A Sound You Don't Hear Anymore

The Household Improvement Project, Part 1

The remodeled bathroom looks so great I began refinishing the wooden kitchen cabinets. They are thickly painted white, then were varnished, then repainted white God only knows when, and were worn and graying around the edges. But because I'd done refinishing only once before I decided to take on, at first, only one cabinet door and one drawer. Removing the door's hinges I was stunned at their condition. Here they are. Here's the outer side of the "before" door. I dreamt of returning it to its natural wood. Only the facing of the drawer is real wood; the rest is particle board and veneer.

Cheerfully I set up in my garage, using a table I set out in the sun and enjoying the view and the dissipation of fumes. Equipment? Chem gloves, mask, scrapers, brushes, sandpaper, sponges, varnish, and the safest eco-type paint-stripper I could find. It's from 3M. Don't buy it. It is odorless but pricey and produces a headache anyway, and it required seven applications, the whole gallon bottle, each application taking a day to strip two little pieces of wood just a little deeper: Seven applications.  Purchase the stinky, caustic stuff and get it over with.

Toothpicks and Tarpaper

Not far from here some farmer sold an acre along the highway to a real-estate developer. The developer shaved all the trees off, and in record time, using toothpicks and tarpaper, erected another of those "dream houses," aka "McMansions." It has columns out front and a little treeless yard. It has never had an occupant, not in four years.

Nearby, within sight, are three acres of pasture in -- get this -- a floodplain. There a developer built yet another dream house, dressing it up with curtains and porch lights. Every summer for four years now, the hopeful real-estate agent opens up one door of the three-car garage and parks a car in it, and puts a kids' trampoline in the back yard. But you never see any kids, because there aren't any parents dumb enough to buy a dream-house in a floodplain.

On a ridge just above it, visible only in winter when the trees are transparent, is a huge rustic barnlike "dream house" with a wraparound porch and dramatic rows of Anderson windows. The buyers wanted to run a bed-and-breakfast in the nice oak-and-hickory Missouri woods. Anyone could have told them that city folk on weekends don't want to bed-and-breakfast in the woods. They want to be able to walk up the street to have a latte and buy antiques. This dream-house was advertised for sale in the paper, for $550,000. It's still for sale, for $450,000.

Now, you and I know that most people can't pay $450,000 for a house, or even $300,000. Even $200,000 is a little steep for most families. And the economists are wondering how it happened that "the bottom fell out of the housing market."