Readers long ago came to look forward to my vacation columns. Not because they were tales of idyllic holidays or travel to exotic places, but because my vacations were so bad they made readers’ look good by comparison.
Our kids got sick, our car broke down on mountain passes, we pitched our tent on red ant hills … it was always something.
Our latest vacation lacked the drama of those adventures, but it wasn’t without its share of mishaps.
Our destination was the family getaway in Washington state. It used to be my in-laws’ house, but my wife inherited it when they passed away. Invariably, it needs work.
“Will you take a look at the shed door?” my wife asked “It seems kind of loose.”
It was loose for a good reason. The trim boards around the door were rotting. This sort of thing is fairly common in western Washington, due to its infamous “liquid sunshine.” It rains an average of 160 days a year there.
The trim boards, obviously, would have to be replaced. This meant a trip to a lumber store (with apologies to well stocked lumber stores everywhere) in the nearest town. This so-called lumber store had barely enough boards to do the job. We’re talking normal boards here, the kind most lumber stores have oodles of, but this store had – count ‘em – three! Dinged up on the edges and riddled with knots and knot holes.
The next closest lumber store was farther away than I wanted to drive, so I bought those miserable excuses for boards and took them back to the house, muttering clever and cutting expletives about the lumber store the whole way.
The boards had to be cut with 45-degree corners to go around the door opening. Fortunately, my late father-in-law owned a tool for doing that. Buried under an assortment of hand tools, extension cords and other oddments was a mitre box. It was old, made of plastic and rickety, but it still worked.
With the corners cut, the boards needed to have their knotholes filled and be sanded, primed and painted. This took several days of working off and on, meaning whenever I wasn’t finding even more fun-filled ways to enjoy our vacation.
With the trim boards painted and looking better than they had a right to, all that was left was to nail them in place. This proved to be a challenge as the two-by-fours they needed to be nailed to were (surprise) beginning to rot. Happily, enough solid spots were left to finish the job.
Even more happily, the shed door opened and closed properly. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing when it occurred to me that the trim boards around the window might need work, too.
An understatement. They were boards only in the sense that they were once made of wood. Now they more closely resembled moldering sawdust. They obviously would have to be replaced.
The good news was that boards in that condition are easily removed. A few easy pulls with a hammer and out they came.
The bad news is that they weren’t the only thing that came out. When the last board was removed, the window fell out.
This was so unexpected that it rendered me momentarily frozen, staring mutely at the window as if it were an alien object that had fallen from the sky.
When my wits, or what there was of them, returned, I went to look for some nails to reinstall the window. My father-in-law had every kind of screw imaginable, but none were long enough to use on the window.
Strangely, he had almost no nails at all. It took some diligent searching to find a small handful of them, in a cupboard otherwise containing nothing but cans of paint. There were just enough of them to nail the window back in place.
This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The liquid sunshine was also rotting the studs that had supported the window. There were barely enough solid spots left to nail it back in place. That done, I breathed a sign of relief, put away the tools and looked forward to enjoying a trouble-free remainder of the vacation.
Less than an hour later, the phone rang. It was our granddaughter who was keeping any eye on things at our house in Boise.
“I think there’s something wrong with your sprinkler system,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Your lawn is turning brown.”
“Has there been a power outage? That can mess up the sprinkler clock. Maybe Christian could come over and take a look at it.”
Christian is her friend who has a landscaping business and knows a lot about sprinkler systems. She called back a few hours later.
“Christian says the clock is working fine. He’s not sure what’s wrong.”
The problem turned out to be a broken pipe. The repair bill: $600.
Thankfully, we’re back home at the house with the brown lawn now and life has returned to something resembling normal.
A good thing. I’ve had about all the vacation I can stand.
Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.
Tim Woodward 