The Barn House (10 page)

I considered. We were going to rearrange some rooms; we would need to install additional heat in a few locations. As far as I knew old-fashioned radiators were no longer available. I had seen baseboard heaters that I knew used hot water. I asked Eddie whether I could use them.

Eddie shook his head. A radiator contained a large reservoir of water. A baseboard heater, on the other hand, consisted of a straight piece of pipe with perpendicular fins at intervals to radiate away the heat. The two didn't have the same . . . at this point Eddie stumbled. He had reached the frontiers of his English. But I saw what he was driving at.

“Thermal mass?” I said.

“Thermal mass,” he said. A baseboard heater didn't contain much water; it would cool off quickly, and with it the room. An old-fashioned radiator contained a great deal of water and would stay warm for a much longer time. You couldn't operate radiators and baseboard heaters off the same furnace, or at any rate off the same pump; they had different cycling requirements. No matter, Eddie assured me—I could get all the radiators I needed secondhand.

Thermal mass was a basic engineering concept, but not every contractor understood it, particularly in an age when hot-water heat was no longer widely used. Here was a fellow, I decided, who knew the right way to do things, and would go to some trouble to do them. I needed to talk to other contractors and get other bids, but this was my guy.

W
e'd first viewed the house in January and taken possession in May. It was now early June. We still had a great deal of planning to do and hadn't hired a contractor, but we were far enough along to know there were sizable portions of the house we'd need to demolish. We hadn't yet arrived at the conclusion, immediately obvious to nearly everyone else, that the house would need to be completely gutted, but even so there were truck-loads of material that needed to be pulled down and removed. This wasn't a task that required advanced skills, and we wanted to economize. I got on the phone.

One thing any guy working on an old house discovers is how easy it is to recruit other males to assist with demolition. Ask for help painting, or hanging wallpaper, or any other mundane chore and you're sure to hear some feeble excuse. But give a guy a chance to spend a couple hours reducing parts of a century-old building to rubble and he's there. Over a period of several weeks I asked perhaps thirty male friends and relations if they'd be willing to spend a few hours ripping down walls. Close to two dozen agreed. Clearly I was tapping into some atavistic male impulse. If I'd promised they'd also get to fire automatic weapons I'd probably have gotten the whole squad.

You may suppose my friends were drooling jamokes. Not at all. I had a surgeon in there, a dentist, an architect (Charlie, who wasn't reluctant to get his fingers dirty), a judge, several writers, a former contributing editor for a national magazine, a computer programmer, a newspaper production manager, a video producer, a college dean, an auto service manager, a lawyer, an accountant, and miscellaneous other intellectuals, professionals, and men of the world. If the house had fallen in on the bunch of them, the average intelligence of the central United States would have noticeably declined. As it was they attacked the house with the elan of the Mongols sacking Kiev. The house echoed with the sound of blows, the squeal of rending lumber, and the crash of falling debris.

The surgeon and the editor went downstairs to pull down the basement ceiling. About forty-five minutes later they came back up. They were completely covered with fine black dust, which had poured out from behind the lath and plaster. The only parts of them that weren't completely grimy were the whites of their eyes. They looked like Welsh miners. “I think we've established that your house was heated by coal,” said the surgeon, making a facial expression I took to be a grin. A few hours later he was back at the hospital rummaging through someone's internal organs, presumably having washed his hands first. Demolition wasn't something most guys wanted to make a career out of, but it lent life a certain tang.
²⁸

There was no end to the surprises one might encounter in an old house. I'd heard of people who found that the previous owner had stuffed bags of cocaine into cracks in the walls (whence, one supposes, the term “crack cocaine”); who on their first walk-through were obliged to step over a body in the living room (sleeping rather than dead, one presumes, although I imagine the matter wasn't subject to close investigation); who, while removing the wall tile in the upstairs bathroom, fell through the bottom of the tub and the floor beneath (there had been an undiscovered leak), their legs dangling in the downstairs hall. Nothing quite that dramatic happened to us, but we did find quite a few curiosities, the following among them:

The work that first few weekends was partly exploratory—we needed to establish what was salvageable and what would have to be replaced. One task was to see what the exterior of the house looked like under the ugly brown shakes. To my satisfaction we found close-spaced cedar clapboard, grimy but in better shape than one might have expected. Though the shake installer had done his best to conceal it, the Barn House had been a handsome structure at one time, and the thought that it might be again now seemed less far-fetched.

The back of the house I wasn't so sure of. A room had been added to the rear of the kitchen in the 1930s—probably, if one judged from the quality of the work, by the same palookas responsible for the roof in front. The room was poorly proportioned, the doorway was too narrow, and the ceiling had partly fallen in—this was the room with the hole in the roof where the deck had been nailed on. On the other hand, it was already there, an advantage if the basic construction was sound. That was doubtful, but one wanted to be methodical. One Saturday I sent my brother Bob out back with a pick and shovel to plumb the depths of the addition's concrete footings. The building code in Chicago required that footings extend at least forty-two inches below grade, beneath the frost line. If the footings hadn't been done properly, the addition would have to be demolished.

Bob strolled out to the front of the house forty minutes later. He was of the view that the Barn House had not been one of my shrewder investments. I detected the glimmer of a smirk.
³¹

“Ed,” he said, “do you know your house is built on sand?”

I went back to look. He'd dug down about three feet. Sure enough, I saw about eight inches of topsoil, and beneath that what to all appearances was beach sand. The entire neighborhood, I now recalled, had been built on an old sandbar, a vestige of the days when a glacial lake had covered the region. I remembered a house we'd looked at some time previously, in a neighborhood a little to the north, a charming place except for the fact that it leaned about six inches out of the vertical, like a picture knocked askew. The Barn House wasn't that bad, although it's true the floors in the rooms in the front of the house were two to three inches lower at one end than the other, due in all likelihood to settlement of the central chimney, which defect one seldom noticed except on the third floor, where one had the impression of walking up a hill. I'd long since deferred that problem for later, and decided not to worry about the sand either, since there wasn't much I could do about it at that point. Instead I concentrated on the footings for the addition, which as feared went down only thirty inches and had been poured without benefit of forms, the concrete having simply been dumped in a trench. I'd seen more care used making mud pies. That settled that. The addition would have to go.

By now I was firmly persuaded that no competent thing had been done to the house since the last of the original carpenters had packed up his tools and walked out the door. Everything accomplished subsequently bespoke expedience and cheesiness. One afternoon I walked around the attic and noticed slabs of cheap pressboard that had been nailed up in a vain effort to lend some finish to the space, and was so offended to have such rubbish in my house that I began ripping off pieces and hurling them out the window. Recognizing that this process lacked system, the following weekend I built a chute, which extended from an upper-story window to the Dumpster (actually, a succession of Dumpsters) we had by now more or less permanently parked in the driveway. I was proud of that chute, a sturdy piece of apparatus made of two-by-twos and salvaged Masonite held together with drywall screws.
³²
I'd constructed it in the rain. It wanted elegance, I concede. Indeed, from the standpoint of slovenliness, the property lacked only a car up on blocks. No matter; the current state of affairs was temporary. We'd arrive at elegance in due course.

The chute proved particularly useful in disposing of cellulose. Cellulose is a dirty gray material having the appearance of loose cotton. It had been used to insulate the attic joists at the time of initial construction—there was no insulation in the walls, the builders of the era having been of the view (rightly enough) that you lost more heat through the roof of a house than out the sides. I'd been told the cellulose was made from ground-up scrap paper, the best they could do in the days before fiberglass. It was foul beyond description.
³³
To get at it you had to pull down the attic ceiling, whereupon it fell on you in a clump, covering you with filth and filling the air with dust that left you coughing and wheezing and wiping your eyes. Most of the guys were good for about two hours of this before they decided they had better things to do. I, on the other hand, had to spend days at it.

Late one morning I began shoveling cellulose down the chute. There was a brisk wind out of the south. As the cellulose slid into the Dumpster, clouds of dust billowed off and drifted down the block. I guessed this wouldn't endear me to the neighbors. Sure enough, after about twenty minutes someone emerged from a two-flat a couple doors up and stormed toward the Barn House. It was an older man whose name I later learned was Joe. Joe was in a rage. “What are you doing there?” he demanded. “That stuff is
poison
. It causes
cancer
.” He planted himself near the Dumpster, his fists on his hips, and glared up at me. “It's asbestos, isn't it?”

I was in no mood for palaver—I'd been hawking up cellulose all morning. The thought crossed my mind to reply that I was increasing the value of Joe's property merely by hauling this despicable crud out of the neighborhood and I didn't want to hear any beefs about his house getting dusty. But I repressed the impulse. One wanted to be neighborly. “No,” I hollered down. “It's cellulose. It's not going to hurt anything. I'll be done soon. Please be patient.”

Joe glared awhile longer, then stalked off.
Fabulous,
I thought glumly.
Maybe the wind will blow out of the north tomorrow and I can tick off the other half of the neighborhood.
Truth was, Joe had nothing to worry about—the real asbestos was already gone. I'd called up asbestos abatement firms based on the size of their ads in the phone book and had gotten quotes of up to $5,000. One of the callees turned out to be an old pigeon-racing buddy of my father's. (Long story. Don't ask.) He volunteered to do the work at cost—$1,100. The process had been completely invisible to me. I arrived at the Barn House one day to find the stuff gone—pipe insulation, floor tile. It was one of many breaks we got that for a long time we considered just luck.