Tale of the Tarp

Somewhere around the turn of the millenium the blue polyethylene tarp became the universal symbol of suburban exterior home improvement. Now every house painter is a pocket Christo.

It's fine by me. I like my McMansions wrapped.

Strolling down a street in downtown Montclair I came across a big tarp covering an entire side of a house.

The tarp ends were strapped to the walls or pegged into the lawn, but the wind slipped underneath and billowed the broad surface like a big sail.

Usually a painter emerges from underneath, where he is not yet painting but still sanding, stripping off old paint or stucco, kicking up a desert storm of paint chips and wood dust. Most of it stays under the tarp and is then vacuumed up with cute R2D2 contraptions like the one in picture two, preserving our clean (relatively speaking) air.

I can watch this stuff for minutes on end.

I like sunny skies for the stark shadows that flicker across the tarp like grasping talons or a rock star's flinging locks as the wind swirls.

But cloudy days are nice, too. You lose the shadows, but the blue eerily broods and stirs like the Phantom of the Opera's cape.

I can't believe how I romanticize this mundanity.

I rationalize it this way: if you can romanticize the little stuff, the big stuff will totally knock your socks off.

If you are wondering, as I was, what a McMansion-size tarp costs, the answer is $338 for a 100' x 100' Standard Duty Blue Poly Tarp that is sun and fade resistant, rot & rust proof, and comes with heat sealed seams, double laminated coating, and poly rope in hem with aluminum grommets at corners and every three feet.

You can pick one up online from Tarp and Cover Superstore (coversuperstore.com).

The best part is, the place is in Newark Okay, Newark, Delaware, but I'm willing to overlook that..

If you are the type of person who, like me, wonders what the difference is between the blue tarps you see on houses and the brown-on-one-side, green-on-the-other-side tarps you see at construction sites--where I like to set up my beach chair on weekends and rest my drink on a stack of cinder blocks--well, Tarp and Cover Superstore puts an end to the mystery,

The blues are light duty (2.75 ounces per square yard), the brown-and-greens are medium or "standard" duty (3.1 ounces per square yard).

Eventually you work up to the big bruiser, the silver heavy-duty poly tarp, weighing in at an indestructible 6 ounces per cubic yard.

Personally, I like to leave it right there, in fantasy land. Because once you unfold these things, you can never get them back into that airtight compact rectangle. They'll take over an entire corner of your garage. I guess that's why God made pickup trucks.

Tags: Montclair | photography

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