Spending time with pals best part of renos
Helping a friend demolish a deck is the closest thing to playing for adult men
I’d never felt so relaxed in the midst of a renovation.
Sure, the deck was being demolished, we weren’t sure what we’d find underneath and the work had to be completed that weekend or the deck builders wouldn’t be able to start on schedule.
But this wasn’t my house. It belongs to my childhood friend Karl.
He had organized a small team — his brother, another friend and me — to help fill his dumpster with splintered deck boards. He would have to decide how to remove the poured concrete we discovered below the boards.
All I had to worry about was whether or not Karl had stocked enough beer for post-demolition drinks.
After nearly a year of doing renovations at my own east Toronto home, I still don’t particularly enjoy spending my spare time trying to fix things through trial, error and YouTube. But I have enjoyed the opportunity to hang out with good people that the projects provide. Especially since, now firmly entrenched in my #adulting years, those opportunities are scarce.
Matt is grateful for the friends who are just eager to lend a hand
For instance, as kids, Karl and I played baseball and basketball in the summer and built snow forts in the winter.
Now, through coincidence and circumstance (that is, we couldn’t afford to buy a house elsewhere in Toronto) we live just a 10-minute walk from each other. Yet I doubt we would see each other as often as we do if not for one of us seeming to always have a project on the go.
I guess the closest thing to “play” for adult men, short of beer league softball and pickup hockey, is home renovations.
Except there’s a lot at stake in this game, which makes me grateful for the friends who either know more than I do or are just eager to lend a hand.
If not for my discovery of a mysterious crack in my ceiling, a year likely would have passed before I next saw my cousin Tim, a veteran DIY-er with experience repairing walls and ceilings. Instead, we spent half-adozen weekends catching up and sharing stories, while working to- ward hanging drywall in my living and dining room.
I’m sure that by the second weekend he was wishing he hadn’t responded to my Facebook messages. But we were all smiling a couple of months later when my wife and I were able to host Tim, his wife and their daughter for dinner in the dining room he’d helped me renovate.
So, I was smiling wide as I took baseball-style swings with a sledgehammer at what had been Karl’s deck steps, not just because it was fun but because I was thinking of all the barbecues he’d be hosting next summer.
“Are you going to put in a hot tub?” I quipped between carrying cinder blocks and wood to the bin.
Meanwhile, Karl’s brother considered Karl’s plans to build a two-level deck and joked, “Have you thought about building a slide?”
Now, that’s what friends are for. Matthew Chung, 33, is a communications manager living in and attempting to renovate his first house in Toronto’s east end. You can follow his progress on Instagram @mjechung.