I spent about 10 years living on a hobby farm. Living there taught me a lot of things: the difference between time and calendars, how to be carried by nature instead of getting run over trying to control it, what hard work looks like, what community looks like… and sooooo much home maintenance. Stuff wears out in older houses and needs to be replaced. That is generally true of most houses. But when farmers have been responsible for previous work, it can… er… alter the maintenance schedule. Some farmers over-engineer everything. Things they build can withstand tornadoes, monsoons, nuclear blasts… but heaven help you if you ever want to remodel. Other farmers have misplaced confidence in their abilities as – or little regard for – electricians, plumbers, carpenters, roofers, etc. Their work is always a moment away from catastrophe.
My farm house was 90 years old when I moved into it. Most of it was 90 years old anyway. Sections of it were newer – having expanded along with growing families who had occupied it previously. According to the abstract, the current house had been built half a century after the original homestead claim, which had changed hands numerous times before this house went up (it had been part of the Land O Lakes cooperative for a while). And then the property changed hands several more times before I got there. However, it experienced a long period of stability, occupied by same family for more than five decades immediately before me. In that time, it had been passed down only once, from the original patriarch to his son. That son had continued to operate it as a working dairy until his body couldn’t do it any longer, which was sadly a much shorter time than his father had done it. He couldn’t have been more than 50 when he lost his life to one of the chronic and painful neurological diseases that so disproportionately affect people who routinely handle herbicides and pesticides. His widow, never having been interested in farming, sold the parts that weren’t making money (i.e., the 10% of the original homestead that had the house and trees and outbuildings and stuff on it) and moved into town. The rest belonged to an LLC that had long held most of the actual farming assets and which, as far as I know, continues to derive income by leasing the land to larger agribusiness operations.
It’s a very common story. The families that managed to keep their farms afloat through the crisis created by Regan-era policies either expanded by swallowing up those that didn’t survive, or took on additional day jobs to support their farming habit. For farmers who did the former, only the tiniest fraction of a percent of the tens of millions of dollars that pass through their hands each year makes it into their own wallets. Most of the farms that took the latter route eventually ceased production because of the untimely death of the person who did most of the work, or because none of their kids fancied the exhausting hours – or both. There aren’t many family farms left in the US. Not in the part of the country where I lived anyway. And while that made for an affordable farmstead for me, it also meant the ghost of the community that used to be was visible in abandoned farmhouses, half-collapsed barns, and shelter belts protecting little more than old rock piles scattered along the county roads.
In any case, prior to my arrival, the farm had had an over-engineering owner, followed by one who half-assed things. So there were plenty of things that needed to be fixed – but they were usually hanging from structures you would need a pyrotechnics team to move. That actually made a lot of the repairs easier to accomplish, because I could easily see the leaky pipes, the wiring that was on the verge of starting a fire, and the stream of water that would cascade down inside of one wall during rainstorms because the roof had been installed so incompetently. It added a layer of complication to some redecorating decisions though. Most of the prior aesthetic decisions in the house seemed to have been the convergence of a pathological fear of the overwhelming intensity of colors (like beige) with a firm conviction that oak was the height of sophistication. It was a cacophony of blandness and high gloss – of oppressively straight lines and chaotically swirling grain. But much of it was FIRMLY in place, so updating it tended to be a big undertaking.
Fixing the roof was my first major project. I replaced the whole roof over the mudroom. And when I say I replaced the whole roof, I mean the whole roof. I didn’t just put new shingles on. I tore the rook off the sucker. Sheathing. Rafters. Everything. I had no intention of just putting duct tape on the problem. The pitch of the roof needed to be changed slightly to eliminate the point where 3 different roof sections converged and funneled water into the structure (hence the interior waterfall feature). That meant tearing it down to the ceiling joists and completely replacing all of the rafters. Obviously, that meant it got all new sheathing too – OSB panels this time, instead of the old 1-by boards that left hundreds of seams and knot-holes as weak points in the roof. I also added about 16 inches to another roof section where the eaves had been inexplicably removed. And I took the opportunity to try using metal roofing, to see if I liked it (I thought I might want to put it on the rest of the house too, eventually). It was a big job – the biggest I had undertaken to that point by myself.
I wasn’t completely green. I had helped friends and relatives install sheathing and singles and I had built roofs as parts of smaller structures, like sheds. So I knew what needed to be done. Also, I wasn’t trying to tackle the entire roof. It was just a 16(ish)’ x 25(ish)’ section of roof over the mudroom. So it was manageable. But it was MY house, and I wanted it to be right.
I did a bunch of homework beforehand to determine the expected snow loads – so I could decide exactly what dimensional lumber to use and how the rafter spacings would work (it was a rural area, so there was no oversight by local governments). I had calculated extensively to convince myself how much material I needed to buy. I didn’t want to end up racing to Menards to pick up missing materials while a rainstorm was bearing down. So I had everything ready to go before I made the first cut.
It was a shit ton of work and it took several days. But I got it done and I was proud of it. The metal roofing looked great. Also, after seeing how it performed for 7 years or so I can confidently say I was the over-engineering farmer on that project.
He was a good friend, so he nodded along and asked questions and sounded impressed as I went on about the minutia of replacing the roof. When I had finished he said “we are going to put a sliding glass door in our dining room, so it is more convenient to get to the back yard.” Then it was my turn to nod and ask questions and sound impressed. After he finished telling me what they had planned, I said “let me know if you want me to come over and lend a hand.”
That was mostly a genuine, friendly offer of help. I enjoy doing that sort of thing. And after the roofing project, I had all the necessary tools. It was another job I hadn’t done myself, but I had seen it done and was confident I could do it competently.
Truth-be-told, I was also a little concerned for my friend, because I didn’t really believe he could do it. I knew him to be fairly fearless about trying new things. He did have the temperament and tenacity to figure it out. Like me, being a little too naive about the things he jumped into was a major reason he wasn’t daunted by things that scare other people away. It can be a good way to learn to do difficult things: to be past the point of no return before you figure out that it was a scary thing to start. Even so, I thought he was in over his head cutting a giant hole in the side of his house – and that he might do serious damage. I also knew enough about his other friends to know none of them were going to be of help. So part of my offer to help was an intervention.
“Oh, we’re doing it this afternoon” he said.
I looked at my watch. It was 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon already. I tried not to let the panic show on my face.
“Like… when you get home…?” I asked, frowning.
Now I was really worried about him. He must have seen a thing on YouTube that made it look easy. Experts do make it look easy, because it is for them. A professional carpenter could surely frame in a new door as an afternoon project. But not a weekend tinkerer. You would have to have all the right tools, and exactly the right materials (i.e., no emergency trips back to Menards to get something you forgot), and you would have to be so practiced at all of the steps involved that you could just do all the things without having to take time to think about any of them. Even then, 3:00pm on a sunday afternoon would still be awfully late to get started. In my mind, I was already canceling whatever plans I had for the rest of the day, so I could help him through the mess he didn’t know he had gotten himself into. My brain was in triage mode, thinking through logical stopping points in the project for when it inevitably got to be too late to finish that night, figuring out how to secure the house once there was a 50 square-foot hole in it, planning for the possibility of rain…
“No it’s getting installed right now” he said.
“………” I blinked.
Wtf? I had been having a perfectly normal conversation, but suddenly I had lost the thread. My brain could not make sense of that last statement. It was actually disorienting enough that I was suddenly aware of the effort of maintaining balance. It was like my body had been been abandoned to look after itself as my brain sailed through the air like Wile E. Coyote, trying to process why he could no longer feel the ground under his feet.
And then I smacked into the side of the cliff.
“The workmen are at the house right now, installing the door.”
Oooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… When he said “we are installing a sliding glass door” he meant it in the HGTV sense. He meant he had decided he wanted a door – and hired someone capable to do it.
Here, I had been telling him “I replaced the roof”, meaning the same two hands I was using to point to the roof and gesture while I nattered about it were the ones that had done the work. And he had responded with “I am installing a door” meaning his hands would just do the pointing (i.e., to the spot the door should go) and then a different set of hands would actually make it happen. (Come to think of it, I wonder if he thought I meant I hired the roof work done.)
A subtle linguistic change has happened in the past couple of decades. Not so long ago, I think people would have said something like ‘we are having a sliding glass door put in.’ That is not just a more accurate way to describe the situation. It also acknowledges the skill and competence of the person who does the work. But the proliferation of remodeling shows on cable networks seems to have made it trendy for designers to speak like a billionaire who talks about how many building he has “built” when it is clear his hands have never been in the same room with, let alone touched, a construction tool.
The difference between ‘we are having it done’ and ‘we are doing it’ is fairly profound in terms of agency. To say ‘I am having a thing done’ is to claim decision making autonomy. It also implies the competence of another person is required to accomplish the thing I decided. To say ‘I am doing a thing’ is to claim agency to act on your own decisions.
I don’t mean to be merely pedantic about this. I am not just complaining about linguistic inaccuracy. I mean, it is true that if someone else is doing the actual work, it is more accurate to say ‘I am having a thing done.’ But far more importantly, to say ‘I am doing a thing’ when you really mean ‘I am having a thing done’ renders the person doing the work invisible. It is a way of dismissing their competence. It insinuates that the decision is all that is really important. It is a claim that the labor is irrelevant. That is a broader societal shift that has been taking place for at least 140 years – since FW Taylor agitated for the management class to commandeer autonomy from laboring classes.
Or maybe it dates to Descarte, as Toulmin suggests, and his abandoning of reasonableness in his obsession with rationality. Or maybe it is all Aristotle’s fault. That is where Pirsig points the finger as the genesis of our present tendency to prioritize think-y stuff over technical skill. There is a long tradition, in the west, of dudes assuming the work they did in their heads was superior to work of the hands. Dudes who mistakenly thought that, because they had read a thing, they understood it.
I see it other places too. I know people who refuse to learn how tools and equipment they use regularly (snowblowers, lawn mowers, bicycles, etc.) work, because they think it is beneath them. I know people who take pride in not understating anything about their vehicles – the ones for whom the absence of a dipstick is a “feature”. It seems to me like an odd form of elitism: taking pride in incompetence. I don’t mean to insinuate there is higher virtue in changing your own oil or installing your own doors, or understanding how an engine works. We don’t have time to know all of the things. We need to depend on other people for most of them. However, it is one thing to say ‘I would rather pay someone else for their competence in doing that thing, so I can preserve my time for doing the things people in my community rely on me to do.’ It is a very different matter to say ‘that is the sort of work I pay other people to do because it is not worthy of my consideration.’
To be clear, I do not mean to say my friend was an elitist douchebag. On the contrary, he is an extraordinarily kind, generous, and respectful human being. He wasn’t intentionally being dismissive of the workmen at his house (or me). But even he had fallen into this linguistic pattern that makes people who work with their hands invisible.
That’s the tricky thing about language. We don’t just use it to tell other people what we mean. With the way we use it, we tell ourselves what we mean. If we say a thing enough, we start to believe it. This trend that started with people having their houses remodeled on cable-TV shows saying ‘we did this thing to our house’, when they really had just decided to have someone else do it for them, has become a commonplace way to talk about home improvement. And the people who do the actual work – people who have historically been underpaid for their skill – have become less-and-less visible.
Just for the record, if I say “I installed a dishwasher in my kitchen” or “I moved my sink” or “I did some landscaping in my yard”, I mean my hands did the work (and probably overdid it a bit). If I hire someone else to do something, like installing a new septic drainfield, I will say so. Because I think they deserve the credit for their labor as well as their expertise.