The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  I think the main reason so many craftsmen worked on the Barn House, and we got such a beautiful job as a result, was simply that I recognized them when they showed up. The Brothers of the Right Way liked having their work appreciated, and would go to a great deal of trouble for anyone who acknowledged their efforts. For all that you heard, standards of craftsmanship in the United States hadn’t deteriorated to any remarkable extent that I’d ever noticed. The real problem, it seemed to me, was with those who did the hiring. A lot of people wouldn’t know quality work if it came up and introduced itself. They lacked the critical eye.

  A good eye wasn’t a matter of being hard to please. Any contractor can tell you stories about clients who thought they knew more than the tradesmen, asked for impossibilities, and got thrown off job sites. That wasn’t the mark of a good eye; that was just being obnoxious. Nor was it merely a knack for judging level, straight, and true, although that was an essential skill. The real trick lay in the ability to give intelligent direction to the project.

  That meant knowing what the job was supposed to look like when it was done, and equally important, what was achievable and at what cost.

  No question it helped to have some basic familiarity with the trades, and for that matter with manual labor. I’d had the advantage of having grown up watching people work on houses and doing a fair amount of work myself. I’d also had the good luck to come along at a point when my family wasn’t so far removed from its working-class origins to have decided this kind of thing was beneath them—if my father had been a stockbroker I’d likely have been as adrift as the next guy. One of my fears, in fact, was that I’d fail to transmit the principles of the right way to my own children, a matter I’ll return to. But first, if you don’t mind, a few more practical tips:■ Anyone who gazes upon a deft piece of finish carpentry (or sometimes even framing carpentry, as happened a few times with us) will marvel at the beauty of the wood in its natural state, which is an understandable reaction, and may conclude it’s his duty to leave the wood exposed or otherwise inadequately finished, which is foolish. You see evidence of the latter tendency most conspicuously in the treatment of new cedar siding. It’s possible to leave cedar unpainted, and if the cedar-sided object in question is a tool shed on the Maine coast, in a quarter century or so it will weather to a lustrous silver-gray. In the city, on the other hand—and here I speak from the evidence of my own eyes—in ten years it will look like hell.

  Despite urgings to the contrary we were steadfast regarding the painting of our cedar (typically nowadays new cedar is stained, but we had to match the painted original). However, we waffled on the matter of interior trim, much of which frankly is also better off painted. Most rehabbers believe they owe it to posterity to strip away the thick encrustation of paint with which previous generations have befouled the woodwork, and doing so in fact often reveals details that the accretion of years has obscured. It doesn’t follow that you’re obligated to leave the uncovered result forever bare. Oak, of course, stains handsomely, and old pine often does so as well (good luck with new pine—although I realize stained pine furniture is fairly common, I’ve never seen a house with new stained-pine trim that rose above the level of a summer cabin). However, poplar, Tom’s species of choice for trim intended for painting (hard, fine grain, no knots), won’t take stain worth squat.

  After I’d proven to my satisfaction that my collection of old pine doors would stain beautifully, I tortured myself for months about what to do with the surrounding poplar trim, thinking I needed to stain it as well. Charlie finally persuaded me to relinquish this misguided notion, and I can report with confidence that a stained old-pine door surrounded by painted poplar (and further set off by oak flooring, a rich wall paint color, and other details) produces as agreeable an effect as one could want.

  ■ While we’re on the subject of exterior work, I may as well say that if you’re going to go to all the trouble to have your house sided in cedar, make sure all the other exterior trim is cedar, too. For some reason nobody involved with the restoration of the Barn House thought there was anything odd about using trim made of pine, which predictably proceeded to rot. We patched the trim, but eventually had the decaying front and rear porch steps rebuilt of cedar.

  ■ Should the opportunity arise—and consider yourself lucky if it doesn’t, since the project isn’t practical unless you’ve gutted much of your house—you’ll want to equip your hot-water supply with a recirculation pipe. The concept isn’t widely known even among plumbers, and I had to thumb through a stack of home improvement books looking for an explanation of how it was done, but the idea isn’t complicated. At the top of your hot-water riser, you connect a half-inch pipe run that descends to the basement monotonically (again that wonderful word) and splices into the drain tap at the bottom of the water heater, thereby forming a loop. The idea is that, even with all the faucets closed, convection will keep hot water circulating steadily, drifting upward in the riser when warm and buoyant, then returning via the recirculation pipe when cool and dense. Turn on the second-floor shower, therefore, and you’ll have hot water in seconds, without the usual frigid delay. I embraced the idea as Parisian youth embraced socialism—thinking it an ideal worth pursuing, but having doubts that it would actually work. I was gratified to discover on taking my inaugural shower that it worked just fine, and have enjoyed prompt hot water ever since. One concedes that a recirculation pipe slightly enlarges one’s carbon footprint, since convection depends on constant discharge of heat to the void, but since I assiduously recycle and am otherwise virtuous, I figure I can indulge myself this once.

  ■ The following information will be useless to anyone not installing a hot-water radiator system (which is to say, pretty much anyone), but in my opinion significantly advances this ancient art. I wanted to install radiators in the basement of the Barn House, since we planned to use part of it as a rec room. Plumbers whom I spoke to on this subject seemed to think the job would be indescribably difficult, and admittedly in the days of gravity-fed systems it was something of a trick, since the exigencies of convection required that all the radiators, including those in the basement, be above the level of the boiler. For this reason, the radiators in basement apartments, including the one formerly at the Barn House, were flat units suspended horizontally just below the ceiling. Since heat rose and cold sank, basement apartments were usually cold in winter. I didn’t propose to put up with that nonsense. I’d read in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, in which I reposed great trust, that in a pump-fed hot-water heating system the water could be forced in any direction, including down, which I considered license to put the basement radiators on the floor where they belonged. As I say, plumbers (including the legendary Polish plumber Boniek, of whom unfortunately we will have no occasion to hear further in this book86) were certain this wouldn’t work, and that at minimum I needed to install a separate basement loop with a separate pump and for all I knew a separate furnace.

  Paying these warnings no heed, I installed the basement radiators according to my own lights, then was mortified, and frankly mystified, to find they didn’t always work. Sometimes after the system had been drained, refilled, and restarted due to some project or other, a couple of the basement radiators would remain cold, although for no apparent reason they might resume operation without human intervention after some months. I spent years trying to noodle out what was up, removing pipes, looking for blockages, and so on. Finally, in a flash of insight that in my estimation ranks with Newton’s apple, I realized that (a) sometimes air got trapped in the pipes serving the basement radiators, blocking the flow of hot water, and (b) to avoid this problem, I simply needed to repipe both supply and return lines for said radiators so that they provided a route rising monotonically to a radiator on the floor above, making it possible to vent trapped air when filling via the upper bleed valves—see illustrations on preceding page. (In fact, had I not been so compulsive about ensuring a continuous slope, I might hav
e had trapped-air problems all over.) The piping having been appropriately modified, I was gratified that all the basement radiators warmed up satisfactorily from the start. The system has worked unremarkably ever since.

  AIR TRAPPED IN RADIATOR PIPING (NO HEAT)

  AIR ESCAPES RADIATOR PIPING (HEAT!)

  19

  In the seven months between Labor Day and April Fool’s Day, which seem like appropriate bookends, we succeeded in establishing a basic level of livability in the house. We installed the doors and woodwork (I first stripped the paint from the ancient lock sets and hinges, which Tom and Frank then mortised into place); finished the floors; tiled the bathrooms, the laundry room, and front and rear entry hall floors; mounted the kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities and installed the countertops; hooked up the appliances, plumbing fixtures, and numerous electric lights; rebuilt a couple of fireboxes for future fireplaces; installed a shower door; put up closet shelves, clothes and towel hooks, toilet paper holders, and other fixtures; replaced the useless 1890s-vintage wooden track on the living room pocket door with a proper steel one; installed a new balustrade, indistinguishable except in minor respects from the original, to replace the one missing at the top of the front stairs; hauled an enormous mound of trash out of the backyard; and in the remaining time, ate, attempted to earn money, tended to sick or crying children, and every so often slept.

  The Chief assisted when he could. Once again we were obliged to learn new trades, or at least enlarge our knowledge of old ones, such as how to glue PVC pipe together. The Chief approached all these projects with his customary optimism.

  “This plastic pipe is the greatest,” he said one evening as we rerouted a two-inch drain in the basement. “It’s cheap, easy to cut, no threading.”

  “I guess,” I said. “The only drawback is it’ll give you lung cancer.”

  “Lung cancer?”

  “Yeah, smell this stuff.” I waved the glue applicator in his direction. The fumes were overpowering.

  “Smoke a cigarette and you won’t notice the smell,” said the Chief.

  By the time spring arrived the Barn House’s residents could use the toilet, take a shower, and brush their teeth at a sink without having to change rooms, much less go to somebody else’s house. We could cook a meal and wash and put away the dishes. In short, we could lead, by city standards, normal lives.

  We’d turned an important corner. One indication of this was that the laboriously refinished floors now seemed ordinary. I wasn’t disappointed with the work; on the contrary, I’d come round to Charlie’s view that the floors were just right—but they’d passed from the realm of the heroic to the everyday. Not three months previously men operating heavy machinery and making God’s own din had struggled mightily in this confined space—now children played on the result without a thought.87The floors in my mind’s eye had receded from the foreground into the background; they looked as though they’d always been that way.

  That was the idea. I wanted everything to seem not bright and shiny and new, but timeless—a common enough ambition, I suppose. But it’s trickier than you might think.

  There are several schools of thought on how to modernize an old house. The first is to pay no attention at all and buy whatever they’re pushing this week at the home-improvement store. Happily those taking this approach aren’t so numerous as formerly.

  The second school consists of the historical purists, who attempt to re-create the house as it stood at a particular moment in time. Mary and I had visited a few homes redone along these lines on neighborhood house tours, most of them magnificent exemplars of late Victoriana with ceiling medallions and period antiques and sometimes operating gas fixtures. Some might object that these places were more like museums than homes, which I don’t think was necessarily the case, but they required more time and money than we had.

  A third group consists of persons of artistic inclination who use home remodeling as an opportunity to make a design statement. We had a number of friends and acquaintances in this category. I remember one gay couple who created a series of rooms so brilliantly conceived and executed you felt you ought to take off your hat on entering—among other things they’d rebuilt a closet, and I mean a closet-sized closet as opposed to the larger walk-in variety, as a library complete with floor-to-ceiling built-in shelves, what I recall as walnut crown molding with indirect lighting, and a rolling wooden ladder with brass fittings on a (very) short track.

  I admired these efforts, but they weren’t what I wanted to do, even if I’d had the resources and talent. For one thing, the arty types often produced bits that were first-rate considered singly but incongruous taken together, lacking a common thread. More important, they were too clearly the product of an individual rather than of their time, whereas we wanted a house rooted in history.

  I’m not sure if I picked up this idea working in the trades, but that reinforced it. Once an old electrician, seeing me crank down a fitting with what he considered excessive force, commented, “I’d hate to be the guy that comes after you.” I thought that was an interesting way of looking at things. You weren’t the first person to work on the project; you wouldn’t be the last. You were appreciative if your predecessors had done their work competently and so made your job easier; by the same token, you didn’t want to leave a mess for the next guy. The project—any construction or remodeling job, really—was a sort of serial collaboration.

  I’d come to think of an old house in the same way. You owned it temporarily. In the rare case you might find the place such a shambles that the only sensible thing was to start over, but more commonly you’d discover well-crafted elements that needed only a little repair and buffing up. Other parts of the house might require rebuilding, and naturally you’d want to install modern mechanical systems and amenities. But the place had been built in a certain style, and it seemed perverse simply to ignore that style in constructing new. What’s more, I thought it self-evident that all the parts of the house ought to exhibit some unity of design. The result if skillfully done would be a modern house that retained its original character while reflecting at least in small ways the times—and not necessarily just the good times—through which it had passed.88

  That was my goal, and by now I felt some confidence that we’d at least partly achieved it. In the spring of 1995 my brother John, standing on the front sidewalk during his first visit in close to two years, stared at the top floor of the house with its turret and dormer and asked, “So what did you do up there, anyway?” I was delighted—I’d wanted no one to be able to tell what we’d done. We’d demolished and rebuilt the roof; what John saw now bore only a faint resemblance to the house when we’d bought it. But it likely approximated the building’s appearance as originally constructed, and more important looked right, to the point that it was hard to imagine the place having looked any other way.

  Still, the house was far from complete. We’d done no decorating. The woodwork, however comely, was unpainted, and the walls were uniformly white. We had no curtains, no rugs, not even closet doors. We had fireboxes built into the chimneys but no mantelpieces—the fireplaces were mere holes in the walls. We had no garage and no landscaping. Barely half the house’s interior space was usable in other than the roughest sense. The “office” where I did my writing was an unfinished (and more pertinently, uninsulated) attic—my computer perched on cardboard boxes; over the winter I’d pecked away at the keyboard in my parka, warmed mainly by a space heater. The living and dining rooms weren’t finished either—the floors had to be rebuilt, and having exhausted our funds, I was the one who was going to have to rebuild them.

  That was the project to which I turned next. By now I’d abandoned hopes of restoring the dining room’s intricate parquet veneer (too far gone) or installing walnut inlay as a replacement (too expensive). I’d learned enough to ask how much more quartersawn oak would cost compared to plainsawn—don’t worry, the distinction will be explained in due time—but the price we’d been qu
oted was $5,000, which was out of the question.

  Instead I settled for getting the floor level. I mentioned earlier that the floors in the front of the house had buckled after someone’s misbegotten experiment in bricking up the foundation wall below—you’d think a mole had tunneled around the perimeter of the rooms. Having first removed the boxes piled in the living room by the movers, I gingerly extracted what remained of the parquet, pried up the subflooring, removed the bricks, then reinstalled the planks. Determined to avoid the squeaks endemic to wooden houses, the Chief and I then fastened all the planking in both rooms to the joists below with drywall screws—fifteen hundred in all. That done—the preparatory work took nearly three weeks—we called the floor guys back to install and finish new oak flooring. While they were in the midst of this, a fill-in mailman stuck his head through the living room window and asked, “Does anybody live here?” But we wound up with a helluva floor.

  Construction on the first and second floors was now more or less complete, but Mary remained unhappy—though she’d made things reasonably homey, there wasn’t a room in the house that was anywhere near done, done here defined as all work finished and the rooms decorated. Experienced rehabbers will recognize the great perceptual divide these words signify. Some may call it a male-female thing, but that’s apt to lead to bitter remarks. Rather, let’s say it springs from the division of labor.

  Typically in any home rehabilitation project you have the construction department and the ministry of interior design. The construction crew thinks it is carrying a good deal of the load and can point to indeterminate but certainly large quantities of plans drawn, dust swallowed, earth moved, pipes run, large and intransigent objects transported, nails nailed and screws screwed, wires pulled, risks taken, injuries sustained, subcontractors set straight, paperwork submitted and submitted again, crud shoveled, mistakes corrected, complex and dimly understood systems successfully installed, disasters averted, difficult persons dealt with, and withal a host of troubles patiently borne. The decorating unit thinks this is all very well, but we still don’t have a front-hall rug.