The Milwaukee Sawzall Massacre
How a power tool taught me that everything gets worse before it gets better
Across the Hudson River from Beacon, midway up the valley rising above the Regal Bag Factory, on the corner of Montgomery and Broad Streets in Newburgh — a vibrant and recovering city lined with some of the most sublime architecture in the country — I was working among my crew on the mostly demo-ed first floor of the three-family that I’m renovating, when I picked up my Sawzall and focused in on my point of destruction: a line down the boards of my soon-to-be-former deck. I squeeze the trigger and its accelerating, wild action takes me back twenty-five years, back to the first home I ever owned — a one-bedroom railroad in Hoboken, New Jersey, that cost seventy-eight thousand dollars. Yes, that was a great price even back then, but that apartment was tiny, crappy, and (like most railroads) middled with a narrow, window-less living room capped with a door on either end. My father, Frank, suggested opening the wall between that cave and the kitchen.
His suggestion initially overwhelmed me and that’s because I knew nothing about construction or renovation. Back when I was a boy, few things excited me less than accompanying my father to Channel, a North Jersey hardware chain. He might as well have taken me to Chanel, because an aisle lined with galvanized electrical boxes felt like the polar opposite of poring over AFX Racetracks in Toys ‘R’ Us.
“Can we do that?”
“Sure,” he said. “This is not a bearing wall.”
He returned the following Saturday morning carrying a red metal case emblazoned with “Milwaukee Sawzall” in white lettering above a lightning bolt. He unlatched it and handed me what looked and felt like an electric turkey carver mounted onto a submachine gun. I squeezed the trigger and it came alive with a suddenness that almost made me drop the damn thing. But when I squeezed again, its pistoning blade vibrated my whole torso. I Felt the Power.
My father drew a downward line with his finger and I put that furious blade to the wall, slicing through plaster and mesh like a knife through a frosted cake while he pulled away the chunks amid a blooming cloud of dust. While decapitating the 2x4s above the header, I sincerely hoped that my father knew what we were doing, and when it was all over, I set down my weapon to survey the damage: ethereal rays of sun flooded that cloud of dust, illuminating that once-dark room with glorious columns of light.
I felt ecstatic.
(I don’t believe in “gateway drugs” but back in 1997 my dad might as well have handed me a tightly-packed bowl and cranked up Deep Purple’s Machine Head because that Sawzall was my gateway tool that — like a drug — spawned visions that would allow me to see what a property might become.)
After supporting a new header with a stud on either side, my dad instructed me how to trim it. The following Saturday, both of my parents returned.
“It’s so much brighter in here!” my mom, Jacqueline exclaimed. I thanked her by setting her up with a paint can and a brush. She began cutting the windows in the kitchen while my dad opened a shoebox filled with spare PVC fittings and showed me how to redo the leaking drain beneath the kitchen sink that had previously been “repaired” with electrical tape. He’d later walk me through further repairs and updates, including exposing the brick wall.
“You could probably sell this place for a hundred,” my dad said, placing a palm on the polyurethaned brick. But after finally owning my own home (and living by myself) the last thing I wanted was to flip it. Nevertheless, I would sell it five years later (and for twice as much) only to then Lather, Rinse and Repeat in Harlem. But I’m not a flipper. I’m a serial monogamist who has made a home and lived extensively in every property I’ve ever purchased, all of which badly needed to be renovated.
In The Godfather Part II, Hyman Roth famously remarked to Michael Corleone, “This is the business we’ve chosen.” I’m nothing like Hyman Roth. Aside from my superior record safely boarding airplanes, renovating homes is the business that chose me. For had my life turned out the way that I’d planned, I’d be a literary novelist living in the South of France. Forget Plan B — I’m on Plan G or H, depending how you count, and it feels great to finally, actively choose this business. To confidently upend the existing order forever, spearheading informed, necessary messes without the fear and hesitation I had back in Hoboken.
And I’m making those messes with that very same Sawzall (that you can see in action — in a tribute to a favorite movie — here).
Without getting too mystical over here beneath my thin coat of dust, power tools come and go — but how many people still posses active power tools purchased during the Carter Administration?
(I have not been compensated by The Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation to say any of this, but I’m completely open-minded about that.)
Only what if my Sawzall outlasts me? What if I’m just its current custodian? I’m not sure, but to paraphrase Chris Rock, “I’m just gonna ride this Sawzall out — see where it takes me.” Because it remains Biblically awesome for continuing to deliver unto me, through its power of destruction, the power of creation.
Renovating homes can teach you just how hard change can be. Things often have to get worse —and for longer than you ever imagined — before they can ever get better. It might also conversely instill in you that Avoidance is the absolute worst strategy. (Unfortunately it never immunized me from feeling the pain of the avoidant strategies of others.) You can’t apply an avoidant strategy to a leaking roof, and our most critical problems are no different. Without getting too mystical over here beneath my thin coat of dust, sometimes the damage and disrepair is so far gone that the only way to save something is to knock it down and build it anew, properly and with a solid foundation, so that what you build — and then maintain — will outlast you.
I realize that flipping homes seems sexy on TV, but I’ve found far greater beauty in being a custodian.
👉 Want to see more? Please SUBSCRIBE and get John Blesso’s latest right in your own damn inbox!
