Doors
While we worked on other things for a couple of years, we came and went through these sad looking doors, occasionally stopping to assert that ‘we really should do these soon’ in tones less and less urgent as the scope of the project we’d taken on became clearer.
When we bought the house the doors were really our last concern.
I took the heat gun to the doors with the sounds of daily covid press conferences in my ears, carving layers of softened paint from the wood in long fingernail-like curls
Anyway, right around the time of the first lockdown in NYC we finally were ready. I took the heat gun to the doors with the sounds of daily covid press conferences in my ears, carving layers of softened paint from the wood in long fingernail-like curls, waving from the top of the stoop at the neighbors who still had to go to work, their faces swaddled in improvised masks.
Sure, their surface was bubbled thickly with black paint, but at least they worked—ish, and once we found a few hours to reset their hinges with new ones, they really did work enough. We had more important things to attend to, like the lack of functional plumbing (much more on that, surely, coming later) or the rat pancaked under the downstairs bath tub.
After sanding, starting to coat with varathane.
Applying varathane.
So while we worked on other things for a couple of years, we came and went through these sad looking doors, occasionally stopping to assert that ‘we really should do these soon’ in tones less and less urgent as the scope of the project we’d taken on became clearer.
Fully coated.
At the time we had a nurse from Arizona staying in our ground floor unit. He had travelled to NYC just to help out, and was stationed at the city hospital a few blocks from us. He’d be coming or going, and we’d have a shouted conversation: do they have enough masks for you? he shook his head. No, we have the one, he told me, and we keep it in a ziplock with our name on it.
There were a few preexisting elements which I knew I wanted to preserve.
Other times he could only manage a few words: It’s crazy, he’d say, I’ve never seen anything like it, and I could see he was ready to cry. The whole time he was here I cannot recall that he had more than one day off, until sometime in the spring, with no notice, he and other out of state nurses were abruptly told to go home.
The whole thing has taken on a dream-like cast now, another horror unfolding, as it so often does in New York City, against the backdrop of blisteringly blue skies. Looking at these pictures of the doors, even the ones of them all finished and smiling in their shiny brass boots, brings it all back.
The whole thing has taken on a dream-like cast now.
Looking at these pictures of the doors, even the ones of them all finished and smiling in their shiny brass boots, brings it all back.