It&amp;#039;s hard to explain. I tried and failed to explain it this morning, in fact, to both Lee and my parents, when I was given a post-inspection dressing-down about my being doomed so clearly to failure. Maybe it&amp;#039;s a reaction to our abstract, digital existence, but the truth is, I like doing hard physical work. I like carrying down bin after bin of debris down the front stairs; I like peering over the edge of our Dumpster and seeing the destruction I&amp;#039;ve wrought, entirely with my two hands. That massive thing is nearly full, and I did that, pitching in every scrap of it. That feeling is why I don&amp;#039;t want to hire any help. I don&amp;#039;t want to hurry up and just write some checks to get it done. I want to think about what I&amp;#039;m doing, to savor it, to pick my way across the wire. Over at the house, my brain goes quiet for once, all of my neuroses turned into feathers and whispers, and I can work happily away, secure in the knowledge that I&amp;#039;m doing this one thing in my life exactly right. I&amp;#039;ll clean up my room today, Mom and Dad, I promise. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a8688/bedroom-remodeling-101510/>