Oh What Have We Gotten Ourselves Into?
"I got the house, I got the house, I can't believe it, I got the house. They even lowered the asking price to below my original offer in light of the furnace and water heater being missing. That inspector friend of Cap's was right when he said they were in a hurry to unload the places." Marco was surprised, shocked, scared, excited, and at least a dozen more feelings he wasn't sure he recognized yet. He was also breathing just a little fast.
"Hey there, buddy, you better slow your breathing down a little or I'm going to have to call a squad out for you." Chet smiled at his friend's side.
Marco forced himself to hold his breath for a few seconds as he focused on getting himself calmed down. That's when Chet noticed that his friend's expression instantly changed in the opposite direction from what it had been.
"Oh, Man," Marco put his face in his hands. "I've still got to find a place to live, I won't be able to start working on the house for nearly a month and it's going to take me that long again to get the place livable."
Just then Chet's eyes and mouth opened wide and his face lost all color as he slid into the empty chair next to Marco. "I didn't think about that," Chet exclaimed and then turned his shocked eyes toward his now puzzled and concerned friend. "I put my thirty day notice in on this place this morning as soon as I got home."
-0-
Marco reported for his overtime assignment the next morning. He and Chet had talked things over and figured out that Marco could move back in with his mother for the short time it would take him to fix the house up enough to move into it. He had already agreed to cover for the injured man on C shift until he returned and that was expected to be six weeks. By then he would hopefully have at least have the bathroom up and running so that he could shower. He considered borrowing his uncle's camper and camping out in the back yard for a week or two if he needed to.
Chet had checked in with his sister and she would allow him to crash on the sofa for a short time. She was excited for her brother and the two of them were talking about her renting the other half of his duplex once he got it fixed up.
Matt and Marco talked about the house while they mopped the bay floor together. Later that evening Matt gave his uncle a call and got a price on a new furnace, air conditioner and water heater. Marco was given a quote to install them using Marco as slave labor to get the job done and Marco was pleasantly surprised. Matt left the next morning promising to bring in a bunch of magazines full of remodeling and decorating ideas.
By the time A-shift was all in uniform they knew that the three crewmates were purchasing their first homes. Johnny had managed to come up with a counter-offer to the counter-offer that was accepted and he had announced it to Roy in the parking lot when they both arrived at work.
Between shifts Marco gave his Uncle Juan a call and talked to him about the landscaping. He had long ago learned that the right equipment made a world of difference in how fast a job could get done.
Even though they didn't have possession of the properties yet, Uncle Juan was able to get on site long enough to get the measurements and layout of the yard enough to design sprinkler systems for each yard.
Chet had managed to get copies of the original blue prints for each of the houses and it was quickly discovered that both Chet's and Marco's houses had been remolded before. The rest of their crew mates, for Marco, two sets of crew mates, brought in magazines every week for them to look over and get ideas and plans were beginning to come together.
At last the day they thought would never come, arrived, and three men were sitting in three different offices in three different parts of town over a two day period and each man left those offices with a set of keys in their hands.
It was learned at their closings that part of the reason the family had been eager to sell was that there were citations filed on the properties to get them to clean up the yards and houses. Each man was informed that they had ninety days to get the yards cleaned up and fences fixed up. Each man had a shorter time frame than that in mind, so they weren't worried.
The night he took possession of the house Marco visited with each of his next door neighbors, telling them about the work he was planning to do on the fence lines and informing them of the need to take the fences down for a short period of time. The neighbor to the north was an elderly widow who was worried about her prized rose garden, planted for her by her late husband. Marco followed her out to have a look at it and found it slightly over grown and in need of trimming but the one tree that desperately needed to come out would likely cause problems. Marco talked with the family living to the south of him to get their blessings and then returned to the widow next door to carefully dig up her cherished rose bushes and set them aside in burlap sacks to be replanted as soon as the tree was removed.
The next morning early, all of the guys from Station 51 plus a few other friends, arrived at Marco's new house. Both Johnny and Roy brought ropes and climbing harnesses and Roy and Cap each brought a chain saw. Chet brought a truck and trailer with a small backhoe on it. The men were just about to start climbing the tree when two large trucks pulled up followed by a van filled with several of Marco's relatives. There were at least thirty people on site ready to work.
John, Roy and Mike made use of a ladder on one of the trucks and were soon secured in the tree with ropes as Cap helped to tie off the chain saws that were then pulled up into the tree and the limbs started falling. Marco was going to let his uncle the landscaper deal with the other tree so that it would be properly shaped and cut back for the best future growth but the one that needed to come down he was more than willing to let his friends at the station have at it. Cap's main jobs was to do what he does best and orchestrate the activities in the tree while making sure the accumulating bystanders stayed back far enough to assure then didn't get hurt by a falling limb.
Chet was driving the back hoe and made short work of pulling all of the smaller weed trees as well as several of the overgrown and dying bushes out of the ground by their roots. All of this was loaded on the larger dump truck with the exception of what Uncle Juan thought was buried treasure. Unearthed with the weed trees was a large section of flower bulbs, long overdue to be divided but still very viable. Those were placed in a basket to be sorted out later. Several of Marco's relatives picked up pick axes and started beating them into the ground to loosen up the soil while others shoveled wheelbarrows of strong smelling manure and spread it around the yard to be mixed in using the pick axes. Once the removal was done men went to work digging holes for the new fence posts while others dug the trenches for the sprinkling system.
It was just after noon when they reached a good stopping point and Mama Lopez, with her daughter and daughter-in-law, arrived with lunch for everyone. After lunch the party moved to Johnny's house and then to Chet's. By late evening all three yards were cleared, and automatic sprinkler systems were laid and tested. After dark Marco was found working by flashlight to replant his neighbor's cherished Rose bushes, using copious amounts of the smelly manure to give them all a good start in their new planting.
When that job was done he nearly collapsed into a mound of softened dirt and slept till the first rays of daylight were seen.
Not wanting to wake his neighbors Marco took on the relatively quiet task of laying the framework for the new drive way and side walk before the rest of the crew arrived to install the new chain link fence. When he noticed his neighbors were awake, Marco took advantage of the fence being down to repair the side of the garage and applied two coats of paint.
Uncle Juan arrived with a truck load of flagstone he had been paid to remove from another home in a richer area so he could lay a brick patio. Marco was more than happy to have a flagstone patio put down especially when the stones were free to him. Uncle Juan also came with a large garbage can filled with moss that had been removed from another site and while he was expertly trimming the second tree, Marco directed the laying of his new patio and working moss around each of the placed stones. Part of the crew started at Chet's place with a large dump truck as carpeting was pulled up and any garbage in the houses was pulled out. They then moved to Johnny's house and did the same, ending up at Marco's house to gather the moldy carpet and old drapes that had been hauled out to the curb.
With the work load being lighter now and not as many pieces of big machinery in use, the neighborhood was starting to come out to introduce themselves and get acquainted with their new neighbor. Marco was quick to notice that most of the people first approached John, Chet or Cap to introduce themselves to.
Marco listened in as Johnny fielded questions from the lady with the roses.
"Are you the one who's going to be my new neighbor?" the woman asked.
"No ma'am," Johnny spoke respectfully as he paused from throwing carpeting and carpet pad into the dump truck. "I'm just helping out; your new neighbor is over there." John pointed to the group working to cover up the sprinkler system and get the area ready for planting. That group consisted of Marco, Cap and Roy, and John was sure the woman would be looking at Cap and Roy as her new neighbor but he took the opportunity to try and build up Marco before she noticed the color of his skin.
"Most of us here are firemen and we work together, I work at the same station with Marco and we're all helping each other out on our days off."
"Oooh," the woman was positively excited. "You mean the person who is moving in next door to me is a fireman, a real honest to goodness fireman?"
"Yes ma'am." Johnny smiled noticing the hero worship in the woman's voice.
"Well, no wonder you're all so big and strong," the woman positively cooed and even though she never touched Johnny he could feel her eyes running over his biceps. Too bad she wasn't a few decades younger.
"I sure hope he pays his gardener well. Did you know that man was in my back yard till nearly midnight replanting my husband's roses? Oh, and he took such special care to make sure they didn't get damaged by the work you're all doing here. And he even put in some extra special soil around their roots and did such a beautiful job."
"Yeah, that sounds like something Marco would do." Johnny commented knowing full well the lady had no idea who was moving in but hoped she'd warm up to her new neighbor.
With most of the heavy work done most of the guys moved over to Johnny's house to help him plant his grass and fill a couple of flower beds with the bulbs Uncle Juan had sorted out. John planned to pick up some annuals and plant them on his next day off so that the outside of the house would look showy even before the inside was finished. Before he went back to his apartment John stopped by to collect Marco.
"Hey, Marco, why don't you come home with me tonight? You'll get a lot better sleep on my fold out arm chair than you will on your mom's sofa and we both know you need a good night's sleep before you go on shift tomorrow." It was obvious that Marco had been living out of his truck and John was sure the tarp near the back of the house was where he planned to hide from the neighbors while he showered in the hose sometime after dark. John wanted to do more for his friend.
Just then a truck pulled up and John recognized Matt from C shift as one of the men that got out.
"John, I'd love to take you up on the offer but I really need to spend some time with these guys showing them where the new furnace and water heater goes so they can put them in while I'm on shift the next two days."
"That's okay, I'll wait." John noticed that Marco was extremely tired and he was afraid if he didn't wait for him that he'd just fall down on the ground somewhere and sleep for the night. He also knew that his new neighbors would not be pleased to find out he was camping on site before he got his house ready to move in.
Once Marco walked through the house pointing out where the water heater, furnace and air conditioner were to go and the wall that he wanted taken out and handing over a set of keys to his Matt and his Uncle whom he'd hired to do some of the work on the house while he was on duty. Marco gratefully followed John home.
John was quick to notice by the sound of the water in the shower being turned on then off and on again that Marco got good and wet then turned the water off and soaped up and scrubbed down good before turning the water back on to rinse off. John suspected he had been doing that a lot and had visions of a bag of water warmed in the sun as being his limit for a shower. Knowing how tired Marco was, John took the time he was in the shower to pull out the armchair bed and throw some clean sheets on it. He was just putting a fresh pillow case on an extra pillow when Marco came out of the bathroom wearing clean boxers and a t-shirt.
"Thanks, John, I really appreciate this." Marco stuffed his dirty clothes in the laundry bag that he carried in with his duffel bag before he sat down on the made up bed and nearly fell over.
"Hey, why don't you just stay here until your house is ready to move into," Johnny suggested but it was too late, Marco was already sound asleep.
Johnny threw a sheet over his friend and turned out the lights hoping his neighbors would be quiet tonight. They weren't, but Marco never noticed.