Two weeks into the sunroom remodel—a mere spruce-up, actually—I began musing on what could have made the experience worse. It could have been the middle of summer when the sun room feels 150 degrees in the afternoon. Or it could .  .  . no, that’s about all that could have made it worse.

I wasn’t even the one doing it. I was mostly in the house eating bon-bons and drinking single malt or so I told Erina when she worried that she had disrupted my life. Erina was, in fact, one of the few good things about the entire debacle.

I’ve known Erina for about eight years. She lived around the corner from me until she graduated high school and found a job and her own place. When she was 13 years old, she posted signs in the neighborhood announcing: I Will Do Your Dirty Work. I hired her to do some work in my yard, nothing especially dirty at first. She cleaned gutters and sawed down tree limbs. She loved anything that involved power tools.

She worked with her Bluetooth ear buds in, listening to old TV shows –Grays Anatomy was one—or music. I always knew when she had music on because she sang along in her lovely voice. Once I couldn’t find her.

I called her mother, Liz:

Is Erina there?

I thought she was with you.

I can’t find her. I know she was up on the was up on the roof.  Let me check.

Outside, I climbed the ladder that just barely gets you onto the roof. Erina was down at the far end, dancing to something she was hearing through her ear buds.

I texted Liz: She’s fine. She had her ear buds in.

Liz: I hate those things.

Erina has painted a lot of my house, inside and out. I have an indelible image of her painting the bathroom ceiling that reached up to a high skylight. She was barefoot and on tiptoe on the top of one of those stepstools that warn you not to stand on the top of the stepstool, keeping a calm and perfect balance while she wielded the roller. When I came around the corner and saw her, I dropped the laundry.

“I’m getting the tall ladder.”

“No, I’m fine.”

She’s delightful, artistic, musical, funny, bright, a girl after my own heart. Except she has mounds more energy than I do. Of course, she’s fifty years younger. I just figured that out. That makes me want to take a nap.

Anyway, to get to the Disaster Story, it all started when Erina painted my living room in lemon meringue yellow and I had three gallons of leftover paint because I don’t understand how to figure square feet.

“I guess I could use it for touch-ups until I die and I’ll will it to you.”

“I could paint your sunroom,” Erina said.

She painted the sunroom. In between coats, she painted my front door and the baseboards in the living room. She secured a shelf, which I put up years ago that has never been stable. She mounted my TV with an adjustable mount so secure, a child could swing on it.

“What do you want to do with the trim?” she asked. “You know what, you should paint it blue.”

I bought a gallon of peacock blue. Erina painted the trim.

“I could pull up this flooring,” she said.

The flooring in the sun room was an ugly brown that broke off in both large and small pieces as it pleased, revealing a cement floor with gunks of hardened black stuff—tar, as we found out—stuck to a jute fabric. All of it probably 70 years old.

The linoleum while Erina is still cheerful

The floor before the grease

Erina started scooping and scraping and peeling with shovels –including my snow shovel–with hand scrapers and putty knives and my neighbor Bill’s spud. Finally she rented an electric tile stripper. When she had gotten the ugly brown linoleum up, we were looking at lumps and patches of black mastic, a substance that appeared to have petrified there on the floor.

Then began the first of many trips Erina made to Home-Depot, Lowes, Aurora Rentals, Tweedy and Popp, a place called Dependable Construction and an Ace Hardware up in Everett, 30 miles away. I marveled at how many trips she could make in the same day in between toiling over the black crud while maintaining her optimism and cheer. She talked to the folk at the stores, she did research on her phone, she watched You Tube videos.  My contribution was to make popcorn for her every day.

Her mother, Liz, got in on it later when it seemed like the ship was going down. Both Erina and Liz are forces of nature. The two of them together are an explosion of ideas, research and arguments.

I hate research. I just make decisions and live with them. For example, here’s me picking out a Christmas tree:

“I need one between five and six feet.”

“Here’s one.”

“I’ll take it.”

One Monday, Erina poured five gallons of Blue Bear mastic and adhesive remover on the floor. She was still humming and dancing, listening to Grays Anatomy and scraping. She was leaving swathes of bare cement.

“I’m going to need the floor tiles tomorrow or the next day.”

I picked out some slate blue peel-and-stick tile that looked lovely with the peacock blue of the trim, bought enough for 300 square feet (accurate calculation) and was home within the hour.

By “tomorrow or the next day” lumps of sticky black tar remained all over the floor,  Erina glopped what she could into old containers I had lying around.  We looked at each other.

“I think we need a degreaser,” she said.

“How are you going to clean it up? How are you going to clean any of this up?” (Notice the use of the “you” pronoun.)

“We need a lot of rags. And I’ll wear my rubber overalls.”

the mastic remover

gunk

more gunk

Two gallons of degreaser went down. Now the gunk wasn’t just sticky, it was oily.

“I think I can hose this down with my power hose and slurp it up with a wet vac.”

The next day Erina showed up in a giant pair of rubber overalls that I called her haz-mat suit to start hosing and slurping. The main thing this accomplished was to spray tar all over the freshly painted yellow walls and ruin my neighbor’s shop vac. I had to buy more yellow paint, which, you may remember, the surplus of which was what started this whole thing.

tar and grease coated red rubber overalls

Liz found a scrapy tool that was a giant razor blade on a handle. Erina commenced to scraping. We had to trade up to a machine that would do the scraping for her. After an hour, this gave us about a foot of bare cement.

I said, “Did you tell me that we could put tiles down without getting up all the mastic and it would last for maybe a year?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t we do that because this floor is going to be the death of me.”

“You’re kidding?”

“Only partly.”

Yet truly my main inconvenience was that if I wanted to get to my cabin in back, I had to walk around the house and unlock the back door to get in. That and the fact there was sticky black stuff everywhere. It was worse than when I used to run the chocolate fountain for my student recitals. I would find chocolate all over the house, even in places I knew no one had been. At least the chocolate would come up with soap and water.

Erina washed the floor as best she could and mopped up everything with rags and towels. While the floor dried she cleaned tools and floors and the shop vac; she spent hours getting the viscous ooze in and out of the sunroom.

Ruining the Shop-Vac

Enough.

She had been at this project for two weeks before she lost all her glorious energy and optimism. She sat down and cried. Earlier she had burst into tears at Dependable Construction. It was over.

Then a friend made a stray comment to me that cork underlayment might work on as much of the floor as we had gotten clean and dried. I did the research this time and made the phone calls. Erina rallied.

Before she set out for the store in Everett, I said, “Don’t let them tell you this won’t work. Everything they have said would work hasn’t”

“This is our ‘Hail Mary’.” she said

I got a text from Erina an hour later. “I’ve found a dead pigeon on 8^th and I’ve made a coffin for it. Can I bury it in your garden?”

I had seen that dead pigeon earlier and had told myself it was just a rag. “She is such a nicer person than I am,” I thought.

Erina and Liz were there til 10:00 that night putting down the cork underlayment. Erina buried her pigeon in my pet cemetery, already the final resting place of five cats and one dog.

Erina re-painted the walls and put down the tiles.

They looked lovely. I was thrilled. But by the time Erina arrived the next day to help move the furniture back into the sunroom, the cork underlayment was buckling and the tiles were expanding and peeling up off the floor.

“Oh NO!”

“It’s okay,” I said. I’m going to live with this. I’ll cover the high traffic areas with a big rug.”

I am living with it although Bill said it was a problem still waiting to be solved.  I bought him a new shop vac, by the way. There is still a pile of glutinous refuse– a lump of foul deformity, Shakespeare might have said, a big boil, a plague-sore–I’ll stop now– in my side yard because no one will pick it up until I have it tested for asbestos.

“I’ll help you sort it out and we’ll take it to the dump ourselves,” said Erina.

You know what? I absolutely love this young woman.