The year 1889 was a big one for Seattle as well, but its trajectory went in the opposite direction. On June 6, a woodshop worker tipped an overheated glue pot onto a pile of wood shavings, and it quickly turned into a conflagration. The tide in Puget Sound was out, the fire chief was nowhere to be found, and the commercial area of Seattle burned to the ground in hours. Afterward, a group of six hundred business owners got together and pledged to rebuild using only brick and stone. Over the next year, buildings shot up, and people flooded over the pass from the east, following the scent of possibility. By 1890, Seattle had a population of forty thousand. By 1893, it was the terminus of the Great Northern Railway.
In the years since then, many of Seattle’s impressive early buildings have been demolished as the city has grown and modernized. Port Townsend, on the other hand, has remained a kind of architectural Pompeii, preserved in time by simple economics, as few residents had the money to remodel or replace those gorgeous Victorian buildings. It was 1958 before a couple from nearby Tacoma started the tradition of out-of-towners coming in and renovating. It’s a catch-22, and most of the townspeople seem to know it—there isn’t much local money for restoration, but it is often unclear whether the newcomers will value the history of the houses enough to preserve them.
* * *
—
IT WAS AN ATTITUDE that Ben and I understood. When we first moved to Seattle in 1982, the city was still reeling from the massive Boeing layoffs of the 1970s, and the software industry was barely in its beginning stages. It hadn’t been that long since there’d been a billboard up in the city that read WILL THE LAST PERSON LEAVING SEATTLE - TURN OUT THE LIGHTS. But after the hustle of Los Angeles, Seattle was a paradise to us. Ben and I were grad-student poor, and while we looked for an apartment that first August, we ate our lunches off the blackberry bushes that covered the city like generosity itself. At school, the other teaching assistants looked at me strangely when I automatically flicked my keys between my fingers for safety as I left the English department building in the evening. There was no need for that here, they explained.
But that changed over the decades we lived there. It is estimated that Microsoft alone created twelve thousand millionaire employees, and all that money shifted things. Other technology companies rushed in. Lured by jobs or the natural setting, people came from all across the country. The city turned into something brighter, sharper, and certainly more congested. Ben and I knew we were part of the problem; we were transplants ourselves, and software was how Ben ended up making a living. But that didn’t stop us from mourning the changes in our city and contemplating a change for ourselves.
And so now here we were, part of the latest wave of newcomers splashing up on the shores of Port Townsend. Our purpose was to save a house that was already there, but why should the locals trust us? Who was to say we wouldn’t just grab the land and do whatever we wanted?
Ben and I couldn’t fault the local wariness; it is natural to want to protect what you love. It was how we felt about the house, after all. But as we waited for a response from the heirs—one month after another after another—I told myself that perhaps in the end it wouldn’t matter what the locals thought. If the heirs didn’t make a decision sometime soon, there would be no house left to save.
MAINTENANCE
A peculiar kind of maniac who is one part ability, one part inventiveness, two parts determination, three parts romanticism, and six parts damn foolishness.
—George Nash, describing “old-house people”
FINALLY, AFTER MORE THAN half a year, we got the call.
“It’s yours!” our agent exclaimed. And with that, we were vaulted into a ten-day inspection period. Technically, the control in the situation had been handed to us, but it felt more like that moment after too long standing, shivering, at the top of a ski run, when someone simply pushes you from behind and you start flying down the slope.
“I know a great inspector,” our agent said.
“Will you be there?” I asked.
“I have another appointment,” she said quickly, although we hadn’t yet set a date.
* * *
—
IN A NORMAL SITUATION, ten days is plenty of time to go through a house with an experienced inspector, even to have an old sewer line scoped or to bring in an engineer if things look questionable. Generally, however, the buyers have spent a fair amount of time in the house already. Because our house had never gone on the market, the inspection would be our first opportunity to go inside. They say love is blind; in our case it was almost literally true.
On a cold, clear January morning, we arrived at the house to find a truck from the Port Townsend water department and a visibly agitated man standing next to it.
“Is this your place?” he asked, approaching us with a wrench held loosely in his hand. I took a step back.
“No. I mean, not yet. We’re just doing an inspection,” Ben said in as friendly a tone as he could muster.
“Well, you’ve got problems,” the man said. “When I tried to turn on the water, I got shocked clear back into the street. Just about fried my brain cells.”
As he marched off, another truck arrived—Ron, the inspector. Ron was a lanky man with short white hair and a big smile that showed off the gold braces on his teeth. He looked up at the house, and I saw an expression of admiration flash across his face.
“You know, I’ve watched this one for a long time,” he said. “They don’t make ’em like this anymore.” Then he whipped out a respirator from the front seat of his truck.
“I do this in every house,” he said reassuringly.
I didn’t believe him for a second.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Sure,” Ben replied, and he and I nervously followed Ron toward the front steps.
* * *
—
IN THE EMOTIONALLY TUMULTUOUS process of buying a house, an inspector provides a bulwark of sanity. It is his job (and it is almost universally a “he”) to see the things we home buyers don’t. While we float along in the land of fantasy, imagining how we’ll fill the rooms, an inspector is dealing with more concrete matters, as it were. In his book Renovating Old Houses, George Nash suggests a checklist for a house inspection that is a staggering thirty-two items long. The list includes, in order of decreasing importance and expense, everything from structural timbers to electrical systems, exterior trim paint, and bathroom fixtures. At the very bottom comes one last item: “Does it feel right?”
Unless you are a house geek—or very brave—an inspection is often the lowest point in the buying process. Real estate agents gear up for it, knowing their clients will have a dip in enthusiasm that can slide into an extreme depression. As potential home buyers, we fall for a dream and then are forced to deal with the reality of things that we may not know how, or cannot afford, to fix. Even an inspection of the cleanest house can have this effect—we don’t like someone taking potshots at our new love. But a good inspector will give you both clarity and solutions, and then let you make up your own mind. It’s not fun, but it’s a critical point in the process, and paying attention can help avoid much heartache later.
George Nash says, in Renovating Old Houses, that it’s “commonplace that a marriage needs more than the first flush of passion to sustain itself. Likewise, even if it’s love at first sight, you shouldn’t buy an old house without conducting a thorough investigation into even its most uninviting corners.” His comparison of marriage to house inspections has always made me wonder how many weddings would go forward if couples went through a similar process before the big day, complete with a checklist of current and potential future defects. Foundation—rotten, or not. Electricity—inadequate for the load, or with plenty to spare. That sheltering roof—watertight, or with leaks.
Back in the first century BC, the Roman engineer Vitruvius had a simpler method of determining a good building, which architects still follow today. Vitruvius was creating buildings from scratch, but hi
s principles apply equally well for house inspections. He wrote that to be an example of good architecture, a building must have firmitas, utilitas, and venustas. These Latin words have been translated in different ways, but I like this version best: stability, utility, and beauty. Would that we could all have those traits.
* * *
—
AS RON, BEN, AND I forged our way up onto the front porch, I could only hope that our house might display some of Vitruvius’s principles—or at least get a passing mark on any of the items from Nash’s checklist. To get to the door, we threaded cautiously between busted bags of potting soil, knocking a hip against an old motorcycle, a shin on a rusted pesticide sprayer. Through the greying weave of the curtains, we could see a dense jungle of shapes inside.
When we finally reached the front door, we encountered a brand-new lockset, bright against the dirty white paint. It was the first and only sign of home maintenance we had seen. There were several possible reasons for it, but I realized that it was unlikely I could ever accurately guess which one, or even who had done it.
Ben and I looked at each other. “Is it keeping people out, or stuff in?” he asked.
The key turned with a simple click, but the door resisted our polite and then increasingly forthright pressure against it. The ancient Romans said even doors have a spirit. This one seemed to be warning us—or snarling. I couldn’t tell which. I put my hand against the worn paint of the doorframe and felt it peeling beneath my touch.
“Let us in,” I said under my breath.
* * *
—
ONE OF MY CARDINAL rules when I was a real estate agent was: Wear nice socks. It’s a corollary to the classic maternal admonition never to wear torn underwear, in case you’re in an accident and have to be taken to the hospital. Real estate agents are constantly touring homes and are often faced with the choice of taking off their shoes or putting on the dreaded blue paper booties, which make even the most stylish agent look like an incompetent surgeon. But that was not my reason for choosing the former option, because I will always take off my shoes, whether required to or not, and I encouraged my clients to do the same.
Without shoes, we pay more attention to our sensory interactions with a building. One of my favorite examples of this is the message inherent in the worn indentations in old stone stairs. You can almost feel the river of people who traveled before you, smoothing that stone like water. There is history in every step you take, and you become part of it as you add your own moments of friction, foot against stone. Your individual contribution matters, and yet the stone of the steps would not change, soften, without all those other feet that have—and will—travel across them. Imagine those same stairs replaced with functional grated metal, and history disappears.
As we move through a building, our bodies—hardwired to scan our surroundings for danger, joy, sustenance—are tracking everything, sending us messages through our senses. By eliminating my shoes, I bring myself closer in contact with a house. Without the distraction of heels, I have learned to sense the slope of a floor, noting the times when my balance seems slightly off-kilter. I can feel if the owner has skimped on the pad for that new carpet laid just before putting the house on the market—and if so, I look for other signs of quick fixes in more crucial areas. I watch out for the slight headache that can arrive in a basement, a sure sign my nose has picked up an odor of mold too faint for my conscious mind. If I enter a house that has those plug-in fragrance emitters, I disconnect them if possible. Perhaps the owners have been told a synthetic scent will sell their house—or perhaps they are covering up years of cigarette smoke or pets. In any case, they have placed a barrier between me and their house, and my mind, set off by my nose, reacts with an unconscious distancing that can color the rest of the tour.
These small physical reactions can work in the other direction, too, pushing our emotions ahead of rational thought. The old trick of baking an apple pie before an open house is a classic because it works. So, too, do warm tiles underfoot, smooth paint on a banister, or the dreamy waves in old window glass. One of my favorite things about our apartment in Italy was the antique key we were given for the front gate. I relished the weight of it in my hand, the angular notches in the bit, the clunking sound it made as it turned and opened those massive wrought-metal gates. I still have that key, stolen as we moved out because I couldn’t bear to part with it.
* * *
—
THERE WOULD BE NO taking off of shoes in the house in Port Townsend. By the time we finally got the front door open, using a full-shoulder shove, it was already obvious there was a problem with the foundation. Nothing but a bad foundation can make a door stick in one corner like that. I didn’t need bare feet to tell me—and I would definitely need my shoes for the rest of the journey. If I’d had any illusions otherwise, the question was laid to rest as the light from the open door hit the living room. This was a house for hip boots.
The piles appeared first. Five-foot-tall towers of boxes spread in a slowly disintegrating sprawl across the room, spilling old photos, hammers, pink Bibles, and patent leather shoes, like birdseed from a split bag. A wide soot-covered fireplace dominated the south wall, a black woodstove thrusting out from the hearth like a squat, angry badger. Beside it resided a television the size of a small refrigerator; next to it were two more televisions, each one about twelve years older than the last. Their boxes stood nearby. A footpath led through the stacks to the dining room, revealing a glimpse of dirty red carpet.
I yanked my sleeves over my hands. It was cold anyway, January inside as well as out, which was probably what was keeping the smell to a manageable level. Ron’s respirator was starting to seem smarter by the minute. I pulled my turtleneck up over my nose and followed the sound of underwater breathing into the next room.
If the living room had been full, the dining room was packed, a carnival fun house of objects. Black metal shelving units covered the walls, crammed with dead plants in pink plastic pots, faded boxes of baking soda and cough medicine, a wooden model ferryboat, a fishing rod, cheese graters, and meat grinders. A huge yellowed bra lolled out of a drawer in an overstuffed sideboard, next to a miniature ceramic Saint Bernard, and a neon-painted tourist plate depicting the wonders of Seattle’s Space Needle. Scanning the room, my eye caught on a faded doctor’s invoice for a pregnancy test, dropped casually on top of one of the stacks of papers that covered the table in an unruly skyline.
I looked at it, confused. We hadn’t wanted to know much about the previous owner—ironic, considering we had offered to dispose of his personal possessions—but the one thing I did know was that he had been a widower, his children grown and gone.
I looked around the room again. I’d never been anywhere like this before. My childhood home had been neater and more organized than I was comfortable with—an opinion I’d stated regularly as I moved into my own house, had children, and let their laundry collect on the bathroom floor for a day or two. I wanted a more relaxed life, I’d said, asserting my independence.
But whatever that was in the dining room of the house in Port Townsend, it wasn’t relaxed. It felt alive, vibrating, hungry. I turned toward Ben. In the past, we had made a game of walking through open houses and making up stories about the people who lived there, playing detective in a casual kind of way. But this was different, disquieting, like a stranger’s eyes meeting yours right before the bus hits.
“Let’s see the view,” Ben said, muscling his way over to the window. As he pulled back the heavy curtains, the outside flowed in—Victorian rooftops, the tips of trees, the water beyond. I breathed in slowly through my turtleneck, inhaling the smell of my own skin.
“Now that’s a nice view,” Ron said. “Remember that.”
He walked over to the swinging door on the west wall of the dining room. It seemed likely it would lead to the narrow room that extended out from that side of the house—a butler’s pantry had been our best guess when we’d viewed it from the ou
tside. Ron pushed open the door, and I caught a glimpse of a stove with something ancient and orange dripping down its dull white front, towers of dishes in a grey-tinged sink, a sagging ceiling, and green indoor-outdoor carpet, curling like waves at the edges. The kitchen, if you could call it that.
“Okay then,” Ron said, closing the door firmly and heading toward the staircase to the second floor.
In my mind, I had already started checking off items. Firmitas was a definite no. And according to the expression on the inspector’s face, utilitas was falling by the wayside as well. When I raised my eyebrows in question to him, he just said, “Water,” shaking his head.
* * *
—
“THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL is water,” writes Stewart Brand, the author of How Buildings Learn. “It consumes wood, erodes masonry, corrodes metals, peels paint, expands destructively when it freezes, and permeates everywhere when it evaporates.” And it takes remarkably little for water to gain access to a building and begin its work. You don’t need a hurricane or a flood. All it takes is a missing roof shingle. Peeling paint. A crack in a window frame. In the end, Ben and I would learn that the vast majority of our structural problems could be traced back to a single downspout that had fallen off and never been replaced. One. Single. Downspout.
* * *
—
WHEN YOU STEP BACK and look at the issue from a larger perspective, we really shouldn’t be surprised when our buildings succumb to the treachery of nature. In most parts of the United States, houses are made of wood—or, to put it another way, dead trees. Nature has its own plan for dead trees: When one falls, water, dirt, and insects move in to begin the labor of decomposition. It can take a long time—for the grandest of Douglas firs, it may require hundreds of years—but decomposition always prevails.
House Lessons Page 3