How my contractor friend repairs more than homes

June 19, 2026 whoopsiepiggleLeave a comment

Being the landlord of a single rental property is largely a passive source of income–except when tenants turn over. When that happened to Dreisbach House early last month, I spent a week cleaning it. That same week, my wallet was stolen, one of my dogs got sick all over the house I live in and the air conditioning did not work when I turned it on for the first time this season.

But, to quote Stephen Colbert, I’d rather be grateful for than mad at. The person who stole my wallet removed my driver’s license and insurance cards and left them in my purse…boy, howdy, am I grateful! My 16-year-old son offered to clean the dog sick from the carpets…and he did a good job! Furthermore, the dog recovered without a (costly) trip to the vet. My AC had simply tripped the breaker and while I paid $135 for a technician to flip a switch, it could have been worse.

As for Dreisbach House, Jack, the contractor who renovated it last year, walked through it with me and wrote out a repair punch list. But two weeks later, when he was scheduled to do the work, I’m happy to report that Jack was too busy with other projects to do the job. He asked his mostly retired mentor, Paul, to do the work instead.

Paul and a neighbor's child at his property during the maple and black walnut sugaring season earlier this year. — Paul and a neighbor’s child at his property during maple and black walnut sugaring season earlier this year.

Paul first worked on Dreisbach House shortly after I purchased it in 2003. In every room of the house, I can point to something and say, “Paul built/renovated/fixed that.” A superlative contractor, he also leaves a space cleaner than when he started and has a sagacity that comes with decades facing life’s challenges head on, no excuses. For over 20 years, I’ve made it a point to sit and talk with Paul during his lunch breaks whenever he’s worked for me.

I first met Paul at the K-8 school his two sons and my four attended. Ten years later, when my eldest son, Claude, was home from college, he worked for Paul for a few weeks before returning to Ann Arbor for a summer program. When my second son, Hugo, learned how well Paul paid his workers, he wanted to work for him, too.

“No, way, Hugo,” Claude and I both told him. “You’d not make it through the first week.” We said this not because Hugo is lazy − he isn’t. At 14, he groomed dogs at a salon where clients can bite and void their bladders and bowels on their groomer, and sometimes did. At 16, he quit the salon to work at Old Carolina Barbecue, a job that infused his jeans with the aroma of slow-roasted pork.

But Hugo is both independent and has a tinge of Tom Sawyer. How often did I find one of Hugo’s brothers doing the job I had assigned to him because he had convinced them it would be better if he did something else (i.e., “You keep raking the leaves while I look for a bigger tarp.”)? Many, many times.

Hugo worked for Paul the last two summers before he went to college. He’d regale us with stories of the projects he’d worked on, and told Claude and me years later that whenever he was tempted to quit, he’d resisted because he didn’t want to give us the satisfaction of being able to say, “We told you so.”

Once, when remodeling a house’s second floor bathroom, they smashed the original cast-iron tub into sections to remove it. As Hugo carried out a large piece, a floorboard gave way under the weight and he was thrown to the ground. The impact shredded the skin of one of his forearms.

“Your arm better not be broken, Hugo,” Paul said as he inspected the bloody wound, “or your mom will kill me.”

With a knot in his stomach, Hugo would watch Paul inspect his drywall work. Paul would solemnly walk up to the wall, putty knife in hand, then slowly slide the flat edge of the knife down the section where Hugo had spackled over the nails and then sanded. If the wall was not as smooth as a mirror, Hugo had to redo it.

When he left for Eastman School of Music to study opera vocal performance, Hugo took a tool box he’d assembled with the money he’d earned working for Paul and would let his former employer know when he fixed things in the dorms. After his sophomore year, Hugo held a Leider concert in Akron to raise money to attend a voice program in Austria. Just before the concert began, I went backstage to see if he needed anything.

“I’m fine, but have you seen Paul? Is he here?” Paul, and his wife, Nancy, had arrived early and were seated near the front.

Was Paul a tough boss? Yes, he was, because he was fully invested in my son, as he is with all his workers. Paul’s consistent commitment of time and attention as he taught Hugo how to repair and remodel homes did more than just give my son handy skills, it also helped fill a father-shaped hole in Hugo’s heart.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, June 7, 2026.

Home renovation · Uncategorized

A family friend is restoring my house. But first he restored his life.

March 22, 2025June 19, 2026 whoopsiepiggleLeave a comment

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.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, March 16, 2025.

Home renovation · Uncategorized

Restoring 1909 home to former glory can’t stop for curveballs

March 8, 2025 whoopsiepiggleLeave a comment

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.

Home renovation · Uncategorized

A new stovetop leads to a kitchen transformation

April 29, 2024 whoopsiepiggleLeave a comment

It all started with the Roper stovetop

I own two side-by-side houses and I’m slowly remodeling the one we call Dreisbach House, an Arts and Crafts home built in 1909. Meanwhile, I live in Cressler House, which underwent significant modernizing in the 1960s, including the installation of that Roper stovetop.

With two parallel rows of burners mounted into the countertop, the Roper was a romantic throw back, sexy even. After all, it produced visible fire and tangible heat. The busiest burner, on the front right corner, sometimes required assistance to ignite its flame. There’s a singular satisfaction in seeing a robust round of fire erupt in the presence of a lit match.

The Roper’s pilot lights ran high. Plates set on burners I wasn’t using, while cooking on others, quickly became too hot to touch with bare hands. The slightest wind would extinguish the Roper’s pilot lights, which, given its proximity to the back door, was frequent

Charming but dangerous, effective but inefficient, the Roper needed to retire. Rather than gas, I chose an induction stovetop. Induction stovetops heat cookware electromagnetically, thus, only cookware made with magnetic materials work. Caste iron is a go, caste aluminum is not. Most of the cookware I already own works just fine.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, induction stovetops are up to three times more efficient than gas stoves. Other perks include no release of the pollutants related to gas stovetops and shockingly fast heating times —induction stovetops boil water up to 40% faster than gas or conventional electric stovetops.

In researching which stovetop to buy, I looked at the website Wirecutter, which reliably reviews just about everything. I chose a GE Profile, which was more than I’d planned to spend. Like the Barbra Streisand song, I’m a second-hand rose. Most of my clothing (and that of my children) is thrifted, my car was used when I bought it and I’ve never been the first owner of a home. But with some purchases, particularly appliances, it is wise to spend more for better. Also, I found some kickbacks.

Before purchasing the stovetop at Lowe’s, I went to Get-Go, the gas station owned by Giant Eagle, and bought gift certificates for the hardware store using a credit card that gives me 3% back on gas station purchases. And because I have a Giant Eagle rewards card, I also earned a lot of free gas.

Not so fast. The induction stovetop is made of tempered glass and the kitchen’s copper-tile backsplash, which is probably as old as the Roper, was embedded with years of stains no amount of elbow grease and Pink Stuff (or Bar Keeper’s Friend, steel wool, etc.) could remove. In order to avoid damaging the new stovetop, the backsplash needed replaced first. But a new backsplash would accentuate how deeply worn the countertops were.

Which meant before the counters, backsplash and stovetop, I needed to pick new flooring as I use the floor to dictate the color of the other components. And that’s when I learned how out of sync I am with seemingly everyone else in America.

I will never install a tile floor in a kitchen. For someone who stands in the kitchen everyday, tile is too cold in the winter, too hard on joints everyday and when you drop something in a room with a tile floor, kiss it goodbye because whether it’s glass, plastic or a small creature, it’s going to break when it lands.

I love linoleum that unapologetically looks like linoleum. Akron’s First Flooring & Tile can order Marmoleum by Forbo, which is old-school vegetable linoleum. The patterns are beautiful, the material is both environmental and durable, while also gentle on the legs. In 10 minutes I chose Asian Tiger, an orange swirl with reds and grays that, yes, would be a perfect floor for children to play hot lava.

I then ordered a quartz countertop that looks like white marble with subtle streaks of grey and brown to complement the busy flooring. So, too, does the white subway tile backsplash with flecks of terra cotta.

The countertop, backsplash and induction stovetop have all been installed. When I walk into the kitchen and look at them, I feel a small trill in my chest, so long as I don’t look at the floor.

Home decor styles come and go. Thirteen years ago, when I put a new floor in Dreisbach House’s kitchen, First Flooring & Tile’s showroom had rows of vinyl linoleum on 12-foot rolls. Today they have none. It’s all ceramic tile and floating floor planks (think Pergo). There are appropriate places for both types of flooring, but not in my kitchen.

With the loss of sheet linoleum so, too, has gone the people who can install it. Two flooring companies and Home Depot have not been able find anyone who will install Marmoleum. At the suggestion of the flooring companies, I emailed Forbo and asked for help finding an installer. They responded by telling me to contact the flooring companies. Sigh.

Perhaps soon floating laminate and tile floors will peak and make way for the return of sheet linoleum. Until that time, my newly refurbished kitchen will include the old flooring with throw rugs strategically placed to hide wear and tear.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, March 31, 2024.

Since publication, Akron architect Hallie Bowie contacted me with this very useful information:

“I want to be sure you know that you can get a tax credit if you had any electrical panel upgrades done to help with the installation of the cooktop. And you could mention that those earning less than 150% of the median income in our area will soon be able to get rebates on the cooktop itself, up to 100% of the cost of the appliance or $840 max. https://pearlcertification.com/news/electric-cooktop-rebates-and-tax-credits“