Fans of Abby Bardi's columns may enjoy her novel, Book of Fred, (Washington Square Press $24) You can read Washingtonian's review of it by clicking here.

Glue

For those of you who are tired of reading about politics, here is a discussion of home improvements.

Longtime readers of this column may recall that when my husband and I bought our house some years ago, we found that the previous owner had left his indelible mark, or rather that of his hillbilly cousin, Buck, upon it.   Some of Buck's innovations were charming--a slab of pink marble, no doubt reclaimed from a dump, glued to the bathroom floor beneath a claw-foot tub; a mantelpiece that appeared to have come from a church, glued to the bedroom wall.  

Some, however, were less charming: rustic faux-wood paneling glued to the kitchen walls; fake-brick linoleum glued to the floor, flecked with black splotches of spilled glue; the fireplace in the living room glued shut next to a fireproof panel glued to the hardwood floor.    

Buck seems to have liked glue.  

Since we moved in, it has been clear to us that while we can think of many wonderful home-improvement ideas, it would be extremely difficult to execute them, since they would all involve undoing Buck's sticky handiwork.   Anything we'd like to do to the house requires that we first ameliorate some glue-y thing. Buck has rigged our house like a minefield of bad craftsmanship and in so doing, he has left his mark on it forever, or at least until someone has the money to gut the place and start over.   Unless you go out and buy twenty copies of my novel right now, that will not be us; meanwhile, we can only marvel at the long reach of Buck's cheesy vision.

Periodically, though, we manage to find projects with low degrees of difficulty.   For the past several summers, I've taken to painting.   It's cheap, it's easy, it's colorful--sometimes too colorful--and it doesn't require much in the way of de-Bucking.   In England, they call this "tarting up" a house, and it's kind of like putting lipstick on a pig.   It may not look good, but it makes the pig feel better about itself.

Last summer, I painted the bathroom a shade of cobalt blue that Ralph Lauren calls Beach Road.   This color looked terrific on the paint chip I picked up at Home Depot, but on the walls--where it was dark enough to cover the hideous wallpaper that Buck had glued on that could not be removed without leaving huge holes in the plaster--it looked awful.   Far from resembling the ocean as seen from the road to the beach in New England where paint moguls have fabulous houses, it looked like a back-drop from a high school play, perhaps one about clowns.  

Meanwhile, between the weird shade of blue and the slab of marble under the bathtub, I couldn't figure out what to do about the mildewed carpeting on the bathroom floor.   There is no shade of tile known to humankind, or at least, to Home Depot, that goes with pink marble.   The nicer the tile samples I tried, the uglier the marble looked, and to make matters worse, Buck had painted the side of the claw-foot tub a shade of gold probably called "Elvis Suit."  

Things seemed to be going well when suddenly, I ran into an impediment.   It seemed that Buck, in typical Buck fashion, had glued a large portion of the carpet directly to the plywood.   For the rest of the day, I hacked away at this section, removing tiny little pieces of decomposing fabric with a hammer and chisel.   It was far more difficult than I'd anticipated, but I couldn't just stop and leave the bathroom half-full of carpet (or half-empty, depending on your point of view).   I spent many hours chipping carefully, trying not to hack into the wood, removing tiny pieces of a carpet that should never have been there in the first place.

As I lay on the floor (the only position from which I could get a good angle with my chiseling), trying to undo the damage Buck had done, I realized that no matter how many repairs we were able to afford, or how much elbow grease we put into it, Buck had basically screwed up our house pretty good.   Anything we wanted to do to fix it would be incredibly expensive and/or difficult.   For example, if we wanted to replace the house's blue vinyl siding (which has been linked to cancer--see the film Blue Vinyl ), we would probably have to scrape it off inch by inch, since it was a virtual certainty that Buck had glued it onto the original 1892 Queen Anne siding.  

Buck had glued everything, and what he hadn't glued, he had installed badly.   Buck's work on our house had been a bottomless pit of incompetence.

Okay, so I lied.   This column really is about politics.  

Eventually, I was able to scrape all the carpeting off the bathroom floor, leaving only the plywood and the strange pink marble.   I painted the wood a shade by Benjamin Moore known as Summer Basket Green.   It looks unusual, more like a dress than a floor, but it's better than the carpeting, and it makes the blue walls seem less clownish.   At some point, I might try ripping up the plywood to see how badly the original floor has rotted beneath it.   But for now, I merely contemplate the blue-green sea of the bathroom, the beach-road-summer-basket of colors.

And sometimes, as I try unsuccessfully to scrape the glue from something in my house, I talk to Buck in my head.   He died several years ago, so I feel that as I try, vainly, to improve what is no longer his cousin's house, he is watching over me.   "What the heck were you thinking?" I ask him.   "You ruined everything with your carelessness.   Didn't you realize that other people might want to live in this house some day?"

There is never any answer, but if I listen carefully enough, I can hear bombs exploding in Iraq.