My Dream Nightmare

This year we are getting rid of stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff. And I can proudly say, that I think we are down to still having too much stuff, but having the kind of stuff that we’ll hang on until we know we don’t need it. I had two sales down at the shop, and got rid of all the “collectibles” and “odd pieces of furniture”, the hundreds of player piano rolls, etc etc. You can’t imagine the treasures that were found deep within the musty drawers of my investment.

Come one, come all! This event will never be repeated.

So me and my good friend Mo got up at the crack of dawn to answer questions like, “do you have any costume jewelry?” or, “Can I have three dollars and four cents, I’m need to take the bus to Birmingham to see my mom” etc etc. BUT amidst the chaos, and the luke warm coffee, and the sentimental feelings we are all overtaken with when we walk into an old neglected building, we managed to move a lot of stuff.

We stayed there the most part of the day, and then at the end of the day, I put everything on the sidewalk, and put a giant FREE sign on it.

You missed it!!!!

THEN people carted away a lot of it, and then the rest I took to my good friends at the THRIFT STORE.

Seller’s remorse? Not really. I was quite ready to move that stuff right on out the door. In with the new, out with the old!!!

THANKS Mo! You are my badass 6 AM gonna help you sell this stuff kind of friend!!!

This is the patron saint of creepy buildings. He guides the exit of all things moldy.

Back to digging dirt!!

We were back to it. The second of three rooms to get the floor treatment. A couple of days of wheelbarrowing dirt out, and dumping it in our neighbors yard (with permission, yes!) and the room was satisfactory to code, the termite guy, and to all peoples who will have to crawl under the floor in the future to fix a leak, or WHAT-EVS.

Once all the extraneous dirt had been removed, we called in the termite guys, who DOUSED the place in what is surely known as a chemical banned in the state of California. But, after seeing what the termites had done to this building, I was prepared to pay for these said chemicals, and make sure our little termite friends move on to, well, say our neighbors building!!!

All that done, and it was time to start rebuilding. I love rebuilding. Putting in fresh planks of wood, the smell, the mildew, the mold ALL GONE! Just new lumber, and solid floors. Whew.

When I was getting rid of the pianos in this room, my friends Jonathon and Debbie took a few off my hands, and instead of paying me the big bucks they were surely worth, they agreed to trade me out for some labor. WELL! This was the event for some payback. So, we continued to do all the prep work, reinforcing the concrete foundation, the metal flashing that would confuse the termites, now high off all the pesticides, and cause them to fall back to the ground from whence they came, the tar paper (I have no idea what that was for) and the installation of the pressure treated 2×4’s to act as the platform for the actual floor, the digging of the hole for the sump pump to keep the water out of the back, etc etc etc. Until we were finally ready to call in the troups and order the lumber.

All prepped out and ready to go!

We started at 8 in the AM. Our friend MO hung out with the kids here at the house, and we got up and got moving. Jonathon came out first, Deb had a few things to do. We set up a work station out on the street:

Workin’ the streets

We started cutting, and by 11 in the AM, we had the floor fully staged out and ready to roll. Those guys were fierce!

The floor, sans the plywood

They went after it with two nail guns in hand, and put the floor in place! It looked so good. It is at this time the kids joined us down at the shop, and no one could resist walking across the boards. Kind of scary, kind of fun.

Zac went to go get the plywood at about 2 in the afternoon, and just about the time I thought we should quit so that people didn’t start making poor decisions, and bad cuts, they start putting the plywood in. Both the kids were at their friends houses by this time, so Debbie and I went to the house and got the keg for the quitting time toast. BUT those guys were crazy! They just kept going. 6 o’clock came and went, and finally I had to just wonder if this would end or not. I could see in Zac’s eyes that as long as Jonathon was willing to keep going, that he was going to keep going, and neither Deb nor I get in the way of men with nail guns and glue caulk guns.

Really guys, lets go home!!!

So we just went, and went. I made more coffee, and the guys kept going. Suddenly you realize you are over halfway done, and why not just finish!?!?? Do you REALLY want to come back tomorrow? Heck no!

SO there it is. The whole floor was finished up, and we brought in a keg of wheat beer and toasted to the new room! I burned some sage, Deb saw some ghosts, fun was had by all!!!!

Now, about that ceiling???!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Quttin’ TIME!!!

Last year when Harvey Robinson, aka Hillbilly, had a hard time leaving the shop, all the tools ended up in the pawn shop, and well, that just kind of took the wind out of our sails. I mean, it was such an amazing feat to get a new floor in the big room, but when he took over, and smoked like a chimney, and almost immediately filled the room up with crap he pulled in from Monty’s Pawn Shop (our neighbor to the west) garbage pile, it just kind of hurt. It was so far off topic, and somehow after all of it, we just couldn’t deal with the whole damn place. It took the better part of a year to get our courage back and stop whining about it all.

But when I woke up all mean from the bourbon I drank during the New Years Eve party, I said to myself, “I’m gonna go get rid of a bunch of crap this year.”  And so the ebay listing started, the craigslists postings went off the hook. And then I started some general demolition of my own. I can say with confidence that I can extract the metal out of a piano, save the cool parts, and get the rest ready for the dump in, well, in a while. Like half a day. Or a whole day. You can work on one, till you get stuck, you can work on another till you get stuck, and then the old stuck doesn’t seem so hard.  And you volley back and forth until you finally get somewhere. Here is a pretty picture I took after I had removed all the tuning pegs from a piano:

Piano strings busted in the sunlight

It is a peaceful thing I realize. I had gone after a piano with force and a mallet, and I realized I just hurt myself, and ok, I hurt my friend Sam who had come over to help me. We were chillin’, with our sledgehammers, and I gave one hard whack on the side of the piano, and the whole body of the piano kind of jumped up and landed on her big toe. So she is now going to lose that toenail, and I’m going to have to live with that. It isn’t easy being the head piano demolisher in Hot Springs.

My friends Jonathon and Debbie came by and grabbed a few pianos. A chiropractor in town traded me some back crackin’ for a grand piano body that he will use as a planter. It has been a serious community effort.

The jumping piano, left right where it was, after the toenail injury.

I always wanted curly hair!!!

Piano rolls on Ebay, old amps on Craigslist, beautiful piano harps just because you stopped by at the right time and I had it out, and you helped me lay a super heavy piano on its back….and am I glad I got some real long johns last fall.

I see a desk.

I see another desk.

Stuff! Stuff!

The layout on this blog is getting out of control, and I’m going to reveal that I don’t really know how to insert photos properly, so I’ll just pretend that I am done rambling on. The point here, to summarize, is lots of stuff is gone, and lots more stuff needs to go. I don’t want to die a hoarder.

Lead. This makes my OCD flare up

I see mental illness

At the end of the long day, we cleared out "most" of the stuff

Newton Smith. Zac’s dad. Came out to visit, prepared to wreak some havoc on the “future studio” room. It is the smallest of the three, yet somehow had attracted most of the stuff. So one by one, Zac and Newt hauled the pianos out of the small room, and into (sniff!) the empty (ish) room with the solid floor in it. Now that room looks like a studio of sorts, the studio of a very optimistic tinker-er.

I  have most of these pianos listed for sale, and a nice guy from Kansas City was going to come down and pick them all up, sight unseen, for a relatively low price, but he has stopped returning my calls.

So it goes, I will relist these on CraigsList, and hope to get a little cash out of the situation.

Thanks to Newt, holy cow! What an effort, he broke up two pianos and helped move many many more. Now I gotta get rid of them! oy!

Our worst fears confirmed, our worst suspicions become a reality, when upon our return from Christmas the piano shop was deserted. Now, where were those tools? What about that job site that Harvey Robinson (master disaster carpenter) was working at? And why did he leave behind food, and the pictures of his kids? And why isn’t that refrigerator working? And where are those antique chisels that our friend Clayton had loaned him? And did he really leave behind a half carved wild pig out of oak in our front room? And what is all this crap everywhere? Is this a Texas style joke?

Did he really leave us his stinky boots???

Then the ultimate cruel joke (in our situation), he actually hauled in a piano and took it apart in the shop! We now have one (1) more piano to move through this world. How ’bout a one way ticket to the dump?!!

Well, I am just naive enough to spend another few days calling his cellphone. And, although it wasn’t disconnected, it just rang and rang and rang. Don’t tell me he was filtering his calls! What?!! People DO THAT?

On the one hand, it is so great that he is gone, on the other, it is unbelievable that he stayed in our shop for 5 months for free, and left it a total mess and no thank you. Now I know how my parents felt. ‘cept my childhood sentence lasted for 18 years. Oh boy, maybe I just took 5 months off of my children’s future parent directed puberty driven freakout. I don’t yet understand how all this works.

Gee, another old man's desk to clean off in this lifetime.

Back to work I go. Cleaning, torturing myself on what gets tossed, and what is a timeless masterpiece, a hidden treasure, an ebay success story. All the while being chased by the monster of clutter, and what happens to people who don’t get rid of anything. I desperately don’t want to be that person! Help Help Help!!!!

And of course, I changed the locks. And after going down the list of all the pawn shops in town, I was lucky. I found my tools (and Clayton’s) at the second pawn shop I went to. I had filed a police report on the missing things, and sure enough, those cops hadn’t even assigned anyone to my case. Granted, a person missing tools from a known suspect is an everyday occurrence out there in the real world, but somehow when it happens to you, you expect the lady at the police department to say something more sensitive than, “and you are just NOW reporting this?”. It would be nice if 10 cops would run out of the back room with their hands on their holsters and run past you, on their way to fight for justice. For what is right. To get that thief!

The unfinished dream, headed the wrong direction.

Then, a word on what it might be like to be a 50 year old addict and con man. Is it really his only choice? He seemed willing to work, but no one, and I mean NO ONE would hire this man. Of course, except us, and that was only two weeks of cash. Was it because of his darkness, or was it because of this terrible economy? I don’t know. Zac considers this a contribution to people who are having a much worse time than we are. Like a mandatory donation to the down and out. As if the next ten people who ask me for money on the street I can say no to and not rack up any bad karma.

I’m just glad he is gone, and I hope I can get the smell of a Hillbilly out of my shop.