The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  But eventually the buildings filled up. Virtually no one had lived in the area previously; now it was home to several thousand people, at least a few of whom were children. In 1989, Father Wall hired a Roman Catholic sister named Mary Ellen Caron to begin preschool and kindergarten classes for thirty-five youngsters in two rooms in one of the apartment towers. The school grew with surprising speed. By the time we enrolled our kids just five years later, more than four hundred students attended and classes were being held in multiple buildings—some preschool classes were conducted in a former Catholic high school on the near north side that had shut down a few years previously. Starting a few days after we moved into the Barn House, Mary had been taking Ryan and Ani there each morning on the L, after which she continued downtown to work.

  The school was everything we could have hoped for, with a bright, enthusiastic staff, a well-thought-out curriculum, and an exemplary commitment to diversity. Though the majority of children in the school came from upper-middle-class families, the most popular kid in preschool was Francisco, whose parents were cops—the dad, a mounted patrolman, rode over on his horse one day and let the kids pet it.

  I ought to emphasize that Father Wall, a deeply religious man, was trying to attract people back to the church in organizing the school and other parish programs, and hadn’t had as his primary aim the resuscitation of Chicago. That was just how it worked out. I should also clarify that not everyone who played an important role in the resurgence of the parish and its school was a Domer, Irish, or in some cases even Catholic. (The original group organizing the world’s largest block party, for example, had gone to Marquette University, a Jesuit school in Milwaukee.) Better simply to credit the city-guy mafia. The essential fact remains that, at a time in our lives when our children’s education had become a matter of urgent concern, and the thought of the suburbs might have wafted through our minds, a first-class school had materialized out of thin air. The speed with which things had come together evidently surprised Father Wall, too. Without really meaning to, and with no scheme of empire in mind, he had tapped into Chicago’s formidable Irish Catholic-dominated establishment. An early effort to attract young adults involved asking prominent Chicago Catholics to speak on the role of faith in their lives; you can guess where that led. The mayor and his wife became supporters of the school at an early stage, sent their kids there, and were honorary cochairs of the school’s annual fund-raiser—we watched with fascination during the silent auction as a clutch of real estate developers outbid one another to join the mayor’s foursome for a round of golf. (The winning bid, if memory serves, was upwards of $10,000, a small sum in some circles but impressive in Chicago.)

  The school, eventually renamed the Frances Xavier Warde Schools and popularly known as FXW, was the first real indication we had that trying to raise a family in the city might not be the nightmare we had feared. We became friendly with the parents of our children’s classmates. Some were rehabbers like us; others lived downtown, either in lakefront high-rises or new close-in residential developments, many built on old railroad yards. Some were professionals; one couple owned a legendary Italian lemonade stand on the west side not far from our old town house. Quite a few, it occurs to me now, were traders.

  We were fortunate the school thing was working out, because the house still monopolized much of my attention. In November the floor finishers showed up. We moved out while they were at work, having been warned that the noise and dust were intolerable, but I returned each day to the house to move radiators and such and keep an eye on things. As always, the workers were Polish, although these men weren’t the same breed as the carpenters—anyway, the firm’s owner wasn’t. He showed up on the first day accompanied by a much younger blonde in a fur coat, tight jeans, and high-heeled boots, evidence to my eye of a different set of priorities. He spoke minimal English, but his manner suggested that a certain amount of time had been allotted for the project and delays wouldn’t be cheerfully brooked.

  It was my project and my money, of course, and I indicated via Tony, who was on hand to translate, that certain repairs were essential. Assurances were duly made, but after the bosses departed it was just me and four men whose English was mainly limited to okay and reparation, which I took to mean “repair.” With hand gestures I managed to communicate with the group’s carpenter, who turned out to be an adherent of the right way—one learned to recognize the brethren through secret signs, in the manner of early Christians—and we got as much done as we could.

  It helped that I’d planned ahead. In the front hall, for example, there were those two large holes cut in the handsome heart-pine flooring for heating registers, then inelegantly patched with mismatching wood after the registers were removed. Early on I’d noticed that a peninsula of heart-pine planking extended from the front hall a few feet into the rear hall, presumably a vestige of some forgotten room reconfiguration. Soon after the commencement of work I’d had the peninsula sawed off even with the hall doorway and the excess planking removed and stored. Now I had the flooring-crew carpenter use the salvaged material to replace the ugly patches, which he did with admirable precision. When later refinished, the patched sections were indistinguishable from the rest of the floor.

  Once repairs in a given room were complete, sanding immediately commenced using massive floor sanders having the appearance of vacuum cleaners designed by the Russian army. Fat cables sprouting from the handles trailed across the floor and down the basement steps. A friend experienced in such matters had warned me not to inspect the electrical hookup: You don’t want to know. But of course I did. I found that the floor guys had removed the front cover from the main electrical panel and jammed giant screwdrivers into the 240-volt terminal blocks above the main breaker; the sander cables were hooked to the screwdrivers with enormous alligator clips. The nearest circuit protection was in the alley; an accident would not only vaporize one or more floor guys, it’d kill the power to half the neighborhood. I retreated back up the steps.

  The final step in finishing was applying stain and varnish. I’d selected a common stain called golden oak. Calling me over to consult, the floor guys gave me to understand that they thought the color was a little dark—they wanted to know if I wanted to dilute it with mineral spirits. Sure, I said. They mixed up a batch and poured some on a section of newly sanded floor. It looked like India ink. Did I approve? They might as well have been brain surgeons asking my opinion of the sutures. Go ahead, I said, hoping not to be appalled. Once rubbed in—the process was extraordinarily fast—the stain proved to be indeed dark, but not objectionably so. Charlie, who visited later, went further: “It’s perfect,” he said. Though I had had the impression of having narrowly avoided disaster throughout, when the job was complete I had to confess the workmanship was impeccable.

  You’ll excuse me, but we have a few practical matters we need to discuss before proceeding further:■ Something we didn’t realize till too late during our work on the radiators was that there had been a simple solution to our problem heating up the larger pipes, had we been alert enough to notice it. MAPP gas—the letters stand for methylacetylenepropadiene—is a hydrocarbon mixture with a higher combustion temperature than propane, making it much easier to sweat a joint. Cheap and safe, MAPP gas is sold in the same aisle in the home improvement store as propane and comes in bright yellow cans—they could scarcely have been more conspicuous if I’d tripped on one. I’m consoled by the thought that, had I known about such things at the outset and so avoided the trials here described, this would be a pretty boring book.

  ■ Admirer of radiators though I am, I admit they have a significant drawback: They make for a dry house during heating season, which among other things manifests itself in staticky rugs, dry skin, gaps in the floor planking, and pianos that go quickly out of tune. When I was a kid my mother sought to rectify these problems by hanging humidifiers behind the radiators in our house, skinny open-topped metal tanks filled with water that evaporated when the radiato
r heated up. How well these worked I can’t say, because we never remembered to fill them. Portable electric room humidifiers have the advantage of bright lights and noise to remind the forgetful but still need refilling at short intervals, making one long for the simplicity of the auto-filling humidifiers used on forced-air systems. I’ve read about auto-filling ductless central humidifiers that supposedly work on the basis of Dalton’s law of partial pressures, which is a grandiose way of saying the humidity spreads around the house on its own, but I can’t say from personal knowledge that it actually does. All of which is to say I don’t have a solution for this vexing issue, so be prepared to deal.

  ■ Two things you need to know about paint. First, only the uninformed, or those without children, use flat interior paint, because while it may initially hide the defects of your lumpy and irregular walls, it shows every fingerprint thereafter and can’t easily be cleaned. Paint having a slight sheen to it—one manufacturer calls its semi-shiny finish “pearl”—washes up much more readily. Second, for exteriors you want 100 percent acrylic paint. Painting your wooden siding won’t be any cheaper, but at least you won’t have to do it every three years.

  ■ I’m not saying it ought to be a major design driver, but home appraisers often have the idea that a room must have a closet for it to count as a bedroom. In fact there’s no national standard and many older houses have closetless rooms where people routinely sleep, but if you don’t put in closets when you have the chance, don’t be surprised if you get an argument later.

  ■ I’ve intimated this a couple times already, but now state it as scientific fact: Whereas everyone notices the difference between an eight-foot ceiling and nine-foot ceiling, thinking the former ordinary and the latter luxurious, hardly anyone notices the difference between a nine-foot ceiling and a ten-foot one. This means you can drop a ten-foot ceiling ten or twelve inches to accommodate pipes and ducts in the serene confidence that no one will know. I acknowledge this falls into the category of things most people don’t need to be told. I just wish someone had told me.

  18

  It’s a commonplace to say of old houses that they don’t build ’em that way anymore, and in fact they seldom do, but that’s not because the skills are lost or the materials can’t be obtained or even, in the last analysis, because the cost is too high. The main reason they don’t build ’em that way is that nobody asks. I had worked on old houses most of my life, but even so there were things I didn’t know to ask for and consequently didn’t get—for example, quartersawn oak flooring, which sad story I’ll relate a couple chapters hence. But I’d learned I could get custom millwork, and meant to, since few interior features so palpably distinguished an old house from a newly constructed one as the elaborate wood detailing commonly found in the former. I was in the happy position of not having to design the woodwork from scratch, although no doubt Charlie could have worked up something suitable if asked; I simply needed to copy the resplendent molding I already had. Duplicating old woodwork wasn’t difficult—all you had to do was give the mill shop a few representative pieces, and of course a wad of cash.

  I’d made arrangements in this regard with a young mill shop owner named Guido. His prices were reasonable, but at this point that was immaterial—we’d spent our savings, maxed out our credit cards and could barely afford a cup of coffee, much less a truckload of custom millwork. I’d gone ahead and ordered the stuff anyway, hoping something would develop. The millwork arrived one morning; I opened the mail while the workers piled it in the hall. In the stack I found an envelope from a publisher—a book I’d written had unexpectedly gone into royalties and they’d sent me a good-sized check, which would cover Guido’s bill and leave us a little for groceries. For all the unseen forces watching out for us, we had our share of just plain luck.

  A staggering number of tasks remained to be completed in addition to the woodwork, many of them made more complicated by the fact that we now lived in the house. A bathroom, for example, required a good deal of intricate finishing under any circumstances, with a long series of tasks that had to be accomplished in a certain order, but attempting to schedule the work, which often involved lengthy delays for processes such as curing that couldn’t wisely be rushed, became positively nightmarish once the bathroom was in regular use. I found myself making timelines and checklists worthy of a missile launch, and about as prone to mishap.

  Some setbacks were of the more mundane variety. While lowering an old washing machine down the basement steps—we hadn’t made up our minds to discard it, and it looked a little rummy rusting in the yard—I lost my grip on the dolly. The washing machine bounced down the steps; I fell on top of it at the bottom. An X-ray established that I’d only suffered contusions, but for a good two weeks afterward my ribs hurt like hell.

  After the usual false starts and distractions, we’d assembled the finishing materials for the bathroom walls—tile for the showers, wooden wainscoting elsewhere—and one day Tony sent a carpenter named Mirek over to install them. I was downstairs that afternoon when I heard a splashing sound in the walls, and on investigating found water pouring from the basement ceiling. I ran upstairs to find Mirek pounding nails into the wainscoting in the bathroom directly above. Mirek spoke no English, but by means of frantic gestures I persuaded him to stop. Seeing the alarming cataract downstairs, he pulled out a carpenter’s pencil and began writing on the wall, the first instinct of all tradespeople in times of crisis. It was an equation—I realized Mirek was trying to persuade me on mathematical grounds that his nails weren’t long enough to cause the leak. I warmly replied that the lack of dripping water antecedent to his hammering strongly argued for his involvement. We pulled off the wainscoting and were doused by spurting water. Acknowledging the reality of the situation, Mirek disappeared briefly to scare up the necessities to put the matter right, my plumbing inventory being momentarily depleted. The repair concluded—Mirek was one of those dependable sorts who might not do everything right, but at least lost minimal time fixing what he’d done wrong—it was back to the wainscoting. A week later I got the shower door and shower head mounted, plus a spout for the half-inch copper pipe, and after that a toilet and sink.

  In early November Tom K—the finish carpenter and his helper Frank arrived to begin installing the woodwork. Tom was Greek and retained a heavy accent despite long residence in the United States; Tony had warned me he could be temperamental. He was, but that posed no great difficulty; he was a member of the brotherhood. Early on I learned that when Tom was especially proud of some bit of craftsmanship he announced, “You no like it, I tear it out,” whereas if he had his doubts he said, “You can’t do nothing, forget it.” When the latter occurred I gazed mournfully at the item in silence, then offered a modest suggestion about whatever defect had caused Tom pain. Invariably after some coaxing he relented and did it over.

  Few such occasions arose, though. Tom’s work was exquisite—“like furniture,” he declared periodically. It was hard to disagree. He and Frank built what amounted to a picture frame around the doors and windows, each an elegant composition of casing and backband plus a sill (in the case of the windows) or high flanking baseboards (in the case of the doors). They did one room at a time. The change in appearance was extraordinary—the finished rooms seemed positively palatial. “Looks rich,” Tom agreed. We at last had tangible evidence that the house’s interior would someday match its now-handsome exterior.

  Like the framing carpenters before them, Tom and Frank took it upon themselves to rectify occasional weak points in the house’s original construction. The closet under the front hall stairs had the tiny window of which we’ve already spoken—the glass measured just twelve and a half by sixteen inches. Originally it had been surrounded by the massive five-inch-wide casing used elsewhere in the house—beautiful there, but in this context absurdly overscaled. Tom and Frank sliced the casing down to three inches wide—the result looked much better. Once again the brotherhood had improved on the house’s origin
al design.

  One may ask: Was every tradesman who ambled into the Barn House a member of the Brotherhood of the Right Way? The answer manifestly was no, but I do have to say we encountered quite a few more than might be expected in a random sampling of the population, especially considering the lamentations about declining craftsmanship and incompetent contractors that one routinely hears. To a large extent, I concede, that was Tony’s doing, because he hired the bulk of the subcontractors, but even in projects in which he had no involvement the brothers turned up far more often than not. I could claim I had a gift for spotting talent, but that would be like saying I had a knack for picking people who spoke English—assuming you had the eye, about which more in a moment, no special skill was required to detect members of this scorned cult.

  Which, frankly, is what it was. In reality, I think, the Brotherhood of the Right Way was respectably numerous; its members just kept their heads low lest they attract unwanted attention, like the Huguenots or fans of the White Sox.85Fact was, the brotherhood coexisted uneasily with the bottom-line crowd, who recognized that the profit lay in knowing when to say: good enough. (Not a problem confined to the building trades, incidentally—ask any software developer.) You were an artist in a world that didn’t reward artistry—I knew that from my own experience. As a writer I occasionally got compliments for a well-turned paragraph—people expected such things of writers. But rare was the electrical job at the end of which people came up to me and said: Hey, nice pipes.