The Garage
Finish What You Start- Another story about My Dad
My Dad was many things, husband, father, steelworker, coach, and music entrepreneur. But he was also a bargain hunter. He loved a deal. I remember sitting around at Christmas time with my Mom’s brother Vic arguing about who got the better deal on presents.
This story is about one of those deals.
When I was about 14 or 15, my dad went to an auction at a bankrupt amusement park at the Beach Strip in Hamilton, Ontario. My mom was fearful that we would come home with an amusement ride, but his main goal was to buy a pinball machine for the Lock basement. Apparently there were garages full of them down there. My brother and I were excited about this. My Dad came home in the pickup truck; there was nothing in it, but my Dad was smiling.
My brother Russ and I asked him whether he had bought the coveted pinball machine and he replied. “ No, those things went for way over market prices, but I got something better”. We waited with bated breath. “I bought the garage that housed the pinball machines for $100. It was the best deal at the auction”
A Garage. Who buys a garage? Isn’t a garage something you hire a contractor to build for you. We had a gravel driveway. We had talked about having a garage, but this sounded ridiculous. My dad then detailed how great a bargain it was and that we had to get the garage off the park property in 30 days. What?! He then laid out the plan about how we would carefully tear down the garage board by board, load it in the pickup truck and then rebuild it in our driveway! I am not sh*tting you!! There are family members and friends of mine who can attest to this crazed plan. I was not sure how much work was involved in this, but my disappointment at the lost chance to own a pinball machine was quickly replaced with the horror that my summer would be devoured by a crazy garage moving project. I was not wrong.
My Dad thought it was a great adventure. He took my brother and I down there the next day with some rented tools — crowbars, nail pullers, ladders and other assorted things that are not really my forte. My brother and I were hoisted on to the roof and instructed on how to remove tar paper. Roll it up carefully. It had to be preserved for the rebuild in Ancaster. What? We are preserving tar paper?. It got worse. We then learned how nail pullers worked and we had to carefully remove thousands off nails from the roof boards without damaging the wood. I began to realize that this project was going to eat many days and weekends. When you are 15, you are not really looking for a multi-month family manual labor project.
And so it went for days, maybe weeks. My friends were playing baseball, riding bikes, meeting up with girls and I was traipsing down to a dilapidated beach strip to tear down a garage.
And then an event happened that might have set us free. We went down to the job site one morning. We had taken the roof off the structure, and taken down the huge door. Only three walls were left standing. But when we got to the job site, someone had driven a car right through two of the walls smashing the boards all over the place. My Dad was not happy, a stream of profanity spewed forth. But secretly my brother and I were overjoyed. The mad project would end. Our summer would be returned to us. But it was not to be. After some thought, my dad decided that we would just brush this setback off. We would keep going, carefully disassemble and preserve the shattered boards and reassemble them like on oversized jigsaw puzzle back at home. Are you freaking kidding me?! Does this man have any sense of the concept of sunk cost? It was just $100 and countless hours of labor. But those costs are sunk. The garage boards are badly smashed. A car drove through the walls!!!! How can we go on? Any reasonable man walks away. But not my dad. “When we start something in this family, we finish it”. Unbelievably, the project went on.
We eventually hauled the entire garage back to Ancaster, put it in the back yard and planned the construction/re-assemble. First step, dig the trench that will enable us to lay a brick foundation. I ask what day the backhoe is coming to dig it. My dad looks at me like I am crazy; he tells me how much a backhoe rental costs and how it will ruin the “bargain” nature of this project. And then he utters words of sheer horror. “We are going to dig the six foot deep trench by hand”. There is open revolt by the boys. This is lunacy. The soil on our property is heavy clay, really hard packed. Further the trench location is covered by gravel and cars have been driving over it for 20 years to pack it down further. I stick a shovel in the ground and jump on it with both feet. It barely penetrates the soil. “ See, this is crazy. It can’t be done”. But there was no budging from my Dad. “I didn’t say it was going to be easy”. “And when we’re done we are going to have a great new garage”. I lost it. We are not going to have a great new garage. A great new garage happens when contractors show up at your house with architectural plans and models and stuff and build you a garage. Our garage, by definition will not be new. It will be “used” and it will be hard to be great when we are building it with boards that have been smashed by a car driving through them! But there was no talking to the man. The project went on. You finish what you start.
A digging schedule was drawn up with names, dates and times. It was typed on my Dad’s IBM Selectric typewriter just to make it more official and painful. And that trench digging project and schedule would lead to great conflict and the biggest fights of my life with my Dad. I sometimes skipped my assigned shift to join my friends Tim, Larry and Jim. We rode our ten speed bikes down to the Village Green to hang out with girls. I had a particularly urgent task that justified the trench digging truancy. I had a plan to win the affections of this particular girl before she headed off to summer camp. She spent 6 weeks away at summer camp and I had only a short window to impress her and that short window had direct conflicts with the trench digging project. In the end, I blamed the trench digging project for my failure to win her affections. But in later years I was reliably informed that notwithstanding my absences due to trench digging, I had no chance there anyway.
And despite the family conflict, my occasional truancy, the arguments and the incredibly hard packed ground, the trench was dug — inch by inch, foot by foot. I can’t remember how long it took. I cursed by Dad with every shovel of clay that I dug from that godforsaken driveway. Finally we were done. My dad’s friend Harry came and laid the foundation for free. He showed us how to use levels and strings to properly lay a brick foundation. My brother Russell had a lot more affinity for this and helped with the calculations while I lugged the bricks. Then we put up the shattered walls, carefully fitting the broken pieces together. We re-assembled the roof and even rolled out the same re-used tar paper that we had salvaged months before.
I remember clearly the day the tar paper was put back on . It was the culmination of the project. We stood back and looked at our creation. My Dad was pretty happy and proud. “Looks pretty good, don’t you think?”. We said yes, but we were lying. It didn’t look good. The garage was a kind of dingy yellow with old faded green tar paper on the roof. The walls had these jagged seams where we fit the shattered boards back together. There was no cement base, just a dirt/gravel floor. But it was done. We had finished what we had started.
I wish I was digging a six foot trench in gravel covered hard packed clay with him today.
Miss you Dad. Happy Father Day.
