When Alexa Johnson got on one of her regular Zoom calls for work one day, the brick wall enclosing her front door patio in Marina was fully intact. By the time her call ended, the wall was a pile of bricks, thanks to the handheld jackhammer her husband, Mark Johnson, had rented.
“He went out to rent it, returned and destroyed the wall all before my Zoom call ended,” she says. Just as rapidly, they put up an ad on Craigslist for free bricks. Within an hour, they were gone.
The transformation may have been quick and decisive but it came as no surprise. Alexa had seen Mark obsess for days over the young couple’s plan to redo the entrance to their home.
Mark uses a free mobile app called SketchUp to create a 3D model of his projects and he gets consumed by the process: “Alexa says I am a crazy perfectionist.”
“He’ll measure everything four or five times, so, yes, he’s a perfectionist,” she says.
What came to replace the outdated brick wall are handsome and modern looking slabs of finished lumber running chest high. They are topped by a long slab positioned horizontally like the surface of a bar. Now, the Johnsons can take their morning coffee outside leaning on their bar and looking out at an immaculate lawn, a big oak tree and the quiet residential street. Or they can sit back and relax on the new wooden chairs that Mark built in the garage-turned-woodworking shop.
Alexa, meanwhile, has revamped the house’s garden area, experimenting with new plants. “We are getting more bees and birds as we plant so we are really rocking the Mother Nature thing right now,” she says.
The Mother Nature thing is coming into full glory in the backyard, where the couple is building a beer garden. It is not simply an outdoor space to drink beer with friends among assorted flowers and bushes – it will have those things but also something much more special. To enter the garden, you’ll have to push past a 10-foot wall made of hops, the plants that make beer, beer.
The hops have already been planted, and to help them grow vertically and fill out space, Mark hung strings from a wooden beam. When the hops are ready the strings will be lowered, and the crops will be more bountiful they can possibly use in their homebrew operation. They’ll have to give some away.
The couple’s home improvement hobbies got kickstarted thanks to the pandemic and shelter-in-place. “Once Covid started, we had nothing else to do,” Mark says. “I actually get bored if I stop doing projects.”
Anecdotally, it can feel like everyone is DIY-ing projects at home while they’re spending an unprecedented amount of time there. At Rental Depot in Monterey, which offers one proxy by which to measure home improvement activity, business is booming, according to co-owner Erik Saulnier.
But that’s not necessarily because homeowners are showing up to rent equipment themselves. “Most of the revenue is from professional contractors,” Saulnier says, chalking it up to the area’s relatively high average income.
The Johnsons were both lucky enough to keep their full-time jobs, so they have maintained their income and gained extra time by pausing travel and not seeing friends as much during the pandemic. That creates a certain irony: “The reason we are able to get these projects done is Covid. But Covid is why we can’t share it with people,” Alexa says.
As impressive as their projects are, the Johnsons insist nothing they did requires more than watching a few YouTube videos and some sweat.
“People say, I could never do that,” Mark explains. “I say you absolutely could. Anybody could. Do your research. It’s a matter of trying.”