Halfway through dinner downtown on Sunday, Tessa set her fork down and asked me to name one house project we'd done together where neither of us got annoyed. It was our first anniversary, September 13, one year after the barn outside Lowell and about two and a half years after we got the keys to the Cape. I thought about it for longer than a husband probably should.
What we're good at together
Once I got going, the list was longer than I expected.
Painting. This summer's trim and front door went better than any project we've done as a pair. I scraped, primed and caulked. She cut in the door panels and took the high gable trim from the extension ladder, because she's braver up there than I am and we both know it. We talked for three weekends straight. Painting is quiet enough to hold a conversation and slow enough that nobody is in a hurry, which turns out to matter more than skill.
The garage roof. In June my dad and I did the tear-off and the shingles while Gary called the lines from the driveway, and Tessa ran the ground crew. She kept the Bagster loaded, worked the magnet sweeper for nails, staged bundles at the bottom of the ladder and kept Moose out of the debris zone. My dad said afterward she was the most organized person on the job, which, with Gary there, is a real compliment.
Thanksgiving for nine. She ran the kitchen, I ran the oven spreadsheet and the furniture, and we never once discussed who should be doing what. That's rarer than it sounds in 1,150 square feet.
The gutter guards. That's next weekend, and so far it's only a plan, but the plan has gone well. We measured the back run and the garage together, she's taking the garage from the stepladder, and I'm doing the back of the house from the extension ladder. She has already labeled the cut list.
The day we agreed never to repeat
The real answer to her question, it turns out, is anything that doesn't involve a rented drum sander. On June 14 last year we refinished the upstairs bedroom floor ourselves, with a one-day rental, three grits of paper and the rental clock running the whole time. You can't hear anything over a drum sander, so we communicated by pointing, and pointing is a poor way to disagree about whether it's time for the next grit. About forty minutes in, I let the drum sit for a moment near the closet while I turned to look at a snagged cord, and it dug a gouge into the oak that I still see every morning.
We finished, and the floor looks good. But that night we made a rule that has held for fifteen months: one person per loud machine, and the other person goes and does something useful in a different room. Since then we haven't run two power tools in the same space, and we haven't argued about sandpaper once. The gouge stays. It's a reminder, and also refinishing it would mean renting the sander again.
Paper, and a quiet dinner
The first anniversary is supposedly paper, so I took the 1961 hardware-store receipt we found under the bedroom carpet pad, which had been living in a plastic sleeve in the house binder, and had it framed. The writing is faint now, and I like to think whoever wrote it up was buying something for this same house. Tessa gave me a 2027 paper wall calendar with the weekend of our second anniversary already blocked out in pen, and two words written across it: no projects.
Over dinner we went back through the wedding day itself: the rain that didn't let up until 3, the ceremony at 4:30 under a sky that couldn't make up its mind, and Moose in his bow tie for the photos, heading home early with Gary and Linda before the dancing started. A year later the bow tie lives in the drawer with his leash, and he still won't hold still long enough for either of us to put it back on him.
Dinner was downtown, and afterward we walked along the river while it was still warm enough not to need jackets. We made it all the way through dessert without mentioning the house, which I'm counting as a household record.
On the walk back to the truck, she brought up the gutter guards herself. "Saturday," she said. "Seven a.m. I'll make the coffee."
