From the ground up: a fable

So, some well-meaning friends wrote to one of those makeover shows—no, not that one where they give you that temporary facelift and a new wig and different teeth and move you to a different town and let you try on a whole new identity for a week or two. I mean one of the ones where they show up one day with a couple of trucks and a fork lift, and tell you they’re going to reconstruct your house.

Once we were past the initial shock, they sat us down in the living room, lights blazing. “Hi, everyone, it’s Teddy and Trish again, and we’re here with John and Jane Citizen and their lovely daughter Sandy. Tell us about this, uh, interesting house, folks!” Even with the A/C on full blast—you can tell when it’s running full blast, the lights go a little dim—things were getting pretty toasty already. “Well, it’s fine,” we said, to begin with. “It’s—nice, it’s old, lots of character...” We were just telling them how our old Uncle Sam had passed the place down to us when—plink. Water started dripping from somewhere, right onto the host’s suede jacket. I raced upstairs, miraculously avoiding the broken part of the banister and that one loose step... I knew it must be the toilet leaking again, and the assistant producer was right behind me with her little digicam. Hopefully they’ll bleep most of the ensuing conversation—well, it was more of a monologue, actually; it had been a long week.

When I came back down, sweating and nursing a bump on my skull from the underside of the sink, Jane was explaining the problem with the security system. “It’s not that it’s bad, it’s good,” she said, echoing what the sales rep had said. “If we can’t actually leave a room sometimes without tripping an alarm, well, maybe that’s just the price of security, you know?” The host noted all the scary-looking devices around the front gate. “We’re worried about, you know, the wrong people getting in,” Sandy, our teenager, volunteered. “The spikes, well, we think they’re an interesting addition, don’t you?” she added uneasily.

The host gave the camera a long and significant glance. The floor groaned and lurched slightly as the crew got off the couch—the joists, well, they’re not used to that kind of a load. I’d been meaning to fix that. The bookshelf by the window, I noticed, had acquired another degree or two of tilt, judging from the water in the fishbowl. Been meaning to fix that, too, but who has time these days?

We headed for the kitchen—after deactivating the motion sensors, of course—and Sandy had to go and mention our little food poisoning problem. I guess she was trying to explain the pile of EZ-Cuizini boxes, you know, the ones that guarantee “100 percent total pureness?” “It’s hard to know who to buy things from anymore,” Jane said. I could tell she was finding it hard having to explain things.

The host was looking more concerned by the minute, mentioned that maybe we’d need to look at more than just the house itself.

“How’s the foundation?” he asked. Jane and I looked at each other.

“Well, I—don’t know,” I had to say, after a moment. “We haven’t really thought about it…” “Not for a while at least,” Jane added.

We went downstairs, into the cellar, with more than a little fear and trepidation. The host had introduced us to that week’s special guest contractor, a telegenic fellow who looked like he was born to wear a tool belt. Sandy seemed particularly impressed with him. He poked here and there, moving carefully around the cardboard boxes and old appliances, and somehow managing to not bump his head even once. While he explored, the host took each of us aside, asked us a few questions—what we liked, what we didn’t, what kind of hopes we had for the old place. After what seemed like forever, we climbed back out, and headed for the back porch.

“Well, Mr. and Mrs. Citizen,” he said with a big grin, “I think you’ll be pleased to know that when they put this thing together they put it together right—but there’s been some neglect, not just by you but previous owners. And I think you’ve been getting some bad advice from some these fly-by-night contractors you’ve been using. There’s a lot that’s worth saving, but we really have to rethink whether some of these additions are really in keeping with the character of the house.”

He pointed to the holding pen we’d put out back, the one where we were still keeping those burglars we’d caught—at least we’re pretty sure they were burglars. “That, for example,” he said, “may have to go.”

- Skip Mendler