How a pull-up bar became a surfboard. (If you have an old house, you’ll understand.
SOMEWHERE THERE IS a world where homes are well-made, predictable, and built to code. You can imagine such a place. Framing lumber is 16 on center. Kitchen cabinets don’t open and interfere with adjacent kitchen cabinets. Back doors don’t stick. Showers don’t leak.
We don’t live in this world. For two of my sons, Mick and Willie, discovering this took nothing more than trying to install a pull-up bar.
Like many stories of minor disasters, this one begins with Christmas shopping. Late one fall, when Mick was 15 and Willie was 11, I was wondering what I might give them for the holidays. Mick had a job at a local surf shop’s beach truck, as a board stacker and surf instructor. He was at an age where he was growing fast and wanted to develop upper body strength to keep up with his rising height.
A pull-up bar seemed just the thing. I checked online and found a sturdy, multi-grip bar with knurled handles. Made for a ceiling installation, its mounting brackets were designed to fasten to joists 48 inches apart. This looked easy enough. Add four lag screws and a few minutes of crew muscle and the bar would be in place. Standard stuff.
I ordered the bar and hid it in a shed until Christmas Eve, when I put it under the tree. I figured assembly and installation would be a one-hour job the next day. Maybe an hour and a half, tops.
Our house, in a former New England mill and farming town, was built circa 1910. In its original form it was compact and laid out simply. As the town evolved into a bedroom community, a previous owner built a two-story rectangular addition off the back. Roughly 15 feet by 22 feet, the addition gave the small house a fourth bedroom upstairs and an eat-in kitchen down.
This story is from the April 2019 edition of Popular Mechanics.
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This story is from the April 2019 edition of Popular Mechanics.
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