My father gave me this garage

I signed the mortgage on this old house in August 1997 when the Coast Guard sent me to Yorktown to teach maritime search and rescue techniques. Since then, I was transferred three more times before I finished up my career. Setting up new households in Florida, Georgia, and D.C. naturally entailed collecting various piles of crap at each stop, and in between transfers I would end up bringing the useless (but valuable - hey! I might need that!) detritus to Wolf Creek and dump it into whatever vacant space remained.

While I first lived here from 1997 to 2000, I had a fairly glorious run of renovations. I partially redid two upstairs bedrooms and completely finished the living and dining rooms. A stupid selection of various housesitters over the years turned out to ruin most of my progress, but at one time it was there. The kitchen and bathroom have been and remain too completely horrid to contemplate, but I guess that is what the future is for.

My method of renovation is to take a wrecking bar and completely gut a room to the studs, rewire with modern materials, install insulation, then put up wallboard and wainscoting. I would also rip the ceiling down and re-use the original materials when replacing it, a choice I now regret but oh, well.

This house was balloon framed with rough cut dimensional lumber which was most likely sawn on site during original construction in the 1920s. Studs are 2-1/4" x 4-1/2" - real wood - and even my soffits are 1/2" x 10" x 10' solid pine planks. There isn't a lick of plywood or particle board in the entire place.

Between my penchant for holding on to every odd 2x4 and remnants of expensive stock materials and all the crap I have accumulated over my 52 years, this old house became cramped and crammed and damned with stacks and piles and tools and boxes and who knows whatall. It became clear to me in retirement I was choking on my own success and packrattyness. I could not get at a room to renovate it anymore for all this shit.

Plus my Harley was threatening to rot away under a tarp parked on a concrete slab beside my back deck.

Enough

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In the 1980s I had a falling out with my father over his treatment of my mother. I guess the only way to sum it up is I disowned him. I never much pursued just what his attitude was toward me since then. I was just happy to get away and out from under.

He became ill and died in 2006. During the settlement of his estate few facts emerged, which I have had to induce. When he received a lucrative corporate buy-out during the 1980s downsizing trend, he chose to place his substantial liquid assets into an IRA. It did and does not surprise me to learn, nor do I blame him in the least bit, for his decision to leave me alone of his four children off the IRA beneficiary designation. I had made clear I did not care to have any more of his shit, his money, or his manipulation in my life.

In the last year of his life, for reasons I will never know, my father changed his real estate trust to name me a partial beneficiary, in equal share of his survivors. Whether or not he re-considered his 1987 IRA decision at the same time is also never going to be known. An IRA takes precedence and is settled before any other estate nomination, and so I received a portion of the proceeds from the sale of his home, and nothing of the majority of his estate. But it would do.

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I contracted for the garage in December 2007, groundbreaking was in March 2008, and it was turned over to me this August. I balked at first over the internal debate as to whether or not spending the most significant cash infusion I have ever received on one purchase was a wise choice, but a few considerations finally won me over.

Holding money which has strings attached, emotional or legal or accidental, eats like an acid from within the one who tries to hold it. As I had learned while spending my G.I. Bill at the casinos in Reno: "All found money gets parlayed." If you find a folded fifty under the crap table, you MUST place it on the Come Line and take a roll. Do not put it in your pocket. If you have all the numbers covered and all the odds layed and the dice keep hitting and you pull an incredible wadstack from the dealers, you MUST put the boys on the Hard Ways and Proposition bets. You play found money for others. That is the Rule. Greed and small mindedness will eat your karma in gulps.

(ASIDE: This is why all politicians, including my choice Barack Obama, are tainted. At least Obama gets the vast majority of his campaign money from millions of small donors over the Internet in amounts of $100 or less, who ask for nothing more than he be as honest as possible in his promises and actions. McCain ... not so much.)

This is akin to the same karma moneysense my mother demonstrated when she finally received a divorce and property settlement from my father in 1982 after 32 years of marriage. She very quickly sold all his hoarded, beloved tools and toys at steep discount, bought a sinfully luxurious leather chair (upon which she loved to sit) at retail, and walked into a Ford dealership one day and said, "Give me that loaded red and silver Ranger. Write it up."

My mother, who had to fight with increasing venom over the years of her marriage for every single dime given grudgingly, and with strings attached, for hay for the horses, vet bills, or antiques she admired. My mother, who never worked for wages and so had no money of her own earning in her entire life spent raising four children. My mother, who at 52 still saved her chewing gum on the kitchen windowsill for later. God bless her.

When you hoard your ducats in a vault, opening the door frequently to check on all the glitter and gold like Scrooge McDuck, it kills you a little bit every time.

I decided to take the completely unexpected windfall from my father, get rid of it, and spend it all in one instance on real property which will never depreciate. To hire a small Christian contractor with two permanent employees who lives in my county, in order to circulate the money to blue-collar hardworking people in my own community. And to clear my karma account with him for life.

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I decided this garage is the pivot point for the rest of my life. I retired one year ago from military service, and it has taken me every day of it to reset myself from a lifetime of serving the needs and demands of outside forces controlling my life. Time now to work for my own life.

I spent the past month finishing the ground floor with insulation, wiring, pegboard, and work benches. A separate utility drop with 200 amp service, outlets waist high every four feet, centered over the benches. A 600 sq. ft. apartment size second floor stocked with hurricane and survival supplies. A gun safe rated for one hour at 1400 degrees F bolted to the concrete floor.

My cousin tells me its' design reminds her of the garage my carpenter grandfather built in Columbia Station, Ohio for his new family in the 1920s. The upstairs apartment was where my mother was born. I think it fitting and somehow deliciously appropriate that I expect to die in a place resembling the home where my mother was born. It is the closest to a family homestead that is left in this world. I have asked my 95 year old gramma to join mom in looking in on me from time to time. There are so many concentric circles of karma closing in on one another in this loop of life that I feel it can be a source of constant nourishment for my soul for the years I have left in this world. I see at least a dozen such loops manifesting just in re-reading this blog, which of course is only words on an electronic page.

After 32 years serving in defense of my country, living in an unending series of rentals, never having a place of my own, working on car parts on the kitchen table, trying to get the simplest woodworking project done in the living room, not once in my life having owned a place to park my car out of the elements, I will at last have a safe, solid, secure place to work. When you can't find a tool, you don't have it. Ask Sartre.

My mitre box at last is nailed to the workbench, and I challenge you to understand what this means.

Today I am moving things out of the house and into the garage so I can expose the rooms and walls which I still have to rehabilitate in the house at Wolf Creek.

Thank you, Edgar H. Wolf. Sincerely.