The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  ■ A muffler shop that usually had a couple dozen vehicles parked in front of it in various stages of disassembly.

  ■ A tavern called the Blue Bird Lounge that sold beer by the quart.

  ■ A public high school having the appearance of a Norman castle that was notable for: (a) having been featured in the movie My Bodyguard (1980), about a kid who needs protection to keep from getting beat up, for which purpose the school seemed an apt choice; and (b) being the alma mater of the ventriloquist and comedian Edgar Bergen, the creator of Charlie McCarthy and cocreator of actress Candice Bergen. 48

  ■ The diner where we had huddled with Howard, owned as it happened by the same fellow who ran Arnold’s, which offered a breakfast of scrambled eggs, hash browns, sausage, toast, and coffee for three dollars and change, and in my observation never closed except for the time the city shut it down for a week for paying off on the electronic poker machine.

  ■ A dilapidated wooden church.

  ■ A submarine sandwich shop run by a succession of immigrants, including one from Jordan, with whom I once got into a discussion of Queen Noor.

  ■ A restaurant in the old-Chicago mold whose logo was a bee, which was decorated with tiny Christmas lights and NFL paraphernalia, served pretty fair ribs, and didn’t have smoking and nonsmoking sections so much as smoky and really smoky.

  ■ A self-storage warehouse that had once been the factory that produced the iconic 1960s appliance properly known as the Lava Lite.

  ■ Another L line. From this point on things get a little repetitive, so we’ll bring the tour to a close.

  You’re thinking: Arnold’s Food. A psychic astrologer. A transvestite bar. I could make a miniseries out of material like that. No doubt. My point is that taken in the aggregate it didn’t amount to much. The street had an unfinished quality, as did the city as a whole—you felt it had started on the long road to urbanity but never quite arrived. Getting it the rest of the way was what city folk hoped to accomplish. But how soon they might do so no one then could say.

  One summer evening after a day’s work at the Barn House I returned home to find the family in a tumult, with the kids crying and Mary grim. Shortly before my arrival Ryan and Ani had been jumping on the bed; Ryan had fallen and hit his teeth on the bedpost. Now his two upper middle incisors protruded at a gruesome angle. Mary drove to the hospital while I sat in the backseat with my arms around the small boy in my lap. Except for the occasional whimper he was quiet, which wasn’t reassuring. Ryan had the characteristic, common among males in my family, of complaining in inverse proportion to the severity of his problems, the extreme example in this regard being his greatgrandfather, who’d walked into the hospital with advanced pancreatic cancer, of which he’d given no sign, and died five days later. Admittedly that wasn’t a likely outcome of the present crisis; disfigurement, on the other hand . . . eh, better to dwell on the positive. My brave little guy.

  At the hospital the X-ray technician asked Mary if she were pregnant. “I don’t know,” she said. “I might be.” Not wishing to chance it, I held Ryan while the technician made the exposures. When the prints were ready the doctor pointed out the adult teeth already growing in Ryan’s upper jaw. They were intact. Although Ryan would have to endure a prolonged period of toothlessness, eventually the adult teeth would replace the damaged ones, which the doctor had now removed.

  We were immensely relieved, but another issue had presented itself: Mary was in fact pregnant, as we confirmed not long after. In itself this was no surprise. We’d bought the Barn House in anticipation of a third child and promptly set about producing one, recognizing that home renovation and gestation were lengthy processes we didn’t have time to pursue sequentially and so would have to endure together. We weren’t unmindful of the fact that if a domestic emergency arose I’d likely be elsewhere, but Ryan’s encounter with the bedpost had made the practical implications more apparent—and Mary would bear all the burden. What’s more, we now had a deadline. Assuming we didn’t want the simultaneous stress of fixing up a house and tending a newborn, we needed to be done by April of the following year, 1994.

  7

  By late summer the architectural drawings for the Barn House were approaching completion and some seventy cubic yards of former interior finishing reposed in a landfill, but we were still nowhere near the commencement of construction. I was growing impatient. Part of the problem was the unorthodox nature of the project. In addition to the general contractor, who would handle most of the heavy construction, I had to hire subcontractors for everything else, mainly the mechanical systems. In August I went to Charlie’s office to use a drafting table to prepare drawings of the air-conditioning ducts. I did this out of exasperation with the HVAC guys, HVAC standing for heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning.

  I never did figure out what the problem was with HVAC guys. Perhaps it was excessive exposure to chlorofluorocarbons. Collectively they were the most argumentative bunch of people I’d ever met. I had three prospective HVAC contractors plus George, my father’s sheet-metal worker buddy, come in to look over my project; each one told me to do the opposite of what the previous fellow had said. One advocated having the registers high and the returns low (conditioned air comes out of the registers; stale air returns, as one might suppose, via the returns); the next said to have the returns high and the registers low. One wanted to have the registers diagonally opposite from the returns; another wanted to have them all on the same side of the room. Normally one gets a bead on the right way by interviewing knowledgeable parties and arriving at a consensus, but here that strategy had gone inexplicably awry. The experience was disconcerting. It was like asking directions to the interstate and having one person gesture across the street, a second over yonder, and a third at the North Star.49

  The one point on which all the contractors agreed was that I was out of my mind. Maybe I was, but I was the owner of the house and it was my money. I figured the least they could do was humor me. We had a number of conversations along the following lines:CONTRACTOR: You want to have separate systems for heating and air-conditioning?

  ME: Yeah.

  CONTRACTOR: Nobody does that. They run heating and air-conditioning in the same ducts.

  ME: I know. I don’t want to do that. I want to use radiators, with ducts for the air-conditioning.

  CONTRACTOR: It’ll be expensive.

  ME: How expensive?

  CONTRACTOR: Real expensive.

  ME: Give me a ballpark idea.

  CONTRACTOR: How much do you want to spend?

  ME: How much do I need to spend?

  CONTRACTOR: A lot.

  CONTRACTOR’S ASSISTANT: Why would you want to use radiators instead of forced air?

  CONTRACTOR: Oh, it’s the best heat.

  ME: Exactly. It’s the best heat. That’s why I want to do it. I’m trying to get a price.

  CONTRACTOR (gesturing skyward, as if pulling a number out of the air): $25,000.

  Thus my dour mood. It was wearing to be constantly thought of as a lunatic, and now I could see it was going to be expensive, too. I had hauled up on an inescapable fact of life: For any object having to do with human shelter, be it repainting the birdbath or heating the house, the building trades offered a certain path—to be fair, in late-twentieth-century America, a pretty wide path—and as long as you kept within it you had only to pick up the phone, collect estimates, hire a vendor, look in on the workers periodically, and in the end write a check. Despite all the kvetching you heard, and I say this sincerely, the fundamental competence of the American home-building industry with respect to any well-defined task in what was after all a complex and perilous business—consider the fell consequences if the plumber overlooks a gas leak—was one of the wonders of the world.

  Strike out into the bush, however—try to get your project done in a way that tradesmen weren’t accustomed to doing—and God help you, you were on your own. It’s not that you couldn’t find anyone willing to take on the
job; I’d found Eddie, after all, who after an hour’s inspection had a far more detailed idea of what needed to be done to my house than I did. But he was an exception. Most contractors lacked his grasp, and if you didn’t feel like paying extravagant sums, I’d come to realize, you needed to break the assignment down into what from their perspective would seem manageable tasks.

  I made two decisions. First, I would repipe the radiators myself. I’d never done this before and had no idea what was involved, but how hard could it be? Second, I’d prepare my own engineering drawings for the air-conditioning ducts. The attic framing was complicated; routing the ducts would require somebody to, you know, think, and in the course thereof one might make a mistake and underbid a job that required an expensive solution. If I could eliminate some of the uncertainty, my theory was, perhaps I would get a more reasonable bid. I did, although in retrospect it must be said that HVAC was one of those businesses exhibiting the Law of Conservation of Price—namely, all bids for a job are the same, the only difference being how much comes out of your pocket and how much comes out of your hide.

  At any rate, it was pleasant that August day to stand languidly in the drafting room of Charlie’s high-ceilinged office and look down on the great avenue and feel a kinship with Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, two of the most eminent names in Chicago architecture, who had done the same thing in an office in the building next door about a hundred years before. Then I told myself it was time to quit daydreaming and buckle down to work. I started with what was known as a sepia print, a reproduction of Charlie’s original floor plan having, as the name suggests, a brownish cast to it. Using ink eradicator I obliterated unnecessary details—they vanished at a stroke—and drew in the lines indicating the ducts, registers, and returns. Adler and Sullivan, and pretty much every other architect in America, had done their drawings in much the same way for the previous 115 years, since the introduction of blueprinting to the United States from the UK, where it had been invented. The whole enterprise, what with the rolls of brown-toned drawings, the simple tools—you kept your compass point sharp using a pad of sandpaper—and for that matter the antique airy room, in the middle of which was a narrow spiral staircase leading up to a gallery crammed with books and ledgers, had a distinctly nineteenth-century feel to it.

  Well it might. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was working in the twilight of an era then passing into history: the time when architects designed with pencil and paper. The Barn House was the last project in which Charlie was able to display his fluid hand in routine drafting. Shortly after he finished our job, his firm took out most of the drawing tables and installed computers, and he worked almost exclusively with mouse and keyboard from then on. He still did (and does) renderings for presentation purposes by hand, but nobody after that got an ordinary blueprint from Charlie that he wanted to take home and frame.

  Whatever might be said for my drawings from an artistic standpoint, which wasn’t much, making them was a useful process—it obliged me to think the project through. I saw now why the HVAC guys had been reluctant to bid realistically for the job. On the third floor, for example, I’d blithely proposed running ducts through a labyrinth of existing wooden framing behind one of the chimneys. On applying the higher cortical faculties to the problem I realized it couldn’t be done. I decided I’d have to drop the ceiling in the front bedroom and run the ducts through the space thus created, which would simplify the routing to a considerable extent, and while I wouldn’t say the result was elegant, at least the thing was physically possible.

  When I’d finished my drawings, Charlie sent them out to the repro house; the copies were delivered to my home a day or two later. I mailed sets to several potential bidders, including a young journeyman named Pete, who’d been recommended by George. We had a somewhat tense negotiation—I had a price in mind, and was determined to get it—but eventually we came to an agreement: $9,000 to install all the ductwork, coolant lines, and control wiring; hook up the air handlers and condensers; and get the whole thing to work. That took care of the VAC. For the H, I was on my own.

  Meanwhile I was still in the process of hiring a general contractor. I wanted Eddie if I could afford him, but prudence suggested learning how his prices compared. I’d spoken to two other contractors besides Eddie—we’ll call them Matt and József. In July I’d sent all three the scope of work, a bid sheet, and a set of preliminary plans. One by one they’d shown up to walk through the house and take notes.

  One morning I was carting debris out of the house into the Dumpster. Matt was sitting on the front steps jotting notes on a pad. He was a young fellow, wearing shorts and looking jaunty. “So,” I said, “what are you going to charge me? Three hundred thousand dollars?”

  Facetiousness with contractors is always a risky business. “Probably more than that,” said Matt, continuing to write.

  “Right.”

  Matt looked up. “I’m serious,” he said.

  The day seemed suddenly cooler. The limit of what we could afford was $250,000.

  I spent several nervous days awaiting the arrival of the bids. Once they were in hand I spread them on the desk and compared the bottom lines:

  Well now. A spread of nearly $100,000 on a $250,000 job represented a significant difference of opinion. However, closer examination partly allayed my concern. I suspected I was merely seeing the ignorance surcharge—the padding a contractor added to his bid as insurance against what he didn’t know.

  The usefulness of an uncertain grasp of the facts is often underappreciated in commercial dealings. Ideally you wanted to discover which of the parties chasing your business knew more, but sometimes it was enough to find out which of them knew less. The three bids were instructive in this regard. Two were fairly close while one was an outlier. Either Matt knew something the others didn’t or he didn’t know something they did. The early returns favored the latter, but one wanted to be sure. I got Matt on the phone. Among other things he had priced exterior demolition at close to $15,000, compared with $6,000 for József and a little over $4,000 for Eddie. When I asked about this, he said he felt it would take four men two weeks to finish removing the cedar shakes. Two of my brothers had ripped off a sizable portion of the siding in an afternoon. No way would four guys need two weeks to dispose of the rest.

  Then there was the quality of Matt’s work, as evidenced by his previous jobs, which I’d gone round to visit. It was competent by the standards of the day but to my eye betrayed only an intermittent acquaintance with the right way. One project had involved adding a bathroom. To avoid having to rejoist the floors to accommodate the drain pipes, Matt had placed the pipes on top of the existing floor, then put a false floor on top of that. To get into the bathroom you had to step up six inches—an inexpensive but clumsy solution. Charlie’s architectural drawings would prevent the worst such improvisations, but no drawing could anticipate every design decision that might arise, and I didn’t want to have to watch the carpenters’ every move.

  Matt having been eliminated from consideration, I turned to József. Like Eddie, he was what the architects had termed an ethnic contractor. Unlike Eddie, he’d been incurious about many aspects of the job, and in general hadn’t been very communicative. It was hard to imagine working with him. I’d seen a few of his jobs; the work was tolerably done, but there were small things that bugged me—gaps between trim boards and so on. I’d have to keep a close eye on József ’s workers, too.

  Eddie’s bid was higher than József’s, but not unreasonably so. The quality of Eddie’s work, from what I had seen of it, was impeccable. For $16,000, the difference between his bid and József’s, I’d get a guy who would do the job right—in my opinion money well spent.

  Just a couple problems. The first was that the bottom line wasn’t really the bottom line. I’d structured the bid to make rehabilitation of the house’s siding optional. It was optional in the sense that there were two ways to handle the work—repair or replace—and I’d asked for
bids on each. It wasn’t optional in the sense that I could omit the work altogether. After some consultation with Eddie, we decided we could wash and paint a third of the siding, salvage another third from the doomed addition and reuse it elsewhere, and replace the last third. That would cost $30,000. So the true cost of the job wasn’t $235,000, but $265,000.

  At this point the disadvantage of doing things the right way became apparent—it was usually more expensive. For example, I’d asked Eddie to bid on modular replacement windows designed to fit into the existing frames. Trouble was, as Eddie pointed out, the existing frames had the structural integrity of wet cardboard. Much of the wood was rotted and out of true; to install new sashes in such junk was foolish. It was better to replace everything, including the frames. Hard to argue with, but it would cost another thirteen grand.

  Then there were the gutters. I’d requested bids on galvanized steel, but Eddie urged copper instead. Copper was attractive and durable and required minimal maintenance; if not abused it would last the life of the house. It cost more, though. After some discussion we decided to use copper at the rear of the house—a quirky choice, I suppose, but it made sense to me. The roof of the rear addition was flat and would be sealed with a rubber membrane poured in place. The gutter supports would be embedded in the rubber; to replace the gutters you’d have to replace the roof. Galvanized gutters eventually would rust, and while they might outlast the roof, they might not—and I didn’t want to have to replace the roof just because I’d cheaped out on the gutters. Thus copper. Add $1,200.