There hasn’t been much camping or backpacking this year, nor has there been much activity on this website. That’s because I’ve been stuck in an hourglass, or more precisely, I’ve been trying to dig myself out of debt. Not monetary debt, but trying to overcome a deficit in my time bank. I didn’t do anything wrong, the debt was planned – sort of – and now my time bank account has become overdrawn.

What is Time?

So how does one go into debt time-wise? Or, what the heck is time?

Shakespeare, in Sonnet 64, sees Time as a tyrant who will steal his love from him:

 When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced
 The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
 When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
 And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
 When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
 Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
 And the firm soil win of the watery main,
 Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
 When I have seen such interchange of state,
 Or state itself confounded to decay,
 Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
 That time will come and take my love away.
   This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
   But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

But in Sonnet 65, he tells Time that his poem, written in ink, will make her immortal.

 Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
 But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
 How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
 Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
 O how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
 Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,
 When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
 Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays?
 O fearful meditation! Where, alack,
 Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?
 Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
 Or who his spoil or beauty can forbid?
   O none, unless this miracle have might,
   That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

His love does die, but it is her memory that survives. Memory isn’t time; it is just a recollection of time past. St. Augustine wrote that the past and the future don’t exist and the present quickly becomes the past. So what is time?

Time isn’t eternal because it hasn’t always existed. If you believe in God, then Time didn’t exist until he created the heaven and earth – which begs the question, what was he doing before creation? If you believe in the Big Bang Theory, then there was no Time before that event. Should we destroy humanity in a nuclear war, will Time cease to exist because there will be no one around to measure it?

These are questions that have plagued poets, philosophers and scientists for time immemorial. It almost seems silly that I should be concerned with my petty time deficit or even share it. For me, Time is mostly a commodity to be saved, spent, or traded (e.g., a job where one trades their time and skills for money).

As I wrote in Managing Your Recreation Inventory and in The Retirement Time Bank, time is something you can spend and save just like money. It is similar to inventory in a store and each year most of us have at least 120 days a year we can spend camping or backpacking if we just take the time to do it. The only problem is we don’t know how much time we have. If we put off too much in anticipation of doing it sometime in the future, we have no guarantee that will be alive at that future point in time. Given all of this, for the past 20 years or so, I have been spending most of my free time backpacking and camping creating a huge time deficit.

How I Created a Time Deficit and Why

This deficit is the time I could have spent remodeling and fixing our house, but I chose to put all of that off until the future. Now this wasn’t an impulse; it was planned. And I knew I would have to save some time (or divert some recreation time) for these household tasks to ensure domestic tranquility with my wife.

Some background on the house situation: in the ‘90s I had rented out the house and in 2000 a tenant pretty much destroyed the interior. Much too expensive to repair and make rentable, and I couldn’t take several months off of work to rehabilitate it. So I cleaned up the mess so I could live in it, which also required gutting the master bathroom, removing all the wall-to-wall carpeting leaving the bare cement slab, and I moved back into the house in June of 2000. In 2002 Joyce and I were married and the issue of living in a house in need of extensive work came up.

Most people would have refinanced their house, pulling out equity to do a remodel. A couple problems with this – (1) monthly payments to pay back the borrowed money, (2) PLUS paying interest on the loan. A smart person would put it off, invest that monthly payment earning interest AND/OR dividends, let the money grow, retire, then do the work oneself saving more than half what it would cost to pay someone to do the work. Go back and re-read the sentence: this is how to build wealth – never pay anyone interest and invest your money to earn interest. Anyway, Joyce agreed it was the best plan and she has endured cement floors, no master bathroom, and other maladies for 17 years. And now it is time “to pay the piper.” 

No regrets or animosity on my part, I gave my word and am now living inside the hourglass of time deficit.

The sand in the bottom is all the time spent over the past 20 years or so camping and backpacking, the sand in the top is the time I need to complete our house, and the middle is me writing this post right now, which will be the past when you read this.

Assuming no huge unexpected problems and assuming I will not die right away, most of the work will be completed by sometime this summer.  Joyce will be happy and I will be happy because 

Happy Wife = Happy Life

To be honest, I enjoy the work. But I would kinda like to spread it out over a few more years, but that wouldn’t be fair to my wife. So every day I put on my “contractors” hat and go to work.

Challenges

Our house is forty years old and every new project phase brings new challenges. The work isn’t a challenge per se, but every phase of the work uncovers unexpected problems; problems often caused by poor workmanship when our house was built. Sometimes I create my own problems by taking on complex tasks that aren’t particularly necessary. Most of the time I like the challenges and sometimes they become very frustrating. Here is some of the work we have completed

Fireplace

We actually did this a little over a year ago. We had this awful small tile around the fireplace about half-way up the wall. We removed it and the small patch of matching tile on the floor. We tiled the entire wall plus the adjoining wall on the left with 18” square porcelain tile.

I removed the gas log and burner replacing them with glass fire-rock and a new burner designed to work with the glass rock. I fabricated a new fireplace door with screens and painted inside walls and the door hardware with heat-resistant black paint.

Plywood Ceiling

This project took several months. Back in 2000 I removed one of the bedrooms, turning it into a dining room. This entailed removing interior walls and closets and installing sections of drywall in the ceiling where the wall framing had connected to the rafters. In addition, we scrapped off all the old “popcorn” ceiling texture. At this point we had a couple options. One was to spray orange peel or knock-down texture on the living room and dining room ceilings – a messy job especially since we have over 800 square feet of ceiling in the two rooms. Then I came up with the idea of installing hardwood plywood on the ceiling. Texturing the ceiling would have taken a couple of days. Installing 26 birch plywood panels (4’ X 8’) took several months. 

There was only enough space in the garage to prepare four panels at a time. Each panel was stained with golden pecan stain, and then four to five coats of polyurethane was applied. Each sheet was sanded with 320 grit sandpaper between coats. 

To install the panels I screwed furring strips to the rafters, leaving the old drywall in place. Removing the drywall would have been a monumental task, plus the entire sprayed-in attic insulation would have fallen down into the house.

Years ago I installed 32 recessed light fixtures in the ceiling, plus four ceiling fans. Add three air conditioning vents in the ceiling and it was quite the planning exercise to layout the ceiling without any lights, fans, or vents on the seam between two panel edges and at the same time avoiding small slivers of plywood at the edges where the ceiling meets the walls. As it turned out, just one ceiling fan is on a seam, everything else fit without sitting on a seam.

We painted the furring strips flat black and attached the panels to the strips with a pneumatic nail gun and construction adhesive. There is a ¼” reveal (gap) along every edge of the plywood. It might be hard to imagine, but think of an elevator where the wood panels don’t butt up to each other. This is the look we wanted and achieved.

Lifting all the panels up and keeping the edges at ¼” spacing would have been impossible without a drywall lift. Given that it took a week to stain and finish a batch of four panels (about two months total), it was much cheaper to just buy a drywall lift than rent one. Of course, Amazon was our friend!

Because the finished panels are so glossy, it is difficult to photograph because of the reflections, but it person it doesn’t seem so reflective.