In regards to my title, I'm going to talk about a few more traits I'm sure I inherited or learned from him.
The driveway at the farm was large in the first place, but really widened out into a parking lot to the side of the house. Dad always wanted vehicles parked on the opposite side from the house, so no cars were directly beside the house. One winter day, mom came home with groceries, so she parked right in front of the door. After I helped unload groceries, mom asked me to go move the car for her. I was all of 13 or 14, but this wasn't unusual for us. Being on the farm, we drove from the time we could reach the pedals, sometimes before! Anyhow, I went out to the car, started it up, put it into drive and stepped on the gas. There was layer of snow pack that had turned to ice and the car was on a tiny bit of an incline. I realized I wasn't going anywhere, so stepped on the gas a bit more. Still no movement. I could hear the tires whirring on the ice and maybe even smell them burning a bit. I worked at this for a few minutes until dad came walking up to the car and asked, what are you doing? I explained that mom asked me to move the car. He told me to put it in park and get out. I expected that he was gonna have me push, but he never asked me to. He put the car in drive and didn't even touch the gas. He just idled away and parked the car where he wanted it. I couldn't believe it. I already knew everything when I was 13, but here was more free education! I think about this incident often and use it as an analogy whenever I think we are putting in a lot of effort but not getting anywhere. I have learned to be very patient with anything that is important to me. It's amazing what you can get if you just keep on whittling away at a problem, or patiently waiting for the stars to line up for you!
This next story happened after Dad had been dead for a few years, and relates to his frugality. I am fairly confident this trait of his was directly related to having grown up in the middle of the 2nd world war, and he definitely passed it on to me.
All my siblings know that Linda and I bought mom and dads house when mom went to live with Cory. After we lived there a few years, we decided to do some renovations and discovered some interesting construction techniques used by dad. He had put up a wall in the basement to build a rec room at moms request. We wanted to remove it to enlarge the room and use the whole basement. I was careful to remove the paneling so I could reuse it later. He would be very proud! After I had the paneling removed, I found almost every other stud, was not really a stud, but either two or three shorter pieces of 2x4 scabbed together to make a stud. Crazy when I think of how much extra work and time it took for him to do it this way! But obviously he had the scrap material laying around. Later on in the renovations, I had to remove some drywall in a bedroom that had become water damaged. This was still in the basement and I had noticed earlier that the pieces were exactly 7 feet long, meaning he would have had to cut 1 foot off of each piece. The room was a pretty square box with only one window to cut around. This window was just under 4 feet off the ground, so would only use half a piece of drywall. Well, you probably have guessed, but in that one small section of wall, he had used 4, 1 foot cutoff pieces that he had left over! In this case, I suspect the extra labour involved was probably not worth it as he would have had to use 10 times as much mud for all the seams. Unfortunately, I can think of at least a few examples from my own life where I cheaped out to save money and ended up spending more than I would have if I had just done it right the first time. The flip side is that I can patch up a broken shovel and wear it out before getting rid of it!
"I think its your duty to overcome what you inherit in life"
Kelsey Grammer
Love Holij
This next story happened after Dad had been dead for a few years, and relates to his frugality. I am fairly confident this trait of his was directly related to having grown up in the middle of the 2nd world war, and he definitely passed it on to me.
All my siblings know that Linda and I bought mom and dads house when mom went to live with Cory. After we lived there a few years, we decided to do some renovations and discovered some interesting construction techniques used by dad. He had put up a wall in the basement to build a rec room at moms request. We wanted to remove it to enlarge the room and use the whole basement. I was careful to remove the paneling so I could reuse it later. He would be very proud! After I had the paneling removed, I found almost every other stud, was not really a stud, but either two or three shorter pieces of 2x4 scabbed together to make a stud. Crazy when I think of how much extra work and time it took for him to do it this way! But obviously he had the scrap material laying around. Later on in the renovations, I had to remove some drywall in a bedroom that had become water damaged. This was still in the basement and I had noticed earlier that the pieces were exactly 7 feet long, meaning he would have had to cut 1 foot off of each piece. The room was a pretty square box with only one window to cut around. This window was just under 4 feet off the ground, so would only use half a piece of drywall. Well, you probably have guessed, but in that one small section of wall, he had used 4, 1 foot cutoff pieces that he had left over! In this case, I suspect the extra labour involved was probably not worth it as he would have had to use 10 times as much mud for all the seams. Unfortunately, I can think of at least a few examples from my own life where I cheaped out to save money and ended up spending more than I would have if I had just done it right the first time. The flip side is that I can patch up a broken shovel and wear it out before getting rid of it!
"I think its your duty to overcome what you inherit in life"
Kelsey Grammer
Love Holij
I'll say 2 things ; the first is that my experience of dad is completely different, the second is that I'm so glad that you got the version you got!
ReplyDeleteGot to agree with Elly on this one.
ReplyDeleteInteresting how each child has different experiences with the same parents. Why and how come? I know it’s the same with my siblings, Birth order and expectations from each maybe?!
ReplyDelete