COLUMNS34 April 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com↓ HOMESTEADINGOMEWHERE 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 try-
ing to install a pull-up bar.
Like many stories of minor disasters, this one begins with Christ-
mas 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 instal-
lation, 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 bed-
room upstairs and an eat-in kitchen down.
This fourth bedroom happened to be Mick and Willie’s. It also
happens that whoever built this addition departed from code.
On Christmas afternoon we grabbed a bucket of tools and gath-
ered to install the pull-up bar. Soon we discovered that the ceiling’s
drywall was not mounted to the joists. It had been fastened to pine
strips hung perpendicular to the framing. This meant our stud
finder would be of no use.
Still we were hopeful. To find the first joist we would probe
upward with a light nail. Once we struck solid wood, we figured
we’d tape off 48 inches and find the third joist over. Two pencilThe Art of Making It Work
/ B Y C. J. C H I V E R S /
How a pull-up bar became a surfboard.
(If you have an old house, you’ll understand.)