Lessons Learned by Tony Burton

Tony Burton has been writing poetry, fiction, and non-fiction for over fourteen years.  His published works include two cozy mystery novels, a collection of supernatural crime stories, and stories in seven anthologies, as well as short stories in Woman’s World magazine, Great Mystery and Suspense magazine, Reflection’s Edge ezine, Crime and Suspense ezine, and other venues. His articles on the craft of writing have been published in Writer’s Journal magazine and Reflection’s Edge.

He is also the CEO and chief editor of Wolfmont LLC, a small-press publishing company with three imprints: Wolfmont Press, Honey Locust Press, and Denouement Press.  He has a particular affinity for the short story form.

LESSONS LEARNED

by Tony Burton

I thought about writing about writing (no, that wasn’t a stutter), but good grief! Who really wants to hear another writer or publisher waxing rhapsodic about his or her struggles with pen and ink, or more likely, keyboard and electrons?

So, since Ms Kaye was so kind as to invite me to visit with her on her lovely blog, here are a few words of a different sort.

Like Kaye, we live out in the country, although a couple hundred miles south by southwest of her, in the Appalachian foothills of northwest Georgia. We love country living, and my wife Lara (who is a healthy-food nut and originally from northern Wisconsin) is enchanted with the long growing season here for veggies.  She and I are in the middle of a multi-year project to build a house that will suit our tastes and our needs for space… along with our budgetary requirements. We’re saving a bit of money by doing for ourselves anything that we are capable of doing, but it certainly slows things down.

Both of us have learned a few things about building, and about each other, in the process. Here are some of them:

If you are building a home on a concrete slab, be sure the guy who is pouring the slab knows how to read dimensions on a blueprint, and is familiar with the local building codes.

If you are not doing your own plumbing, be sure your plumber (a) also knows how to read a blueprint, and (b) is not drunk when he supervises the plumbing crew.

Once the drain pipes are set in the hardened concrete slab that weighs about 180 tons, you are not moving them to account for the mistakes made by the drunken plumber’s crew.

It is not easy to change house layout to accommodate a toilet drain that is six feet away from where the blueprint shows it should be.

The wife will be annoyed if the plumbing crew neglects to install a sink drain in the kitchen area.

Hired professionals, often aren’t.

No matter how flexible a spouse may claim to be about how things turn out, there are always a few things that he/she is adamant about… and usually it’s something the other spouse disagrees with.

If you need to do serious digging in the clay-and-shale hills of NW Georgia, you are not going to accomplish it with a shovel and mattock.

Pursuant to number 8 above, you also will not accomplish it with a DR Towable Backhoe, no matter how easy it looks on the DR website. It’s easier to simply hire Mr. Hooley (our local heavy equipment operator) to do it.

Tarps disintegrate in about a week under the stark UV rays of a summer Georgia sun.

No matter how much storage space you have, you always need more.

Dropping a bag of Portland cement on your foot, that has managed to get damp and harden because of your inadequate storage, hurts like heck.

When mixing your own concrete from scratch, be sure to check each shovelful of sand for sleeping toads or other creatures.

Of course, I have to say that I’m Divinely Blessed to have a wife who believes in buying the best tools we can afford. If I say I need some sort of tool to work on the house, her usual response is “Don’t go cheap! Get a good one!” It’s so nice not to have to justify spending money on a new chop-saw or a new drill. (I recently took a count, and we now possess eight drills.)

The downside of this, of course, is that I never have an excuse not to do something that needs doing, since I now have an assortment of tools that many professional contractors would envy. Now, if we can only get the house completed so I can move all the tools into the lovely new shop that will be behind the garage!

In the end, though, we have discovered that we often do just as good a job ourselves as the “professionals” can do, or better, and we take more care since we will be living here. Plus, we’re cheaper! And Lara really has that concrete recipe down to a science—she can whip up a batch of concrete from scratch in no time flat! Now, if we could just come up with a good recipe for healthy whole wheat biscuits….