We humans interrupt the cycle. We take the tree while it’s still alive, remove its protective bark, and, from its most vulnerable parts, create our homes. From that point on, preservation depends almost entirely on keeping out the elements of nature—even though rain, dirt, and insects virtually surround the house, and the wood is easily the most exposed part. Seen in this light, concrete foundations, solid roofs, unblemished coats of paint, and tight-fitting windows are all merely stopgap attempts to keep nature from following a system whose efficacy was proven millennia ago. It doesn’t take much thinking before the whole thing begins to seem a little foolhardy.
The early Pacific Northwest settlers built out of wood for a simple reason: that’s what was here. Creating space for a farm, a town, or a store meant clearing trees, their stumps, and their god-awful roots. And while certainly there were stones in the ground, it only made sense to use timber for building. Those early forests are mostly gone, but lumber remains the cheapest and most plentiful building product available.
Wood is how many new cultures begin, until the land is cleared, the trees are chopped, and all that is left is rocks. When we get down to stones, houses gain a shot at permanency; human history defies fire and water and bugs, grabs on to the land, and holds. We get Colosseums and Buckingham Palaces, whitewashed Irish cottages next to dry-stacked rock walls. The shift from wood to stone construction in northern Europe was considered to be of such importance it was given a name: “The Great Rebuilding” in England; “The Victory of Stone over Wood” in France. Slogans for a new era.
For those of us in the United States, and particularly the Northwest, our timber houses are perhaps our most potent daily reminder that we are still a young society, not yet out of the woods. Our houses cannot last forever, their life expectancy centuries less than one of those big Douglas firs lying unprotected on the ground, or their stone counterparts in Europe. Suddenly, that old children’s story about the three little pigs takes on a whole new meaning.
* * *
—
THE PROBLEM IS, FEW people are invigorated by the idea of spending their precious Sundays caulking the trim of their windows or getting up on their roofs to check for moss. As Brand puts it: “The romance of maintenance is that it has none.” Even back in 1994, it was estimated that only a third of US houses were actually well maintained, and it was predicted that number would drop as people’s work hours increased—as they have. And when people aren’t watching out, water, rodents, termites, and mold move in. It makes sense; we’ve logged much of the forests that were their natural habitat. They’re only looking for a substitute home, and negligence on our part just makes their hunt easier.
The act of maintenance, however, can have its own particular beauty. “There is a certain higher calling in the steady tending to a ship, to a garden, to a building,” Brand writes. “One is participating physically in a deep, long life.” Perhaps my favorite example of this approach to maintenance can be found in the story of the dining hall at New College, Oxford, which was established in the fourteenth century. The dining hall is a stunning room, with high, beamed ceilings built from massive oak trees, like a set from a Harry Potter movie. Over time, however, oak beams become infested with beetles. It’s a known fact, and there is little that could have been done about it, particularly back in those centuries before we had access to so many chemicals. In any case, about a hundred years ago, it was discovered that the beams had become “beetly.” The problem was that there were few oaks anymore that were big enough to use for beams—especially in England, where most of the trees had been cut down centuries before.
But someone thought to ask the college forester (I love that there is such a position), in the hope that there might be some big oaks hanging around that would work. The forester came in and, as anthropologist Gregory Bateson told the story, he said, “Well, sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”
It turned out that when the college was founded, a grove of oaks was planted to provide the replacements for the beams they knew would fall victim to beetles by the time the new trees matured. For five hundred years, the message had been relayed from one generation of foresters to the next: “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”
It’s a wonderful story, and I try to think about it when I am grumbling about repainting my peeling front porch steps or repairing the grout between the bathroom tiles. For things to last, we must think long-term.
* * *
—
IN AN ODD WAY, marriages deal with many of the same maintenance issues. Our relationships need our attention as much, if not more, than our houses. And sometimes here, too, the romance of maintenance is that it has none. Caretaking in a relationship is not flowers or date night—necessary as these are, they are the equivalent of a new color painted on your walls. Delightful, but not structural. Structural is unloading the dishwasher when it’s your partner’s turn, or making sure whoever gets home last from work is greeted with dinner. It’s learning about mushroom hunting or musical theater or rugby because your spouse loves it. It is talking about the best of your partner in public, not the worst. It’s listening to stories we have heard a hundred times before as if they are new. Often, it is just listening, period.
My father always washed the car by hand before he took my mother out on a date, even after they were married. He would say he wanted it clean “for his girl.” That is the part she remembered, not where they went or what they did. As psychologist John Gottman, who has studied countless married couples, will tell you, it is the presence of respect and an abiding willingness to support each other, more than romance, that indicates whether a marriage will last. Couples that exhibit these qualities tend to stay together, creating the marital equivalent of firmitas.
As I followed Ben up the stairs in the Port Townsend house, I was hoping we were doing well in the marriage department, but I worried sometimes that we threw ourselves at things like this because the excitement of a questionable project seemed more romantic, or at the very least more dramatic, than the caretaking of a relationship. It is perhaps why many marriages founder during a remodel or a building project—it isn’t really about needing a new kitchen or house. Sensing a lack in their relationship, some couples rush toward a project or a baby when in fact those voids might be better filled by words spoken to each other. By simple maintenance, instead of a new addition.
The jury was still out on where Ben and I fell on that spectrum. The truth is, though, that many of the things I love best about Ben come out during our crazy projects—his gift of envisioning what isn’t there, his reliable sense of humor, his artistic sensibilities, not to mention his MacGyver-like abilities. On one of our first dates, a trip into the Los Angeles mountains, he fixed my car’s leaking gas line by rechewing an old piece of gum he’d found in the ashtray and plugging the hole until we could get to a gas station. The fact that I found this immensely appealing says much about us.
In many ways, Ben and I are at our best in challenging situations. Over the course of our relationship, we’d moved far away from family, and left good, practical jobs to chase dreams. We’d had children when we were without any foreseeable income. We’d even adopted a puppy, sight unseen, when our son was three months old and our daughter a toddler. That the last one had seemed the craziest of all to us tells you something.
Maybe—probably—I worry too much, I told myself. So I crossed my fingers and headed upstairs.
* * *
—
THE CHAOS WE’D ENCOUNTERED on the main floor extended to the second. A claw-foot bathtub sat in the middle of the first bedroom, filled to overflowing with what looked like forty years of clothes and board games and sports equipment. We tried to enter the other bedrooms, but the doors would open only enough for a peek inside. Peering in through the crack of a door, I saw more piles of clothes, a camping porta-potty, a rifle.
“Oh, man,” I heard Ron say, backing out of the bathroom, his voice muffled by the
respirator.
“E, come here,” Ben called to me. “You’ve got to see this.” He pointed to the shower.
It was the soap I saw first—a delicate sculpture made up of some fifty slivers of Irish Spring, thin as porcelain. A precarious tower of green and white rising up in the back corner. More work to stack them than to throw them away, and yet there they were, balancing.
“The faucet.” Ben redirected my attention.
I looked and then looked again, puzzled. The handles were covered with yellow rubber kitchen gloves secured with rubber bands. They looked like Mickey Mouse hands, waving at me from the tile wall. But that didn’t make sense. I turned to Ben.
“So he wouldn’t get electrocuted,” he remarked dryly.
That would explain what had happened to the guy from the water company: the plumbing was live.
There were a couple potential explanations for this situation. A rat could have chewed away the insulation of a wire that then came to rest on a pipe. Or—and we were beginning to think this was more likely—someone had grounded a live wire instead of a neutral one to a pipe, as would normally happen. In any case, whoever was taking showers had preferred to risk death rather than fix the problem. It was kind of impressive when you thought about it.
Except there was already too much to think about. Of the thirty-plus items on Nash’s checklist, the best we could hope for was a neutral ranking on a few. The only thing that would garner full praise in this house was the view—and that didn’t require the house.
The rule of thumb is that if the renovation will cost more than half the purchase price, you should just start over. It was already clear that we would need to renegotiate with the heirs based on what we’d found, but even then, it was obvious that fixing this house would likely cost more than we would pay to buy it.
Ben and I shared a look: Do you still want it? He wasn’t saying no.
Send me something, I said to the house in my mind. Give me a reason. Because strangely enough, I still wanted one.
* * *
—
RON HAD FOUND AN entrance to the attic. When it was my turn, Ben held the ladder and I climbed up the rungs, expecting the worst. But as the beam from the flashlight roved over the darkened space, I could see the straight lines of rafters, the untouched interior of a roof soaring above me. Everything felt quiet, peaceful, as if this one portion of the house had somehow kept itself separate from all that had happened below—as if in some way, it was only itself. For the first time, I felt the house as it had once been.
* * *
—
THE ARCHITECT JACQUES HERZOG has suggested an interesting take on Vitruvius’s three principles of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas. He posits that certain buildings are so strong and utilitarian that they generate instability through their very lack of beauty. Take, for example, Pruitt-Igoe, the high-rise public housing project built in 1954 as a solution to the lack of low-income housing in Saint Louis and demolished after only eighteen years. The lack of shared green space and the unrelieved repetition of nearly identical floors and hallways, reached only by elevators or isolated stairwells, which rapidly became the domain of drug dealers—all of that killed any sense of community and led to graffiti, crime, and a general hatred of the place. The structure did not fail in any technical sense, but its excessive utility at the expense of beauty created its demise.
On the flip side of this equation are the gardens and temples of the city of Kyoto, Japan. They are built from far more fragile materials, but they contain a beauty that inspires people to maintain them. In fact, some historians contend that the city of Kyoto was spared in the bombing of Japan during World War II because US Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had spent his honeymoon there and couldn’t stand the thought of such a lovely place being destroyed. Beauty created its own durability.
* * *
—
SO THERE I STOOD, toes holding on to the rung of a ladder. I leaned forward into the still, perfect space of the attic, and in that moment all the defects of the house mattered not at all. I went for the last item on Nash’s list: Does it feel right?
“It’s okay,” I whispered into the dark. “It’s not your fault. We’ll take care of you.”
THE FOUR Rs
A remodeler’s tool of choice is invariably the wrecking bar.
—George Nash
AND SO WE PUT ON OUR hard hats and renegotiated. We showed the heirs the horrifying inspection report, trying to get to a price that made any of this possible. All we really learned is that owners are rarely rational about their houses. Following the heirs’ line of thinking, if the house had not fallen while they lived there, it never would.
It took weeks, but we finally reached a compromise that made no one exactly happy but allowed ownership to change hands. The house would be ours. Now we just had to figure out what to do with it.
* * *
—
EVER SINCE WORD HAD gotten around town that we were trying to buy the house, people had started questioning us.
“Would you be remodeling?”
“Restoring?”
“Renovating?”
To which we’d consistently and proudly answered yes—as in, yes, we wanted to keep the house, not tear it down. But we came to understand that these three terms meant vastly different things. I’d never heard the distinction in Seattle, where the population is numerous and ever changing, and landmark buildings are too often destroyed in the name of progress. But Port Townsend was different, and people there cared what happened to their buildings. And it wasn’t just the houses, either.
“You gonna keep those palm trees?” an old man asked as he walked by.
I looked at the trees—two mangy four-foot-tall specimens, kidnapping victims from a sunnier climate, their fronds drooping despondently toward the ground as if they hoped it might be warmer there. It made me cold just to look at them.
“They’re how people navigate around here,” the old man said. “Turn right at the palm trees.” He gave me a considering look. “I’d hate to have to write a letter to the newspaper,” he finished, pleasantly enough.
I wondered what he would think if he knew we were thinking about cutting the kitchen off the side of the house.
* * *
—
HOME REMODELING AND MAINTENANCE in the United States was a 320-billion-dollar business in 2016, and the number is expected only to rise. But for most people entering this fray, there is little discussion of the distinction between the three Rs: restoration, renovation, and remodeling. It is only when you encounter a green granite kitchen complete with Greek pillars, dropped like an off-color joke into the middle of a charming old farmhouse, that you might wonder if there was a stage someone missed in the design process. It’s something worth considering, not just to avoid an architectural faux pas, but for what it can teach you about life.
Of the three terms, restoration is the strictest. To restore a house means to take it back to what it originally was. In a restoration, the homeowners become caretakers of an older way of life. They live in what is essentially a museum, even heating by the original systems. Windows remain single pane, and damaged plaster is repaired using traditional techniques. Never drywall.
It requires a certain kind of person to live in a restored house. There is a young couple in Port Townsend who fall into this camp. Their house is lit by oil lamps, and you can often see Sarah walking the streets in Victorian garb (including a corset—her waist is a tiny twenty-two inches), or observe Gabriel perched atop his bicycle with its giant front wheel. In many ways, they appear far more natural among the old buildings than the tourists in their yoga pants. Every time I see them, it feels like a glimpse into a town that used to be.
But impressive as such dedication is, Ben and I had no desire to follow their example, or take on a pure restoration. When I hear the word, it reminds me of the story of a young woman in Italy who wanted to learn how to cook a pork roast. Her mother gives her instructions, i
ncluding one that seems rather strange: cut an inch and a half off the end of the meat before putting it in the pan.
“Why?” the young woman asks.
Her mother shrugs. “That’s what my mother always told me. You’ll have to ask her.”
The question goes up through the generations.
“Why did you cut an inch and a half off your pork roast, Bisnonna?” the young woman finally asks her great-grandmother. The older woman looks at her, equally puzzled.
“That was the size of my pan,” she says.
* * *
—
AND THUS, WHILE I AGREE it is important to preserve some houses as museum examples, I don’t think we all have to live that way ourselves. Luckily, there are other options.
The middle ground on the spectrum of keep-or-pitch belongs to renovation. For a renovator, a house is not an artifact locked in time, but a distinct being with a character and history that should be upheld, even as the owner’s needs are taken into account. In this more synergetic approach, it is acceptable to add a new heating system if it’s not obtrusive, or replace old windows with double panes as long as they are similar to the original in style. The intention is a seamless transition between old and new, but as you might suspect, there is a lot of grey area in this approach.
Which jumps us to a fourth R, perhaps the most important: respect. For a renovator, respect is not an authoritarian thing; instead, it is an acknowledgment that there are always two sides to an equation. It is a promise to work together to bring out the best in both.
Respect often goes out the window in a remodel. For remodelers, the existing structure is viewed more as a head start on the way to a new house. Want more light? Just slap a bay window in the middle of a wall. Need more room? Go up, or out, in whatever configuration gives you maximum square footage. In my years as a real estate agent, I saw delicate bungalows with second-story additions perched on top like alien spaceships. A spiral staircase dropped in the middle of a living room, because the owners wanted access to the attic. A turret added to a Midcentury Modern, because the husband liked all things medieval. It is the equivalent of fracking on a domestic scale—the need always justifies the means.
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