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Think about your average 25-year-old male do-it-yourselfer—-the guy who installs five windows in a single afternoon.
What other things would this fellow be into? Trucks? Not a bad guess. Football? A possibility. Architecture and the visual arts? Again, that’s not a stretch.
But custom tailoring? That had me double-taking.
Yet that’s the shtick of Tony Davidson, a Largo resident who lives alone in his four-bedroom home. Davidson popped into the D.C. Home Depot this morning to pick up a bunch of 2x4s so that he could frame up his new windows. His home was built around 1940 and had pulley windows that were drafty. He’s putting in seven new ones and has already done two of them; the rest, he says, will be in by 5:30 today.
When I point out to him that framing up windows is a huge pain in the ass, Davidson likens it to the suit-making he’s been doing since high school. He’s made about 20 custom suits, he says—-some for other folks, but most of them for himself. “I wear ’em,” he says.
Davidson, who works at the Crystal City Hilton and declined to be photographed or even to allow his building materials to be photographed, says it’s not a good idea to contract out window installation, or your clothes, for that matter. “It’s too expensive out there, so you’ve got to learn to do this yourself.”