Odd Jobs Around The House

My first gig was repairing my room in the slave quarter room (those were the rooms out back from the main building in New Orleans - where the slaves/ servants used to live) in a boarding house in the French Quarter. I got two weeks free rent for repairing the plaster and replacing the carpet and painting. It was one little room, you had to go outside in the courtyard and into the main building to take a shower. I didn't last there too long, I moved out to the river bend area where there were grass and trees and a porch swing and a kitchen and bath room and bedroom. Two weeks after I moved out of my little room, I ran into a a neighbor from the building and was told the ceiling in my little room totally collapsed destroying everything. Luckily, they hadn't rented it out yet.

Then I built bookcases for Cary Beckham's bookshop that he was opening on Decatur. The first couple were kind of cock-eyed, but I think the rest were ok. He didn't have to pay a carpenter. With a few of the scraps I built a bench for my front porch on Louisiana Ave. 

The real undertaking began when we were expecting the twins. We had a little two bedroom house in Venice and I was using the second bedroom as a writing room. Babies were going to need that space. We had a little stand alone garage out back (a one car garage) and I proceeded to remodel that and redo the bedroom for the babies at the same time. I got a lot of books and rewired the garage, put in drywall and a ceiling and skylights and a floor and another window. I learned things, like don't hang drywall on the ceiling, Cutting a hole in a wall or a ceiling is consciousness raising and one should probably ask those professionals one knows for advice before you start to make up how to do things. Anyway, I've not been posting cause I was finishing a bathroom that I bragged about tiling in a previous post. 

The babies room got a mural.

I went on to redo much of the little house in Venice and now am sitting in my masterpiece, a two car garage conversion with a wall of bookshelves and fake beamed ceilings and windows to look out on Westchester at night. If you can't afford it, the second best thing is to build it yourself. (Even if you realize ten years later, some of the stupid choices you made that you then spend years trying to fix) These days, I tell folks that the third time I repair or remodel something that's the one that's the good one.