The Barn House (14 page)

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.

So it went. A little more for concrete work. A lot more for carpentry—a new iteration of the drawings indicated much more framing than originally envisioned. A little more for roofing; I can't remember why. Eddie shaved his contractor's markup. It helped a little, but not enough. By the time we were done, the price of the job had ballooned to more than $284,000.

The obvious and for practical purposes only solution was for me to do a lot of the work myself. I'd always planned on doing some work, because I enjoyed it; now I'd do so because I had to. The electrical and heating systems—they were my problem now. Other work I decided to subcontract myself, to save the contractor's markup—plumbing, air-conditioning. Some work we omitted altogether. Woodwork refinishing, for example—some other time.

We got the price down to $213,000—not an extravagant sum, given the breadth of the work required, but it was a little deceptive. To cite one obvious difficulty, while I was a fair electrician, I didn't know jack about heating. Worse—this was the part I hadn't explained in detail to the bank—even after all the money in the budget was spent, the house still wouldn't be done. Woodwork refinishing was a case in point. An unwary loan officer might consider this task a dispensable luxury—who cares if the woodwork was a little scuffed up? But the truth was, the old woodwork we'd piled in the basement was more than scuffed up; it was probably wrecked—in the fever of demolition the boys had shown a little too much zeal. While I hadn't ruled out the possibility of reusing some of what we'd salvaged, chances were we'd need to install new. Remilling woodwork to match the opulent original would be an expensive project—more than 5,000 feet of oak and poplar stock worked into four different shapes using custom-made knives. We could use cheap stock moldings, of course (though I cringed at the thought), but even that would cost thousands of dollars I didn't have and had no immediate prospect of getting. Some work had never been on the bid sheet—painting and decorating, chimney relining. Rebuilding the fireplaces. Repairing the dining room floor. Finishing the third floor, where my office was to go. All required. All unbudgeted.

But it was too late now. Interior demolition was now well advanced. Decrepit as the house had been when we bought it, it was now completely uninhabitable. The project was fairly launched; we wouldn't come up for air for another three years.

I
was by now fairly desperate to get the work under way, but one obstacle remained. We still faced the delicate matter of getting a building permit.

Some controversy attends the question of when a building permit is required. To hear some tell it, you're supposed to get a permit every time you change a lightbulb. That wasn't the attitude in Chicago, where the common view was that you should never get a permit if you could possibly avoid it. I'd known people who had built major additions entirely on the sly. Partly that simply reflected the instinctive distrust of authority in a working-man's town—obtaining a permit wasn't going to materially advance your project; it merely gave someone the opportunity to tell you to stop, or that you were doing it all wrong. Chicago being Chicago, it also gave someone an opportunity to put his hand in your pocket.

There was also the matter of the building code. Chicago—I imagine this is true of many older large cities—didn't use the uniform national building code that smaller municipalities typically adopt. Rather, it enforced a code of its own devising, the peculiarities of which were legend. For example, for years the city had demanded that the water supply in every building be connected to the feed from the street main using something known as a wiped lead joint. It's unnecessary to explain what such a joint was other than to say it required copious amounts of the heavy metal lead. Lead in drinking water causes mental retardation. Many who've had dealings in Chicago will find a lot explained right there. Eventually the lead-joint requirement had been rescinded, but a great many other oddities remained, with some new ones added.

There was the matter of purple primer, for instance. The city had decided to permit the use of drainpipe made of polyvinylchloride, commonly known as PVC. The joints in PVC pipes were secured with glue. Before daubing on the glue it was necessary to apply primer, which cleaned and softened the parts to be joined. So far so good. The twist in Chicago was that the primer had to have purple dye in it.
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This enabled building inspectors to determine that you had in fact used primer, as opposed to spit or taco sauce or (I suppose this was the real fear) nothing, thereby producing a substandard joint and subjecting posterity to the embarrassing possibility that the waste line on the upstairs toilet would give out immediately following the arrival of someone's prom date. I appreciated the thought, but there were manifestly so many thousands of other things that a creative plumber could screw up that I wondered why anyone would single out primer. One far greater risk, for example, was that the plumber would saw through all the floor joists to accommodate horizontal pipe runs, something that happened constantly and which in terms of potential seriousness was comparable to removing the home owner's spinal column. I speak from experience; someone had done it in my house, causing Bob the engineer to come as close as I ever saw him to betraying agitation.
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The code had a great many other problematic clauses, of which I can give only a sample. All house-current wiring had to be placed in ductile metal conduit. I'd spent thirty years learning to bend pipe and had no personal objection to it—on the contrary, I thought it was a worthwhile investment. There had been multiple safety-related changes in wire manufacture in my lifetime—cloth-and-rubber insulation had given way to the more durable plastic TW; TW to the more heat-resistant THHN or THWN; copper wire to aluminum and back to copper when aluminum proved more prone to fires. In a house without conduit you had to chop holes in the walls to replace the wiring, or more likely just live with the danger; with conduit you merely pulled the old wire out of the conduit and ran new. All that having been said, virtually every other habitable place on earth permitted armored or plastic-sheathed cable in residential service, which was much cheaper to install.

The drain line for a dishwasher had to have a one-inch “air gap,” to preclude what in my opinion was a somewhat unlikely scenario involving the siphoning of contaminated water. The dishwasher also had to have a cutoff switch located nearby, in case the home owner wished to repair the wiring but couldn't find the fuse box.

Oh, and grease traps. Grease traps in most of the world had gone out with chrome dinette sets, but the code in Chicago still required them, even though if used with a garbage disposal they'd rapidly fill with odious slop. Professional home builders in Chicago had adopted the tactic of installing a grease trap until the plumbing inspector had signed off on the job, whereupon the trap was removed and saved until needed again. I got the impression from plumbers that there were only a couple dozen extant grease traps in Chicago, which had been making the rounds from job site to job site since 1958.

In light of all this, obtaining a building permit struck some as foolish. But I intended to get one anyway, for two reasons, one obvious and the other possibly not. The obvious reason was that we had a Dumpster in the driveway and were about to tear off the front porch, the back of the house, the siding, and a good portion of the roof. For a period of several months the building would have gaping holes in it covered with big blue tarps. If an inspector happened by, we were hardly in a position to claim we were just cleaning out the basement. The less obvious reason was that building permits were a bulwark of civilization, and however stupid or seemingly pointless the process, to get one was to step back from the abyss.

You may think I exaggerate, and of course I do, but less than might be supposed. Here's an episode that illustrates the matter in all its complexity. A few minutes after midnight on June 30, 2003, a tier of wooden porches at the rear of a renovated three-flat in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago collapsed without warning, the floors pancaking on top of one another as the floors of the World Trade Center had done on September 11. Thirteen people were killed, all twentysomething professionals with (till then) bright prospects. Another fifty-four were injured.

In the ensuing media coverage, the following emerged: