View from the North 40: It's all shabby without the chic

It’s hard to pretty up a home when you have all the decorating instincts of an average sixth-grader. I have countered this lack of style savvy, though, with all the ambition and focus of that sixth-grader’s twin.

Given the state of my character, and the fact that I am sitting here in the deteriorating wasteland of our old trailer house, while we whittle away at finishing building our new home – which is going slowly largely because “design decisions are haaaaaard,” as I like to whine – I am bemused as to why the website Houzz.com has emailed a request for my opinion on home improvement and design.

Houzz is a vast resource for building and remodeling with everything from ideas for the finished look for every room in your house to items to buy, where to find a contractor and help with floor plans. It’s all very shiny.

I don’t fit in.

Even the photos of their “Rustic” style décor show a polished look with any visible patina artfully applied under the direction of a skilled artisan. And I’m here all, “Hey, dudes, you need a little rust and a few tics to your rustic.”

Their “barn wood” accents look like someone took brand new lumber and distressed it with some rocks and a bit of an acid bath or something to bring out some grays. They want to know how I’m saving money on our project, and I’m over here pointing to a stack of old, dry and slightly brittle boards I actually took off an old barn. The layers of dust and flecks of dry horse manure came with it for free.

You have to admit, that’s some smart shopping. Right?

The email the company sent is encouraging me to take their survey about trends in home improvement.

The problem here is that A) I wouldn’t know something was trendy if I had to write the check for it. B) the new home is not finished so we haven’t made any improvements on that one. And C) the old home has been a real trooper to last this long – it owes us nothing – but it’s barely surviving and will be humanely destroyed after we move out, so I’ll be darned if I put money into improving it.

We’re more shabby sans-chic here right now.

I’m disappointed that I have nothing to contribute to the survey – unless they want to know about my home-improvised emergency indoor rain gutter system.

With the barest skiff of snow melting on our trailer house roof in late winter, I started hearing a dripping noise in the living room. What I thought was going to be a single drip proving that I didn’t get the leak fixed after all last fall, turned out to be a bigger problem. I had water dripping – occasionally streaming – from the seam where the open beam peak meets the flat roof.

The sustained high winds and gusts we had mid-January that reached about 80 mph in our wind tunnel location apparently flexed our roof so much that the seal popped completely loose on the roof in one area. There will be no repairing it until the temps get high enough for tar to stick.

With more snow melt drips than I had bowls and pans to contain, I grabbed scissors, some visqueen and a staple gun, and I took care of the problem my way. I cut a couple 18-inch wide strips of the plastic sheeting, and with nothing more than a pretty good idea, my keen ingenuity and the staple gun, I fashioned those strips of plastic into a rain gutter with a spout that drained into a five gallon, easy to empty bucket.

No fuss, no muss, no designer shine, no company allowed in my houzz until the roof is fixed.

Still, I’m thinking of sharing that little gem with the Houzz folks, I mean, they are looking for trends in home improvement. Maybe I could patent the design, by adding some support ribs and making it the pop-up-tent version of indoor rain gutters, sold exclusively at their web-store.

I may just be brilliant – shabby brilliant.

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I also want a chain hoist to lift things like the laundry basket from the ground floor to the second level in the new home. It’s a remodeled shop – if it was a fire station remodeled into a house you’d keep the fire pole and take up pole dancing, right, at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com .