The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  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 Xs 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.
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  “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.

  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.

  5

  We’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:1. A Victorian-era high-button woman’s shoe.29

  2. A one-pint glass milk bottle from the T. H. Bates company, 410 Otto St.—PURITY GUARANTEED, patented Sept. 17, 1889.

  3. An 1891 Liberty dime, perhaps lost by one of the workers who built the foundation wall near which it was found by Ryan, and subsequently lost a second time by us.

  4. An 1897 train schedule wrapped around a radiator pipe, indicating the date at which the owner of the Barn House had given up on the original heating system and installed one that actually worked, a matter to which I’ll return.

  5. The skeleton of what was probably a pigeon (there had been a hole in the eaves where they roosted), but having an appearance of such antiquity that one couldn’t rule out the possibility that it was an archaeopteryx.

  6. A portion of the June 14, 1923, edition of the Miles City (Montana) American. Miles City, I happened to know, had been a crew change point on the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, better known as th
e Milwaukee Road. Perhaps someone in the house had been a trainman.

  7. A 1921 visitor’s guide called This Week in Chicago, modestly reporting that Chicago, the “World’s Fourth City” (in population; today it’s twenty-seventh), had “a record of development in population, wealth, education, and civic achievement of which the world can furnish no parallel in rapid and permanent growth.”

  8. A walled-up set of built-in shelves containing nothing, which I nonetheless found gave me the creeps, having read at a too-tender age Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.

  9. Several hundred feet of gas pipe used for lighting—disconnected, we established, although with gas pipe you never knew. A friend removing some old pipe in his house one day smelled gas and thought at first it was a trace of earlier days but soon realized, mercifully before the house exploded, that the pipe was still connected to the main.

  10. The original house wiring. Houses in the 1890s commonly were equipped for both gas and electricity, lest the latter prove a fad. Old wiring is commonly called knob-and-tube wiring, referring to the insulators from and through which the wire is strung. The Barn House electrical distribution system used basically this type of wiring except that it dispensed with the knobs and tubes, consisting merely of wires pulled through holes drilled in the framing and soldered together. Most of the old rubber and cloth insulation had rotted away, exposing the bare copper, fortunately no longer carrying current.

  11. A 1972 issue of Gallery magazine proving that Brady Bunch-style haircuts didn’t look any less ridiculous when you took your clothes off. 30

  12. A box of .38-caliber bullets with five missing, wrapped in a newspaper dated 1972 and stuck above a header in the attic. Clearly 1972 at the Barn House had been quite a year.

  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.