March 2025 – Whoopsie Piggle

If you find a contractor who is knowledgeable, talented, honest and sober, do all you can to keep them happy because they are about as hard to find as a four-leaf clover growing in Akron in January. Contractors who are all that are highly sought and it may take months, sometimes years, to schedule your project.

After I purchased Dreisbach House in 2003, contractor Paul Mann updated many things for me. He remodeled the upstairs bathroom and one of the four bedrooms. Because Dreisbach House is constructed of two layers of brick, the walls cannot be insulated. Paul suggested blowing cellulose insulation between the ceiling of the second floor and the floor of the third. It made the house noticeably warmer in winter

Now 70, Paul has been trying to work less for several years. I have used another contractor who fits the bill when Paul isn’t available, including last spring’s deconstruction of the walls in the three bedrooms in Dreisbach House that Paul hadn’t remodeled. But last summer this contractor told me he would not be able to finish the project for a while due to health issues.

It was a perfect storm. My house was torn apart, the contractor who started the project was unable to work, and because I had to abruptly end what I thought was the last relationship of my life, I needed my empty house to generate income ASAP. I called Paul, not sure he hadn’t fully retired, and told him the scope of the project. He said, “Holly, do you remember Jack?”

Just a little younger than my eldest son, Jack went to the Waldorf school with my first three children. He taught them Dungeons and Dragons and how to fish. Back then, I’d leave my boys with their grandparents in northern Michigan for a month each summer. In 2009, Jack accompanied them. They fished off the the town’s lighthouse pier on Lake Michigan when they weren’t working at the cemetery with Grandpa, the city’s sexton. One weekend, the grandparents took the boys to an inland lake down a long dirt road where a friend had a small cabin. The lake had been stocked long ago, but nobody fished there anymore. The boys caught 80 fish (or 10 dumb ones eight times) in one day. They christened it “Lake Heaven on Earth.”

Two of Holly Christensen's sons and Jack fishing off the lighthouse pier in Charlevoix, Mich. — Holly’s sons Claude and Hugo fishing off the lighthouse pier with Jack in Charlevoix, Mich., 2009.

In high school, my sons mentioned who smoked marijuana. Jack was one of them. Many nights he climbed out his bedroom window and went who knows where. His mom said she if she put her foot down, Jack would go live with his father. I understood her anxiety; he very well might have. But being adamant about house rules, sometimes confrontationally so, is an expression of love. Deep down, it is also what children want. For when instead parents do nothing, the child feels they have given up on him.

“Paul,” I said, “Jack has disappointed me in the past.” Paul said the same was true for him.

Jack became a father at 19. When his girlfriend was pregnant, they rented a room in Dreisbach House for a few months, and he also did some yard work for me. Though Jack is an incredibly intelligent person, in both situations I observed behaviors that showed a lack of maturity, particularly for someone about to become a parent.

The relationship with his child’s mother didn’t last, and over the course of his 20s Jack’s alcohol and marijuana consumption increased. Eventually he started using what he calls “roulette powder,” something sold as cocaine, but which users know is often cut with other white powdery substances — some inert like baby powder, others potentially lethal. Jack understood any dose might be laced with something that would kill him, and he thought maybe that was best.

Then one night, while getting high on roulette powder, he watched a movie in which a man finds his son’s body several days after he’d overdosed. Jack had an epiphany. Whatever his miseries, none compared to what his child would have to live with if Jack overdosed.

“So, Holly,” Paul tells me, “Jack’s sober, he’s married to a wonderful woman and they go to church.”

He shared at length the quality of Jack’s work, describing projects where he had exceeded clients’, and Paul’s, expectations. Paul ended with, “And, Holly, you and I both believe everyone deserves a second chance, don’t we?”

Jack, now 30, and another worker began putting Dreisbach House back together last October. A week after they started, I went over to answer some questions Jack had. I entered the living room and found the floor covered with tarps upon which rows of baseboards and trim were organized neatly.

I began to cry, releasing a stress I hadn’t known I was holding. Where there had been overwhelming chaos, things were now orderly. I’ve since learned that Jack’s skills do indeed live up to Paul’s praise. Jack and I have had many long talks and he also has reconnected with my sons. It feels like a once lost nephew has returned home.

I met 88-year-old Herman Dreisbach twice in 2003 before purchasing the house his uncle built in 1909 and gifted to him in 1946. Herman and his wife, Ruth, raised their two children in the home, the only one in which the couple lived as Ruth died in 2002. As regular readers know, I raised my three eldest sons in what I call Dreisbach House and am now raising my youngest two children next door in Cressler House, named after Claire Cressler, who lived in his home for six decades with his wife, Gloria. Claire was my neighbor and frequent dinner guest until his death in 2007. Both homes feel imbued by the love of the couples who lived in them.

For 11 years, I rented out Dreisbach House, which paid for both mortgages. When my last tenants moved out, I was in a relationship with the man I fell in love with at 17. Though external forces pulled us apart in 1983, we never lost contact. For four decades and many moves across the country, I kept a box of his letters because in a back pocket of my heart I believed we would one day reunite. And so we did in the spring of 2021. After 2 1/2 years of a long-distance romance, he moved to Akron. Together we decided to restore Dreisbach House beyond its former glory and live there for the rest of our days. Instead of finding new tenants, we began renovations.

By necessity, windows went first. While most of the main floor windows are original, several decades ago the Dreisbachs replaced the second floor and kitchen windows with vinyl ones, which had warped with age. Two remained permanently closed while one was stuck 4 inches open and had to be covered with wood and plastic. We replaced them with Andersen wooden windows that have color-matched exterior aluminum cladding in oxblood red, the exterior color of the windows in 1909. We discovered this when layers of white paint were scraped off the existing original windows. That, along with their non-standard sizes, caused the manufacture to take more than 16 weeks.

The next step was to begin the great undoing of Herman Dreisbach’s 1950s improvements of the bedrooms. I assume Dreisbach’s goal was to cover the plaster walls, which now and again form bubbles and cracks, and situate outlets. First he mounted heavy-gauge wire atop the 10″ baseboards. Then he installed drywall, with holes strategically placed for outlets to connect to the wire, over the walls and baseboards. Not exactly up to code, but it worked for 70 years without incident.

Last spring, contractors removed the drywall, revealing the original baseboards and window frames, which also had been covered, all of which needed repaired or replaced. In one bedroom I had a sizable hole cut into the wall of a closet that extended several feet over the stairwell so as to create a sitting nook.

Then, when the project was at the point where everything was undone, my relationship went topsy-turvy, as someone less besotted might have predicted. There will never be a love in my life greater than that for my children. The remorse for what my 15-year-old son was exposed to will stay with me all my days. But he also witnessed my swift and irrevocable response.

Where the brain accepts hard truths, the heart can be slow to follow. The loss of a dream I thought had come true pushed me into an unrelenting grief that too often doubled me over with sobs from the bottom of my gut, made me shake palsy-like and weep in public for no apparent reason. The only other time I felt as hollowed out was after the death of my grandmother. If you’ve run into me in the past year and what I said made little sense, you now know why.

But grief is not depression. I carry on, busily working on projects I had set aside for three years. Most importantly, I am held by the loving support of family and friends. My eldest sons have taken monthly turns traveling home to spend weekends with me, while faraway friends schedule calls to talk for as long as I need. Here in Akron, my friends Bruce and Jim share meals with me most weeks as they patiently guide me through this difficult passage.

Because it was in the middle of a renovation when I was thrown a curveball, I found myself with a house that could not generate revenue. My income last year was almost $20k, so I had to get creative. I took out $17,000 on two credit cards at zero percent interest for 18 months and began to put the beautiful Dreisbach House, and my life, back together. I’m eager to share some results in the weeks ahead.

This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, March 2, 2025.