The Barn House (32 page)

I
n the seven months between Labor Day and April Fool's Day, which seem like appropriate bookends, we succeeded in establishing a basic level of livability in the house. We installed the doors and woodwork (I first stripped the paint from the ancient lock sets and hinges, which Tom and Frank then mortised into place); finished the floors; tiled the bathrooms, the laundry room, and front and rear entry hall floors; mounted the kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities and installed the countertops; hooked up the appliances, plumbing fixtures, and numerous electric lights; rebuilt a couple of fireboxes for future fireplaces; installed a shower door; put up closet shelves, clothes and towel hooks, toilet paper holders, and other fixtures; replaced the useless 1890s-vintage wooden track on the living room pocket door with a proper steel one; installed a new balustrade, indistinguishable except in minor respects from the original, to replace the one missing at the top of the front stairs; hauled an enormous mound of trash out of the backyard; and in the remaining time, ate, attempted to earn money, tended to sick or crying children, and every so often slept.

The Chief assisted when he could. Once again we were obliged to learn new trades, or at least enlarge our knowledge of old ones, such as how to glue PVC pipe together. The Chief approached all these projects with his customary optimism.

“This plastic pipe is the greatest,” he said one evening as we rerouted a two-inch drain in the basement. “It's cheap, easy to cut, no threading.”

“I guess,” I said. “The only drawback is it'll give you lung cancer.”

“Lung cancer?”

“Yeah, smell this stuff.” I waved the glue applicator in his direction. The fumes were overpowering.

“Smoke a cigarette and you won't notice the smell,” said the Chief.

By the time spring arrived the Barn House's residents could use the toilet, take a shower, and brush their teeth at a sink without having to change rooms, much less go to somebody else's house. We could cook a meal and wash and put away the dishes. In short, we could lead, by city standards, normal lives.

We'd turned an important corner. One indication of this was that the laboriously refinished floors now seemed ordinary. I wasn't disappointed with the work; on the contrary, I'd come round to Charlie's view that the floors were just right—but they'd passed from the realm of the heroic to the everyday. Not three months previously men operating heavy machinery and making God's own din had struggled mightily in this confined space—now children played on the result without a thought.
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The floors in my mind's eye had receded from the foreground into the background; they looked as though they'd always been that way.

That was the idea. I wanted everything to seem not bright and shiny and new, but timeless—a common enough ambition, I suppose. But it's trickier than you might think.

There are several schools of thought on how to modernize an old house. The first is to pay no attention at all and buy whatever they're pushing this week at the home-improvement store. Happily those taking this approach aren't so numerous as formerly.

The second school consists of the historical purists, who attempt to re-create the house as it stood at a particular moment in time. Mary and I had visited a few homes redone along these lines on neighborhood house tours, most of them magnificent exemplars of late Victoriana with ceiling medallions and period antiques and sometimes operating gas fixtures. Some might object that these places were more like museums than homes, which I don't think was necessarily the case, but they required more time and money than we had.

A third group consists of persons of artistic inclination who use home remodeling as an opportunity to make a design statement. We had a number of friends and acquaintances in this category. I remember one gay couple who created a series of rooms so brilliantly conceived and executed you felt you ought to take off your hat on entering—among other things they'd rebuilt a closet, and I mean a closet-sized closet as opposed to the larger walk-in variety, as a library complete with floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves, what I recall as walnut crown molding with indirect lighting, and a rolling wooden ladder with brass fittings on a (very) short track.

I admired these efforts, but they weren't what I wanted to do, even if I'd had the resources and talent. For one thing, the arty types often produced bits that were first-rate considered singly but incongruous taken together, lacking a common thread. More important, they were too clearly the product of an individual rather than of their time, whereas we wanted a house rooted in history.

I'm not sure if I picked up this idea working in the trades, but that reinforced it. Once an old electrician, seeing me crank down a fitting with what he considered excessive force, commented, “I'd hate to be the guy that comes after you.” I thought that was an interesting way of looking at things. You weren't the first person to work on the project; you wouldn't be the last. You were appreciative if your predecessors had done their work competently and so made your job easier; by the same token, you didn't want to leave a mess for the next guy. The project—any construction or remodeling job, really—was a sort of serial collaboration.

I'd come to think of an old house in the same way. You owned it temporarily. In the rare case you might find the place such a shambles that the only sensible thing was to start over, but more commonly you'd discover well-crafted elements that needed only a little repair and buffing up. Other parts of the house might require rebuilding, and naturally you'd want to install modern mechanical systems and amenities. But the place had been built in a certain style, and it seemed perverse simply to ignore that style in constructing new. What's more, I thought it self-evident that all the parts of the house ought to exhibit some unity of design. The result if skillfully done would be a modern house that retained its original character while reflecting at least in small ways the times—and not necessarily just the good times—through which it had passed.
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That was my goal, and by now I felt some confidence that we'd at least partly achieved it. In the spring of 1995 my brother John, standing on the front sidewalk during his first visit in close to two years, stared at the top floor of the house with its turret and dormer and asked, “So what did you do up there, anyway?” I was delighted—I'd wanted no one to be able to tell what we'd done. We'd demolished and rebuilt the roof; what John saw now bore only a faint resemblance to the house when we'd bought it. But it likely approximated the building's appearance as originally constructed, and more important looked right, to the point that it was hard to imagine the place having looked any other way.

Still, the house was far from complete. We'd done no decorating. The woodwork, however comely, was unpainted, and the walls were uniformly white. We had no curtains, no rugs, not even closet doors. We had fireboxes built into the chimneys but no mantelpieces—the fireplaces were mere holes in the walls. We had no garage and no landscaping. Barely half the house's interior space was usable in other than the roughest sense. The “office” where I did my writing was an unfinished (and more pertinently, uninsulated) attic—my computer perched on cardboard boxes; over the winter I'd pecked away at the keyboard in my parka, warmed mainly by a space heater. The living and dining rooms weren't finished either—the floors had to be rebuilt, and having exhausted our funds, I was the one who was going to have to rebuild them.

That was the project to which I turned next. By now I'd abandoned hopes of restoring the dining room's intricate parquet veneer (too far gone) or installing walnut inlay as a replacement (too expensive). I'd learned enough to ask how much more quartersawn oak would cost compared to plainsawn—don't worry, the distinction will be explained in due time—but the price we'd been quoted was $5,000, which was out of the question.

Instead I settled for getting the floor level. I mentioned earlier that the floors in the front of the house had buckled after someone's misbegotten experiment in bricking up the foundation wall below—you'd think a mole had tunneled around the perimeter of the rooms. Having first removed the boxes piled in the living room by the movers, I gingerly extracted what remained of the parquet, pried up the subflooring, removed the bricks, then reinstalled the planks. Determined to avoid the squeaks endemic to wooden houses, the Chief and I then fastened all the planking in both rooms to the joists below with drywall screws—fifteen hundred in all. That done—the preparatory work took nearly three weeks—we called the floor guys back to install and finish new oak flooring. While they were in the midst of this, a fill-in mailman stuck his head through the living room window and asked, “Does anybody live here?” But we wound up with a helluva floor.

 

C
onstruction on the first and second floors was now more or less complete, but Mary remained unhappy—though she'd made things reasonably homey, there wasn't a room in the house that was anywhere near done, done here defined as all work finished and the rooms decorated. Experienced rehabbers will recognize the great perceptual divide these words signify. Some may call it a male-female thing, but that's apt to lead to bitter remarks. Rather, let's say it springs from the division of labor.

Typically in any home rehabilitation project you have the construction department and the ministry of interior design. The construction crew thinks it is carrying a good deal of the load and can point to indeterminate but certainly large quantities of plans drawn, dust swallowed, earth moved, pipes run, large and intransigent objects transported, nails nailed and screws screwed, wires pulled, risks taken, injuries sustained, subcontractors set straight, paperwork submitted and submitted again, crud shoveled, mistakes corrected, complex and dimly understood systems successfully installed, disasters averted, difficult persons dealt with, and withal a host of troubles patiently borne. The decorating unit thinks this is all very well, but we still don't have a front-hall rug.

Moreover, from the standpoint of bringing matters to a conclusion, the renovating moieties often have radically different ideas on how to get from point A to point B. The construction crew believes, and is confident any reasonable and practical observer would agree, that one ought to stain all the woodwork, then refinish all the doors, then paint all the radiators, and in general perform the many tasks that need doing in a global and systematic manner, whereas the decorating lobby thinks we should finish (and I mean totally finish) one room at a time. I make no attempt to judge the wisdom of these disparate approaches, or to recount the outcome of every step in the decision-making process. Suffice it to say that one or both of the participants spent much of their time mad.

Mary had other complaints, too. Her commute downtown from our old town house, which was only a mile or so from the Loop, took fifteen minutes door to door; now the trip, consisting of a circuitous L ride plus a few blocks' walk on either end, took her forty-five minutes. She also didn't like the walk to the L station, which took her down a dreary commercial street. I couldn't do anything about the long commute, but I thought maybe I could brighten up the walk. The commercial street had a wide paved median formerly used for streetcar tracks—why not plant trees in it? When we got a flyer announcing a meeting to reestablish the local community association, I saw my chance. I decided I'd help get things organized, then lobby the alderman and the city to landscape the median.

Things began promisingly. At the initial meeting, held in the basement of a nearby church, I learned that the community group had been quite active at one time—they'd been the people behind the nightly CB patrol—but had fallen dormant once crime became less pressing. I volunteered for the bylaws committee, figuring once we got our paperwork in order (legal issues required that the organization be essentially created afresh), officers elected, and other busywork dispatched, we'd be ready to take on city hall.

It didn't work out that way. Here again I'll omit a great deal of dispiriting detail, but basically the bylaws committee, having cooked up a serviceable document, prevailed upon party A, who had a history with the prior organization and thus some stature, to chair a meeting of the membership to push through the bylaws without unnecessary ado. However, despite the fact that the necessary parliamentary maneuvering had been reviewed with some care beforehand, party A on taking the gavel ignored these preparations and let the debate drift, with the result that the meeting sputtered out and the participants scattered with essentially nothing resolved. Many more meetings were required to get the organization reconstituted, by which time another resident, an eccentric older man, had sent around flyers for a competing organization he claimed was the rightful heir to the dormant group (and more significantly, to its bank account), confusing everyone and requiring much tedious sorting out. By the time all was settled—believe me, I spent months at this—many had lost interest and turnout at meetings was poor.

In the end it didn't matter. Although we hadn't done any lobbying, local officials a little later announced they were going to landscape the medians of the nearby commercial streets as part of a city beautification program, which in due course they did—an indication, although I didn't see it that way at the time, that we were being swept up in a larger tide.

None of this happened quickly enough to relieve the tense domestic situation. Mary and I had an argument that spring—I don't remember much about the timing or the circumstances, except that we were driving somewhere on an errand. She'd been grousing off and on for months about how miserable our life was. I hadn't had much response up till then; the point was tough to dispute. What set me off on this occasion, I think, was what I took to be the implication that, whereas she lived an existence of unrelieved pain, I occasionally enjoyed myself. Looking back on it now, I concede there was some truth in this. I always enjoyed myself—I found points of entertainment in a root canal. What's more, if we may resort once more to the out-of-control car metaphor, I at least had the benefit of being at the wheel, while she was screaming in the backseat.