Home improvement

1.

I inherited a completely furnished room.  I am not on the lease.  My hope was to sneak in, live for four months, and then leave without getting embroiled in any of the complications of renting a place.  Those hopes were dashed when my formerly absentee landlord moved in upstairs.  He is a short but well-built man in his late fifties with piercing gray eyes and a shock of white hair.  He also has no discernible concept of privacy.  

We first met one afternoon about a month ago.  I had just dropped off into a deep nap when a rough hand on my shoulder brought me back.   Dazed and groggy, I pulled off the scarf I'd wrapped around my eyes.  He was standing over me, angelically backlit in the late afternoon light.  My being mostly naked didn't bother him as he made his introductions and tried to ascertain my identity.  In retrospect, I think he may have tried to tell me about the renovation blitzkrieg that was about to engulf our building.  

I awoke the next morning to the sound of the building coming down.  Objects skittered across my desk as I stumbled to the window to find men tearing into the wall with drills that would have looked more at home on an oil derrick.  Fortunately it only took them a day to do my section. Unfortunately, it has taken them two weeks to do the rest of the building.  Jack-hammering away at the wall is the acoustic equivalent of peeing in a pool, no matter where it happens, it affects everyone.  In fact, the building functions surprisingly well as an enormous reverberation chamber, actually channeling and amplifying the sound.  I literally cannot shout something to my roommate two feet away while this is happening.

It turns out that this is part of a project to better insulate the building by attaching big foam pads to the outside walls.  Despite the nuisance, I strongly support this move because I have no doubt that the extra padding will save a couple bystanders' lives when a strong breeze finally brings the building down.  The work goes on nonstop from eight to six every day (weekends and holidays included).  

2.

We have now moved into the painting phase.  Men with buckets prowl every level of the scaffolding, scraping and sanding and sloshing (the latter only for alliterative purposes only.  They're actually quite neat and methodical).  Rather than installing precarious ladders on the scaffolding, my landlord has made use of the building's existing stairwell.  Workmen file up and down the stairs carrying big buckets of paint and inch their way out onto the different levels of scaffolding from peoples' balconies.  

I had the misfortune to be the only person home the first day they began the painting.  The landlord pressed down on the doorbell and didn't let up until I finished in the bathroom and came out a minute later.  He asked if anyone else was home (it turns out Philip's Turkish is a bit better than he lets on).  I said no and we charaded a bit until it became clear that he wanted to get out onto the balcony.  I went to the bowl in the kitchen where we keep the key to the padlock and fished around to no avail.  I had no idea where it might be and my roommates didn't answer their phones.  Thus commenced a half hour process of scouring the entire apartment for keys that might work.  My landlord went into Gurcan's room, took the pillows off his couch, the clothes out of his dresser, and upended every one of his change/pen mugs.  A team player, I dutifully checked under the refrigerator but knew that if it wasn't in the bowl then someone must have taken it.  I hadn't a clue why one of my roommates would have done that and lacked the skills relay my irked bewilderment to my landlord as he grew increasingly flustered and workmen in orange jumpsuits piled up in the entryway.  The man carried on his privacy-invading, Ahabian quest for the balcony key for another half hour while I made a show of looking puzzled and concerned, occasionally checking under random objects.  Just when it seemed like I might be stuck in missing key purgatory forever, my roommate answered the phone.  He had been in class.  He had the key.  The landlord had specifically asked for it, so he'd put it in his pocket and meant to give it to the landlord on the way to school.  Unable to find the man, he went to school anyway.  It all worked out. 

My landlord and I are building up quite a rapport through all this, even though the majority of our conversations consist of one us mentioning something that the other recognizes (Barrack Obama, the weather, tooth paste) and both agreeing that it is very nice/beautiful ( X + çok güzel = passable conversation).  Given a moment to think, I'm capable of such complex constructions as, "Do you agree that your state of having become tired in the past exists, not so?" or "The deep, strikingly blue sea's waves the shore profound-melancholy-with lash."  However, I'm not quite able to synthesize these Yoda-with-a-speach-impediment constructions on the fly and under pressure.  

3.

The painting is almost done and the end is in sight.  My landlord does not carry a key to the building when he's working, so I had to buzz him in before letting him into my apartment.  Once inside he had me grab the vacuum cleaner then ushered me into my room where he asked (if a landlord can be said to "ask") me to vacuum the window sill and the space beneath while he sat on my couch and chatted.  Once I was done he came over and held out his hands, palms open and an inch apart.  I'm pretty sure this meant parallel.  Then he pointed to the window and made a waving, clawing gesture as if something were trying to get in.  He then shook his head and said "no."  I think the gist of it was that the new paint job would prevent beings from a parallel dimension from flooding through my window.  I find this reassuring.  He also may have meant that he's replacing the leaky wood-framed windows with new double pained ones to keep out the cold, which would also be nice, although it means the war will soon be moving to the homefront.