The Barn House (9 page)

We encountered one unexpected obstacle early on—the matter of insurance. The bank wanted to see a copy of a valid hazard insurance policy with a liability limit of at least $1 million. What heart-stopping disaster would run to that kind of money I didn't care to contemplate, but the amount wasn't the issue. Rather, it was this: Our regular carrier refused to insure a house that was unoccupied. We explained that we couldn't occupy the house; we were renovating it. This concept proved difficult for the agent to grasp. His was a suburban company; his idea of home renovation was recarpeting the guest room. A house so far gone that you couldn't live in it while working on it was beyond his comprehension. We had several exasperating conversations; it was like explaining quantum mechanics to a sheep. We hunted around and found another carrier. The carrier sent out an inspector. More problems. The company would only insure the house if we replaced the main electrical panel. The old one was a fire hazard.

I couldn't argue. I'd seen more impressive-looking apparatus in a tackle box. But I couldn't legally replace the panel myself; the job had to be done by a licensed electrician. I asked around. Friends who were also renovating a house suggested a man named Lee. He'd done some work for them; they were satisfied with the quality; the price had been reasonable. The only drawback was that Lee was hard to reach. However, it was my lucky day—I got him on the first try. He agreed to stop by the following morning to replace the panel. I said I'd leave the rear basement door unlocked so he could get started. This was perhaps an unorthodox procedure for someone I hadn't yet met, but I felt the lack of insurance acutely—I was certain the house was going to burn down at any moment. (Indeed, for months every time I turned the last corner en route to the Barn House I felt genuinely relieved to find it was still standing.) I felt I had no time to lose.

I was late getting to the house the next day. The basement door was open; I could hear noise inside. Walking into the room where the fuse box was, I found a tall, gaunt black man with a salt-and-pepper goatee fussing with a piece of pipe. I guessed he was in his sixties. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, what I recall as a tan army-issue sleeveless T-shirt, and baggy khaki fatigue pants. On his head was a baseball cap with a black, red, and green flag insignia above which was the word AFRICA. He was smoking a long, thin cigarillo. He looked like a cross between Fidel Castro and Malcolm X.

He looked up as I entered. “How do,” he said in a drawling baritone, extending his hand. “You must be Ed. I'm Lee.”

I had one of those watershed moments one encounters from time to time. You'll appreciate that the total package Lee presented at that moment was, even by city standards, pretty out there. Then again, I knew if I wanted somebody in a blue work-shirt with
Vern
embroidered on the pocket I should have moved to the suburbs. I stuck out my hand and we shook.

Lee had a courtly manner and a dry sense of humor; he was one of those people it was impossible to dislike. He showed me what he'd done. He'd installed a temporary new service panel next to the old one and switched over the cabling. Then, his sense of aesthetics offended by the derelict basement wiring, he'd ripped out the worst of it, replaced it with conduit, and installed a couple of ceiling lights. The result was a great improvement—we'd easily pass insurance inspection. I asked him how much.

“Seventy-five dollars,” he said.

The city guy learns at an early age never to appear surprised by anything, and that skill came in handy now. The typical quote for a new main panel at the time was on the order of $1,000. Granted, what Lee had done was only a quick fix. The temporary panel was essentially a long-term equipment loan. Still, $75 was startlingly cheap. I'd need someone to install the permanent service and possibly help with other work; I could see already that there would be little slack in the budget. Lee offered the prospect that I'd be able to conclude the project without having to knock off gas stations in the late stages.

My friends proved to be right—it was never easy to reach Lee. If he wasn't home when you called, you could leave a number with whomever answered, presumably one of his kids; but the chances of the message getting through weren't high. Later a friend told me that Lee was often unavailable for long stretches because his wife had thrown him out of the house. “He's quite the charmer,” she said by way of explanation, with what seemed to me a silly grin. But I was willing to put up with that. Lee, too, belonged to the Brotherhood of the Right Way.

My earlier excursion on this subject may have given the impression that the right way was the exclusive province of the professional crowd. Not at all. I had learned about the right way from my father, who was as working-class as they got.

Long experience with my father had taught me two things about the right way: (1) Doing things properly would produce a beautiful result in which one could take great satisfaction when the job was finished; and (2) there was such a thing as taking it over a cliff. In the latter department, for example, we had the matter of haircuts. When I was small my father had been the household barber; his idea of a proper haircut was to make you look like you had just been inducted into the Marines and to take a full hour doing it. In matters more worthy of his attention, however, my father did magnificent work. My parents had the only hundred-year-old house in northern Illinois in which every wall was straight and every corner square, testimony to what could be accomplished with infinite patience and a truckload of cedar shims.

My father's general approach, for better or worse, had rubbed off on me. As the significant others in our respective lives will surely agree, it was a mixed blessing. My parents once had an argument about the proper method of sanding the floor in their bedroom. My mother reasoned that all they needed to do was sand around the perimeter, because there would always be a rug in the middle. My father bridled at this suggestion, because it wasn't right, and I have to say my sympathies were with the old man. On the other hand, I also have to admit I don't know whether they ever sanded the middle of the floor or not, because it has been covered by a rug for nigh on forty years.

An adherent of the right way reconciled himself early in life to certain intransigent facts. The first was that the right way was only sporadically the easy way, and as such was rarely going to be on sale at The Home Depot. Another, which is perhaps the first restated, can be expressed in the form of a lament:
If I abandoned my principles,
the righteous person might say,
life would be devoid of meaning. On the other hand, I could probably make a lot more money
. One knew certain persons who when rehabbing a house would re-side only the front, because that was the part you saw from the street. This offended the sensibilities of any right-thinking person, but was boatloads cheaper. In fact, one observed with chagrin, this sort of blatant chiseling had become routine in American home building, where people (my sister, for one) thought nothing of buying a house with brick in front and vinyl siding everywhere else.

I understood cost-benefit analysis, the laws of supply and demand, the greatest good for the greatest number, and that sort of thing. That didn't mean I had to like the result. I didn't live in the city because it was economical; I didn't propose to live in an old house because it was cheap. The world could do as it liked; I—you can imagine what a trip I was to live with—was going to do it right.

My goal in getting people to work on the house, therefore, was to hire disciples of the right way whenever possible. There were several reasons for this. The first, naturally, was that the job would get done properly without my having to hover constantly over the proceedings like a fretful mother. Second, and I may as well be frank about this, people who liked to do things right had a tendency to undercharge. Finally, an adherent of the right way was a party with whom one could profitably consult. We'll return to this matter in a moment.

A month before we were scheduled to close on the Barn House we got a call from the appraiser asking if we knew there was a hole in the roof, the sequela to the aforementioned deck. We admitted that we did. We'd become accustomed to being thought of as crazy people. My family in particular thought fixing up the Barn House was an act of the profoundest folly. My brother John, who was on his second house, and for whom I'd wired two kitchens, four bathrooms, a bedroom, a garage, an attic playroom, and sundry other portions of miscellaneous premises, offered the opinion that the Barn House was a bigger project than his and the old man's houses put together. That was an exaggeration in one sense, true in another. We'd gutted probably half of my parents' home, and my brother had done the same with maybe 40 percent of his, but not all at once, and the breadth of the work in both houses was nowhere near as extensive as in ours. Truth was, we'd signed up for a much larger project than we were initially willing to admit.

We needed to replace all the pipes and wires throughout the house and out to the street. (We omitted the sewer tile, but shouldn't have, to our subsequent regret.) We had to replace all the plaster. There was a point early in the project where I thought I might save the odd wall here and there, and walked around marking
X
s on sections I wanted to preserve; reality eventually set in, but quite late in the project there was still one chunk of original plaster and lath approximately eight square feet in area that I planned to save, partly because it was intact and partly because it was a token of an era long past; however, the fit was upon the lads that day (I wasn't present) and it all wound up in the Dumpster. The heating system needed to be completely redone. We needed to install an air-conditioning system, intercoms, an alarm system, telephone and cable TV wiring. Sixty percent of the flooring needed to be replaced and the rest refinished. All of the existing windows save two were destined for landfill. The front porch—junk. Likewise the repulsive turret roof, a fair number of the doors (the rest would have to be refinished), much of the woodwork, the fireplaces, plus much more that's painful to recall and that we'll get to soon enough anyway. Suffice it to say we had a full plate.

Two weeks before closing the current owner phoned. There had been a drenching rainstorm the previous night; in the middle of it, the electricity on the second floor of the house had failed. He'd been unable to restore it, and had the idea this might queer the deal. Perhaps it should have; probably at least I should have taken advantage of the opportunity to strike a harder bargain. But I didn't. The truth was I didn't care. I expected to replace all the wiring anyway; it was immaterial whether it worked beforehand or not.

I planned to do some of the work myself, but given the scale of the project I knew I wouldn't be able to accomplish more than a fraction of what was required. I began soliciting recommendations for general contractors. Finding a good contractor was a challenge under the best of circumstances, and living in the city made it more difficult still. I'd heard many bizarre tales.
²⁶
But I wasn't too worried. I'd heard about Eddie, whom I had reason to believe was well acquainted with the right way.

Eddie was a Polish immigrant—Chicago at one time had had the largest concentration of Poles of any city except Warsaw.
²⁷
He'd arrived on a tourist visa in 1978, but the political troubles that eventually sparked the Solidarity movement made it seem unwise to go back. He'd been a grade school teacher in Poland, but lacking accreditation in the United States and having long been fascinated by construction anyway had gone into the remodeling business. Our friends Beth and Zet had been his clients; they described him in rapturous terms.

“We were remodeling our kitchen, and on one side there was a staircase coming down and a boot room with walls separating everything,” Zet said. “We were thinking about removing the walls and opening up the space but weren't sure if we could. Eddie said the walls weren't structural and suggested we take them out and put in a railing on the stairs instead. He said, ‘If I were a child, I would want to sit at the top of the stairs so I could look out at the trees in the yard.' I thought:
I want this guy.”

We invited Eddie over. He was a compactly built man with a neatly trimmed beard and a precise manner of speaking. We sat at the dining room table in our town house and discussed the work. One question regarding which we had come to no firm conclusions was the method of heating the house. The Barn House when we bought it was heated by hot-water radiators. They had been installed some years following the house's original construction, and the pipes were exposed. The radiators themselves were bulky. We assumed without having given the matter much thought that we would remove the pipes and radiators and install ductwork for gas forced-air, by far the most common type of home heating in the United States. In addition to being relatively cheap, forced air had the great advantage that you could use the ducts to air-condition the house in the summer.

Eddie was unenthusiastic about forced air. The rooms in the house were large, he pointed out; it wasn't as though we couldn't spare the space for radiators. Concealing ductwork, on the other hand, would require us to install false ceilings or soffits, either of which from the standpoint of appearances was something of a kludge. More to the point, radiators provided the best heat. He thought we should just conceal the pipes, easy enough to do while we had the walls open.

As he spoke I realized with budding certainty that he was right. The house I had grown up in had been heated by radiators; it had been comfortable even on the coldest days. When I came inside after jumping in the snow, I could sit on a radiator and warm up. In contrast, the places I had lived in that were heated by forced air always seemed to have cold spots. In our newly constructed town house, for example, the furnace was located on the second floor. To heat the first-floor kitchen, the blower had to force the naturally buoyant warm air down ten feet, then twenty feet laterally beneath the floor, then up through the registers. The system didn't work very well; you were fighting basic physics. We froze in that kitchen on cold days.