The Barn House (13 page)

You're thinking:
Arnold's Food. A psychic astrologer. A transvestite bar. I could make a miniseries out of material like that
. No doubt. My point is that taken in the aggregate it didn't amount to much. The street had an unfinished quality, as did the city as a whole—you felt it had started on the long road to urbanity but never quite arrived. Getting it the rest of the way was what city folk hoped to accomplish. But how soon they might do so no one then could say.

 

O
ne summer evening after a day's work at the Barn House I returned home to find the family in a tumult, with the kids crying and Mary grim. Shortly before my arrival Ryan and Ani had been jumping on the bed; Ryan had fallen and hit his teeth on the bedpost. Now his two upper middle incisors protruded at a gruesome angle. Mary drove to the hospital while I sat in the backseat with my arms around the small boy in my lap. Except for the occasional whimper he was quiet, which wasn't reassuring. Ryan had the characteristic, common among males in my family, of complaining in inverse proportion to the severity of his problems, the extreme example in this regard being his greatgrandfather, who'd walked into the hospital with advanced pancreatic cancer, of which he'd given no sign, and died five days later. Admittedly that wasn't a likely outcome of the present crisis; disfigurement, on the other hand . . . eh, better to dwell on the positive. My brave little guy.

At the hospital the X-ray technician asked Mary if she were pregnant. “I don't know,” she said. “I might be.” Not wishing to chance it, I held Ryan while the technician made the exposures. When the prints were ready the doctor pointed out the adult teeth already growing in Ryan's upper jaw. They were intact. Although Ryan would have to endure a prolonged period of toothlessness, eventually the adult teeth would replace the damaged ones, which the doctor had now removed.

We were immensely relieved, but another issue had presented itself: Mary was in fact pregnant, as we confirmed not long after. In itself this was no surprise. We'd bought the Barn House in anticipation of a third child and promptly set about producing one, recognizing that home renovation and gestation were lengthy processes we didn't have time to pursue sequentially and so would have to endure together. We weren't unmindful of the fact that if a domestic emergency arose I'd likely be elsewhere, but Ryan's encounter with the bedpost had made the practical implications more apparent—and Mary would bear all the burden. What's more, we now had a deadline. Assuming we didn't want the simultaneous stress of fixing up a house and tending a newborn, we needed to be done by April of the following year, 1994.

B
y late summer the architectural drawings for the Barn House were approaching completion and some seventy cubic yards of former interior finishing reposed in a landfill, but we were still nowhere near the commencement of construction. I was growing impatient. Part of the problem was the unorthodox nature of the project. In addition to the general contractor, who would handle most of the heavy construction, I had to hire subcontractors for everything else, mainly the mechanical systems. In August I went to Charlie's office to use a drafting table to prepare drawings of the air-conditioning ducts. I did this out of exasperation with the HVAC guys, HVAC standing for heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning.

I never did figure out what the problem was with HVAC guys. Perhaps it was excessive exposure to chlorofluorocarbons. Collectively they were the most argumentative bunch of people I'd ever met. I had three prospective HVAC contractors plus George, my father's sheet-metal worker buddy, come in to look over my project; each one told me to do the opposite of what the previous fellow had said. One advocated having the registers high and the returns low (conditioned air comes out of the registers; stale air returns, as one might suppose, via the returns); the next said to have the returns high and the registers low. One wanted to have the registers diagonally opposite from the returns; another wanted to have them all on the same side of the room. Normally one gets a bead on the right way by interviewing knowledgeable parties and arriving at a consensus, but here that strategy had gone inexplicably awry. The experience was disconcerting. It was like asking directions to the interstate and having one person gesture across the street, a second over yonder, and a third at the North Star.
⁴⁹

The one point on which all the contractors agreed was that I was out of my mind. Maybe I was, but I was the owner of the house and it was my money. I figured the least they could do was humor me. We had a number of conversations along the following lines:

Thus my dour mood. It was wearing to be constantly thought of as a lunatic, and now I could see it was going to be expensive, too. I had hauled up on an inescapable fact of life: For any object having to do with human shelter, be it repainting the birdbath or heating the house, the building trades offered a certain path—to be fair, in late-twentieth-century America, a pretty wide path—and as long as you kept within it you had only to pick up the phone, collect estimates, hire a vendor, look in on the workers periodically, and in the end write a check. Despite all the kvetching you heard, and I say this sincerely, the fundamental competence of the American home-building industry with respect to any well-defined task in what was after all a complex and perilous business—consider the fell consequences if the plumber overlooks a gas leak—was one of the wonders of the world.

Strike out into the bush, however—try to get your project done in a way that tradesmen weren't accustomed to doing—and God help you, you were on your own. It's not that you couldn't find anyone willing to take on the job; I'd found Eddie, after all, who after an hour's inspection had a far more detailed idea of what needed to be done to my house than I did. But he was an exception. Most contractors lacked his grasp, and if you didn't feel like paying extravagant sums, I'd come to realize, you needed to break the assignment down into what from their perspective would seem manageable tasks.

I made two decisions. First, I would repipe the radiators myself. I'd never done this before and had no idea what was involved, but how hard could it be? Second, I'd prepare my own engineering drawings for the air-conditioning ducts. The attic framing was complicated; routing the ducts would require somebody to, you know, think, and in the course thereof one might make a mistake and underbid a job that required an expensive solution. If I could eliminate some of the uncertainty, my theory was, perhaps I would get a more reasonable bid. I did, although in retrospect it must be said that HVAC was one of those businesses exhibiting the Law of Conservation of Price—namely, all bids for a job are the same, the only difference being how much comes out of your pocket and how much comes out of your hide.

At any rate, it was pleasant that August day to stand languidly in the drafting room of Charlie's high-ceilinged office and look down on the great avenue and feel a kinship with Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, two of the most eminent names in Chicago architecture, who had done the same thing in an office in the building next door about a hundred years before. Then I told myself it was time to quit daydreaming and buckle down to work. I started with what was known as a sepia print, a reproduction of Charlie's original floor plan having, as the name suggests, a brownish cast to it. Using ink eradicator I obliterated unnecessary details—they vanished at a stroke—and drew in the lines indicating the ducts, registers, and returns. Adler and Sullivan, and pretty much every other architect in America, had done their drawings in much the same way for the previous 115 years, since the introduction of blueprinting to the United States from the UK, where it had been invented. The whole enterprise, what with the rolls of brown-toned drawings, the simple tools—you kept your compass point sharp using a pad of sandpaper—and for that matter the antique airy room, in the middle of which was a narrow spiral staircase leading up to a gallery crammed with books and ledgers, had a distinctly nineteenth-century feel to it.

Well it might. Although I didn't know it at the time, I was working in the twilight of an era then passing into history: the time when architects designed with pencil and paper. The Barn House was the last project in which Charlie was able to display his fluid hand in routine drafting. Shortly after he finished our job, his firm took out most of the drawing tables and installed computers, and he worked almost exclusively with mouse and keyboard from then on. He still did (and does) renderings for presentation purposes by hand, but nobody after that got an ordinary blueprint from Charlie that he wanted to take home and frame.

Whatever might be said for my drawings from an artistic standpoint, which wasn't much, making them was a useful process—it obliged me to think the project through. I saw now why the HVAC guys had been reluctant to bid realistically for the job. On the third floor, for example, I'd blithely proposed running ducts through a labyrinth of existing wooden framing behind one of the chimneys. On applying the higher cortical faculties to the problem I realized it couldn't be done. I decided I'd have to drop the ceiling in the front bedroom and run the ducts through the space thus created, which would simplify the routing to a considerable extent, and while I wouldn't say the result was elegant, at least the thing was physically possible.

When I'd finished my drawings, Charlie sent them out to the repro house; the copies were delivered to my home a day or two later. I mailed sets to several potential bidders, including a young journeyman named Pete, who'd been recommended by George. We had a somewhat tense negotiation—I had a price in mind, and was determined to get it—but eventually we came to an agreement: $9,000 to install all the ductwork, coolant lines, and control wiring; hook up the air handlers and condensers; and get the whole thing to work. That took care of the VAC. For the H, I was on my own.

Meanwhile I was still in the process of hiring a general contractor. I wanted Eddie if I could afford him, but prudence suggested learning how his prices compared. I'd spoken to two other contractors besides Eddie—we'll call them Matt and József. In July I'd sent all three the scope of work, a bid sheet, and a set of preliminary plans. One by one they'd shown up to walk through the house and take notes.

One morning I was carting debris out of the house into the Dumpster. Matt was sitting on the front steps jotting notes on a pad. He was a young fellow, wearing shorts and looking jaunty. “So,” I said, “what are you going to charge me? Three hundred thousand dollars?”

Facetiousness with contractors is always a risky business. “Probably more than that,” said Matt, continuing to write.

“Right.”

Matt looked up. “I'm serious,” he said.

The day seemed suddenly cooler. The limit of what we could afford was $250,000.

I spent several nervous days awaiting the arrival of the bids. Once they were in hand I spread them on the desk and compared the bottom lines:

Well now. A spread of nearly $100,000 on a $250,000 job represented a significant difference of opinion. However, closer examination partly allayed my concern. I suspected I was merely seeing the ignorance surcharge—the padding a contractor added to his bid as insurance against what he didn't know.

The usefulness of an uncertain grasp of the facts is often underappreciated in commercial dealings. Ideally you wanted to discover which of the parties chasing your business knew more, but sometimes it was enough to find out which of them knew less. The three bids were instructive in this regard. Two were fairly close while one was an outlier. Either Matt knew something the others didn't or he didn't know something they did. The early returns favored the latter, but one wanted to be sure. I got Matt on the phone. Among other things he had priced exterior demolition at close to $15,000, compared with $6,000 for József and a little over $4,000 for Eddie. When I asked about this, he said he felt it would take four men two weeks to finish removing the cedar shakes. Two of my brothers had ripped off a sizable portion of the siding in an afternoon. No way would four guys need two weeks to dispose of the rest.