My Two Cents
Great moments in building history: There's nothing wrong with being proud of your work
We worked for years on our fixer-upper. It was finally gorgeous. Then we got an offer to move back East, and we couldn’t refuse. Did we have the stamina to attack another neglected beauty? We figured we wouldn’t have a choice. The market a thousand miles from our old home is astronomically different: unavailable and unaffordable. We kept trying to buy hopeless projects, but they’d be gone the next day. Finally, we found something out in the country, 25 years old, almost in our price range, tons of built-ins, didn’t need a thing. Could we buy a house that didn’t need fixing? We joked about it. We said it would be like living a vacation. Besides, with the mortgage we were taking on, we wouldn’t be able to afford to fix anything anyway.
Of course, even a house that doesn’t need fixing needs plants, a couple of fruit trees, some roses to feed the deer, a little paint. Paint isn’t so expensive. The guest bath was a cave of deep red moldy grass cloth, so that had to go. And the kids seemed afraid to play in the den with its dramatic wallpaper: popcorn balls, canaries and fig leaves. Removing wallpaper after all we’d been through was easy and cheap.
Then there was the nasty wall-to-wall carpet upstairs. A decade old if it was a day. Formerly white. And the last year of Tonka traffic hadn’t been easy on it. It had to go. A Saturday project, right? What could be easier?
Five days later, we were still tearing up that carpet. The first bits came up easily. But all those built-ins? Some carpenters had done really nice work—on top of the rug. Door trim? Cut off 3⁄8 in. short of the floor. Baseboard? Same thing. Bookshelves? They were built on the carpet, too. We were tearing at it with our teeth, and the best we could do left a nice dirty carpet fringe sticking out from underneath all those edges.
“For two cents,” my husband roared, “I will tell the idiots who did this what I think of them.”
He went for the crowbar and ripped off the bottom bookcase shelves and moldings. Everything creaked; the shelves were now suspended off the floor, with nothing to hold them up but a few finish nails and some paint. I rushed to unload books. He reached under to give the carpet a good yank and came up laughing.
In that empty space underneath, resting on a little square of virgin carpet, were two pennies. Those carpenters were proud of their work. Underneath the bookcase, they’d signed and dated a scrap of wood, tucked away forever, and left my husband his two cents.
—Sarah Colvin Unfried, Redding, CT
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