A Closer Look at Crestline
By Lee Reeder

Earning a Master's Degree in Carpentry

I have earned a postgraduate degree in carpentry since I moved here. When we bought a house in Temecula in 1994, we moved into a place that we watched being built from a bare lot to completion in a new housing development. We moved in a week after it was finished, so we had virtually no maintenance for the four years we lived there except gardening and landscaping. In 1998, we bought a 25-year-old house in Crestline that had been treated as well as you might expect it to be treated by the squatters who were finally evicted from it before it went on the market.

We had our work cut out for us. The worst thing is that I had no clue what to do. My greatest mechanical accomplishment up to that point was changing the oil in my car—a task that took hours, made a huge mess in the garage, and probably ruined 20 bucks worth of clothes every time, so I would have come out way ahead if I had just taken it to the Jiffy Lube and popped into Starbucks next door for a latté and the Sunday paper while somebody else got dirty for a half hour.

During the whole four years I lived in Temecula, I had a socket set, a hammer, a crescent wrench, a couple of screwdrivers, an oil filter wrench and a tape measure. Five years after moving here I have two sanders, a hand grinder, a jigsaw, a circular saw, a cordless drill, a hammer drill, a regular corded drill, a chainsaw, two axes, three iron wedges, three caulk guns, four chisels, six different kinds of vises, hearing protection, eye protection, three types of leveling devices, two squares, 11 different types of pliers, and a whole toolbox full of stuff that is devoted to nothing but plumbing. I also have things I never knew existed, like a tile cutter, a 12-pound maul for hacking up wood rounds, and some strange type of pliers, the original purpose of which was to bend and attach tags into pigs’ ears, but that also works great for other things, like making wire rabbit cages.

If there is such a thing as a master’s degree in construction and repair, I have earned one since I moved here. My library on the subject is probably worth half as much as all of these tools I’ve bought.

A year after we moved here, we got two feet of snow in one storm. That was all it took to completely collapse our deck in the front. And that was all I needed to start working on my postgraduate degree—I certainly wasn’t going to spend thousands of dollars for someone else to make the new deck.

So I started hitting the books. After clearing that old deck away, I set out learning step-by-step what I had to do to replace it. To my dismay, I learned that this type of deck was the most technically demanding—going 14 feet from a concrete retaining wall to the house with no supporting posts. I also learned that whoever had built the old one had violated just about every code you can imagine for building one of these freestanding decks, and that’s why it fell down. The stringers were too small to hold the weight across such an expanse, and the joists that held them to the wall and the house had been nailed in instead of being fastened with anchors and bolts, which required reinforcing the house on one side and drilling a multitude of holes through solid concrete and placing anchors on the other. To make a long story short, after many hours of study, drilling scores of holes into concrete, cutting up my house and strengthening the wall at my kitchen floor, I spent nearly a year and probably about half of what it would have cost someone else to do it. But it’s beautiful, it barely creaks, I feel proud every time I walk on it, and now I have lots more tools and books.

There is not only expense and time involved in doing this work—there is also danger. One thing I’ve learned with all of this outdoor work here—yellow jackets completely leave you alone while you’re working outside until you’re 10 feet up a ladder with a running chainsaw or hammer drill, and then they go after you. I don’t know whether it’s the buzzing of the machinery that draws them, or perhaps they’re just inherently evil. So you balance on the ladder with your feet and no hands, hold the running tool in one hand and wildly fight off the bee with the other hand. Sometimes I think the human brain doesn’t work right. It’s funny how you’ll choose to risk cutting your leg off at the knee with a chainsaw or puncturing your lung with a hammer drill rather than getting stung by a hornet.

Lately I’ve also learned to be a lumberjack, mostly from [we hope] reliable sources on the Internet. Again, the brain doesn’t work right. You’d rather risk your life felling trees than pay somebody who knows better a thousand bucks to do it. So far I’ve been lucky—two giant trees down with no property damage to my neighbor’s place, where they’re falling, and no accidental death or dismemberment for me. Only four more trees to go. Perhaps I should check my insurance policy to see whether my insurer considers such stunts to be “accidental.”

Another thing my AD&D insurer would probably wince at is my twice-yearly ritual of cleaning the pine needles off of the roof. I have a downslope house, so the front side is no problem—I boldly strut from place to place sweeping the needles off the edge, bravely waving at passersby on the road. That’s because it’s only a 10-foot drop in the front. Luckily, nobody has a view of the cringing coward on the backside, anchored on his substantial rump or lying down on his yellow belly to sweep the last remnants off of the edge. When those needles fall of the backside, they take a long time to travel those 60 feet to the ground, and that isn’t ever going to be me if I can help it.

Since I have been here I have sponge-painted over brown paneling using five different colors in my living room, and then I have taken the same colors, reversed them and sponge-painted the adjoining kitchen. I created a built-in red oak desk in the living room that serves as my wife’s office and used two doors of an old gun cabinet in the family room to make a built-in bookcase in my office. I have dug up an old cheesy 1970s linoleum floor in my master bathroom and replaced it with ceramic tile, and I even had the courage to take the toilet completely out to do it, with the full confidence that it would work correctly after I put it back in. Sometimes when I’m in there, I just have to spend a little time extra time sitting there admiring my handiwork.