boutons_
08-26-2006, 02:47 PM
July 20, 2006
The Allure of the Tool Belt
By JOYCE WADLER , NY Times
THE evening he made the awkward toast, David Mager was not aware * not consciously, at least * that his longtime girlfriend was involved with the contractor. As far as he was concerned, it was just a joke, a teasing reference to the amount of time the two were spending together during the renovation of the 18th-century house in rural Massachusetts that Mr. Mager and his girlfriend shared with their two children. But what is the unconscious in the fixer-upper that is man but the cesspool? Letting forth with a stink when one has struggled so hard to make things presentable.
"Maybe I should just get you two a hotel room," Mr. Mager said, laughing, as he raised a glass over dinner with his girlfriend, the contractor and the contractor's wife. "It would be cheaper." http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif
Some time later, Mr. Mager, a vice president of an environmental technologies firm, left his unhappy but wonderfully renovated home on the Saw Mill River, with its five recently exposed original brick fireplaces, and his girlfriend. She and the contractor have been living there for the last 12 years. Mr. Mager, now 52 and happily married himself in Hatfield, Mass., is not sure how long the affair had been going on before he discovered it. (His ex and the contractor did not return phone calls.) But he is fairly certain of the amount he paid the contractor for his services: $30,000. There was additional money outstanding, although he cannot recall how much.
"I remember saying, 'I'm not paying for the work,' meanwhile I'm feeling like I want to feel his face imploding on my fist," he said.
There was never a problem with the contractor's work. "I seem to remember his last project was a very beautiful marble counter," Mr. Mager said. "It was just bad form. It's like a shrink-client, or a student-teacher relationship. It may not be jailable, but in many respects it's similar. Contractors and women at home, it's shooting fish in a barrel." http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif
Renovation, according to the National Association of Home Builders, is at an all time high. And with the warm weather, which marks the peak of renovation season, come the contractors in their tool belts, which, for many a client, carry a romantic charge. (Men who don't get it might want to consider the garter belt.) They invade still-occupied houses, taking charge of renovation projects and spending several weeks in close proximity with their owners. Often, even today, it is the woman of the house who is home all day long; in summer resort areas like the Hamptons, she is sometimes there alone with the children from Monday to Friday. Who can blame her for harboring dreams of the contractor?
"They've been totally sexualized, like the U.P.S. man," said Stephen Drucker, the editor in chief of House Beautiful. "I can't tell you how many times when I hear somebody give a recommendation for a contractor it inevitably ends with the four words, 'And he's really cute.' " http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif
Which only makes sense, he added. "It's all very intimate. You're making plans for how you are going to live your life with this person in enormous detail. And let's face it, they take off their shirts a lot and that doesn't hurt." http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif
R. Couri Hay, the society editor of Hamptons and Gotham magazines, says he has heard more and more stories of client-contractor romance stories in the last few years.
"It's fast, sexy, hot, but it doesn't mean a lot * it's like sexual chocolate, like sneaking out and getting that double scoop of ice cream in the afternoon," Mr. Hay said. He added that client-contractor affairs are relatively safe: there is no need to worry about the contractor's car being seen in a woman's driveway in the middle of the afternoon; it's supposed to be in her driveway. And client-contractor love, from what he's seen, rarely threatens marriages because when the job is over, the affair is over.
"Nobody knows," Mr. Hay said. "The contractor isn't going to tell because the husband is writing the check, the wife isn't going to tell, and you get a better job because she's providing a fringe benefit. Everybody wins." http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif
Clients and contractors agree that the attraction between them is generally about more than just sex. It seems to stem largely from the emotional importance of the home to the client, and from the contractor's ability to listen to her. Husbands may not be willing to discuss the aesthetic merits of polished chrome versus stainless steel or clam casing versus colonial casing, but the contractor, if he is to be successful, must. The contractor will accompany the client to the marble distributor, expertly moving slabs of marble with one hand. And if there's nothing at that distributor, he will take her to another. The client has finally found that ideal * the heterosexual man who will go shopping with her. http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif
David Guido, a contractor in Woodstock, N.Y., says that while the first thing he does is to have a husband and wife draw up separate wish lists, 60 to 70 percent of his working relationship ends up being with the woman.
"Say you have a woman who's a baker or likes to do her own vegetable canning," said Mr. Guido, 53. "You're setting up special counters, you're going over what's involved in making it. When someone gets that much attention, it's like when you're getting your hair cut and the person is talking just to you. My clients' wishes are the center of my attention."
Sandra Slater, 54, an environmental designer in Palo Alto, Calif., has lived with her former contractor, Drew Maran, 50, of Drew Maran Construction, for 10 years. They share an interest in green building. But the relationship began with Mr. Maran's talent for listening. "When my husband left, I didn't know a divorced person at all," she said. Then she remembered that Mr. Maran, whom she had consulted for renovation work, was divorced. "I called him up crying for an hour and a half and he was fine with it," she said, laughing. "He was a contractor * he was used to hysterical women calling in the middle of the day, and holding hands with neurotic women." http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smielephant.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif
And there was also the matter of Mr. Maran's skill around the house. Although he was not macho * "he's not a hammer swinger," Ms. Slater said * he did have what she calls "a confidence with the physical world."
"There's this really primal thing of, this is your space, this is your cave," she said, speaking of the home. "Nothing fazes Drew. I get baffled when I turn on the light and it works or that the plumbing works properly. Feeling safe in your own space, that's pretty primal."
Was her ex-husband, an entrepreneur, handy?
"Once a light bulb broke and the glass part was still in its socket," Ms. Slater said. "I didn't know how to get it out and I asked my husband and he said, 'I don't do light bulbs. Go hire somebody.' That would never happen with Drew."
Mr. Guido, too, has noticed how attractive the ability to do household repairs and construction is to women. "They say, 'That door was sticking 10 years. Why couldn't my husband do that?' "
Mr. Mager, who acknowledges that there were problems in his relationship long before the contractor came on the scene, believes that his successor's building talents, combined with his girlfriend's love of their home, were deciding factors in the breakup.
"I think I know what a hammer is," Mr. Mager said, but the contractor had "a skill she respected and loved. And she loved the house. I used to tell her when you talk about the house, you smile; when you look at me, you scowl." Certainly, he added, the issue was not physical prowess.
"I'm 6-foot-4 and I actually am very, very strong," Mr. Mager said. "He's a very small guy. At parties, when we were friends, I would pick him up and spin him around."
WHETHER client-contractor romance is a good idea from the contractor's point of view is another matter.
Of a dozen contractors interviewed, most said it was not. They said it could only lead to problems, including lawsuits, a tense workplace, the expectations of a discount or no payment at all. Even if the client was aggressively interested, romantic entanglement was considered unprofessional and unethical.
"I have been at design meetings where you feel the toe under the table or the hand lingering on my hand a little too long," said Alan Bouknight, 48, who runs Azzarone Contracting in Mineola, N.Y., and does a lot of work in the Hamptons. "If you are not someone with honor and scruples you could probably keep playing that, but in my instance this is a family business * I'm third generation and I'm not going to jeopardize that reputation."
"There are plenty of young guys out there who play this to the hilt, especially in warm weather," he said. "The Timberland boots scuffed just so; the thick white socks scrunched down ever so; the shorts frayed, the tool belt that hangs strategically. http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gifNone of my guys are like that, I won't have guys like that."
Richard Mander, a married 56-year-old New York contractor who does much of his work on Park and Fifth Avenues, speaks skeptically about the motivations of some of his more forward clients. "Those things do happen, the 'Wouldn't you like to stay and discuss the job and have a glass of wine?' " he said. "It usually comes with, 'Don't you think you can put an extra coat of shellac on the Mozambique cabinetry you've just built? Don't you think this will go better with an extra coat?' "
"They've only given you one glass of beer and then they expect the world," he concluded.
Mr. Mander's friend Robert Gobright, of Gobright Electric in Sag Harbor, takes a lighter view. Mr. Gobright, who was once named a Hamptons Hunk in Hamptons Magazine, had an affair with the daughter of a client on a job he did two and a half years ago, which ended amicably, he said.
Mr. Gobright is now engaged to Heather Buchanan of Sag Harbor, who writes the Kiss & Tell column for The Independent, a Hamptons weekly. They met when a mutual friend invited Ms. Buchanan to see the house Mr. Gobright had built for himself. Ms. Buchanan, who had flipped two houses in Sag Harbor, was impressed with his sense of design and detail. "Every last design element was carefully chosen and was beautiful."
Ms. Buchanan had never had affairs with contractors who worked on her houses (though she did once date her landscaper). But she has used seduction techniques of a sort with contractors, she said, for decidedly unromantic purposes. There is so much work in the Hamptons that it is very difficult to get a contractor to show up, she said, and since she could not compete with money, she created a "fun" atmosphere, baking blueberry muffins in the morning and inviting a friend who gave Hula-Hoop lessons to use her front lawn.
Ms. Buchanan added that if you are a single woman, the contractor can become your "de facto guy''; the man you call instead of AAA if you get a flat tire * something she did before meeting Mr. Gobright.
One can imagine how a contractor could misread the signals.
But there are some signals that seem pretty clear: the greeting at the door in a T-shirt and nothing else, the steaming hot tub, the walk into the bedroom to "look at the closets" * which seems to be the female client equivalent of "Don't I know you from someplace?" They all spell trouble, contractors say. Though it takes some fellows a while to figure it out.
"I was a kid, much younger, working for another contractor, who left me to do a deck on a house," said one upstate New York contractor, now middle-aged, who begged anonymity. "The woman was divorced, the door to the deck is four feet off the ground."
So you're * ?
" * Right. I'm looking at her crotch. She's bringing me breakfast, lingering in the doorway in her bedclothes and one thing led to another and I end up in bed with her and when the boss came back from vacation she made a row and threatened not to pay. My boss was a little upset that I had sex, but I was 19 at the time, and it was a new experience for me, the older woman. When you're 19 and you have a woman like that, you don't ask questions, you go for it."
What did he learn from this experience?
"From that I learned * I really did not learn anything," he said.
Years later, he had figured out a few things. "I learned you get paid before, http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif you don't mess in your own backyard, you keep your business separate from personal relationships."
Ronald Brannan, 48 and newly married, heads R. B. Builders in Manhattan Beach, Calif., close to Marina del Rey and Redondo Beach (communities, he said, where $1.5 million would get you a little shack). He recalls a $35,000 job in Santa Monica in the mid-1980's, when he made the mistake of telling the divorced client * a woman who "was a lot about drama" * how nice she looked when she was dressed up and going out to lunch.
By quitting time, he said, the candles were lighted and the wine had been poured, and he had to think quickly to avoid a difficult work situation (the five-month-long job was only half done). So Mr. Brannan, after telling the lady that she was very beautiful and he was very flattered, did what any honest man would do * he lied.
"I told her I had a girlfriend," he said.
On another occasion around the same time, he said, he did an estimate at a woman's town house in Century City. "I came into her house and she was wearing high heels, hot pants and a tube top, and she was just coming on to me like gangbusters and she was gorgeous," Mr. Brannan said. "I think she had some sort of lounge act. Believe me, all sorts of ideas were running through my head."
Despite the passage of time, Mr. Brannan's memories remain remarkably sharp.
"She led me over to her aquarium where there was a little fish, a sucker fish that hung on to the aquarium and cleaned the inside. She showed me how; she puckered her lips. Then she showed me her bedroom and sat down on the bed." http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif
Mr. Brannan was concerned that if he had an affair, there could be "a huge conflict," including the expectation that he would do the work free or at a large discount.
"Believe me, when I went home that night, I was totally enamored with the idea, it was very romantic and very alluring," he said, "but at the end of the day it wasn't something I wanted to get involved with."
So what did he tell her?
"I didn't call her back; I more or less just ignored it."
Would this be typical contractor behavior or just typical guy behavior?
"I think it's typical guy behavior," Mr. Brannan said. "And I was in my late 20's. I've matured."
Even Sandra Slater's boyfriend, Mr. Maran, whose story had a happy ending, is conscious of the hazards of sexual tensions between client and contractor.
"I'd say 75 percent of the projects where I have constant contact with the homeowner's wife I get the feeling of some level of sexual desperation," he said. "I don't think 'Desperate Housewives' has helped this cause at all." http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif
Mr. Maran added that clients' nannies and baby sitters represent another common danger. "Sometimes they're very attractive," he said. "I remember one in the early 90's, a 19-year-old Swedish au pair. It sounds like something out of a video, right? She was just constantly around, though the kids weren't. One day I'm standing on the ladder and she's asking me about the label of my jeans. I'm thinking that the label is on my back pocket and that's where she's staring. Which is why one of our company's mottos is, 'Don't touch the wife, don't touch the nanny and keep your hands off the husband.' "
Wait a minute, Mr. Maran * you violated your own rule.
"That's how we came up with the motto," Mr. Maran said. "And, in fairness, at the time Sandy was not the wife, she was divorced."
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