Home Improvement's Not Always Been So Pretty

As I was priming the stairwell walls this week, I was thinking about the turn to "hipness" that home improvement has taken. It's now considered a cool thing to do to take a house in disrepair and to do all those fixer-upper things (painting, carpentry, drywalling, plumbing, electrical work) that we used to hire out for ages ago. There are even titles for people who do this as a career: "flippers," who fix up dilapidated homes in the hopes of a big payday. But, back in the day, those jobs related to home repair were solidly blue-collar. You didn't do them because you wanted to make a lot of money, but you took those jobs because there wasn't really anything else available.

One of the many people involved in home repair was my grandfather Bernard (a.k.a. "Pete"). Pete was a WW2 vet who came back from France and Germany scarred, grumpy, silent, but ready to work. He took a job as a painter and worked 6-day weeks until his health deteriorated. Some of it was from a youth of smoking and blowing up cherry bombs in friends' cars. Then there was the war. The years of painting (I remember the most famous building he painted in Worcester, MA, was the Polar Bear Cola Co. building, and it must have taken weeks). Every night that I spent in his presence I can remember him drinking a beer and pouring a pat of salt on his hand, in the space between his thumb and index finger, to replenish all the salt he lost as he sweat through 10-12 hour days of painting.

It was not glorious work. It was strenuous, backbreaking: when Pete died he was inches shorter than when he was young, with a stooped back, replaced knees, arthritic hands. And then there was the emphysema. Of course that wasn't all from painting, but who knows about what fumes he breathed in for 40 years during his work? When he came home, he was covered in paint, smelled like paint, and just wanted a smoke or two or five. On his days off, my mom remembers that during the summers he would drive his wife and daughters about an hour to get to the beach. Even on his days off he wasn't off: coughing, hacking, curling under the strain of making people's homes and workplaces brighter.

And so while I was painting my one small stairwell, I thought about how Pete handled doing it, day after day, month after month. It had to have gotten monotonous, ingratiating, irritating. To deal with unfair practices and health issues, Pete had joined a painter's union (does this explain why I'm so pro-union?). But in the end all his health issues caught up with him and he died in a haze attributed to emphysemic senility.

Why am I reminded of this? When I was at Home Depot the other day, after I had my paint mixed (Ralph Lauren's "Architectural Cream"), I wandered over to another aisle in which "environmentally safe" paints (called Freshaire) were being sold. Of course I was lazy and just kept the paint I had mixed, but a part of me wondered what damage I might be doing to not only me but future people who buy my place. What ingredients are in the RL paint? What is better about the environmental stuff (more on this in another cross-over post)? Could these technologies (even in paint) have helped my grandfather have a better end-of-life? If I breathe in this stuff, what will happen to me in 10 years?

So maybe this is silly, or over-exaggerated, but I continue to wonder ...