The Barn House (16 page)

Tony was different. No doubt I'm being unfair in saying this, but I can't help thinking it was because he wasn't native born, and so was unfamiliar with the way business in America was done. At the time he began work on the Barn House, he'd been in the United States for not quite twenty years, having emigrated from Poland in the early 1970s. By training Tony wasn't a contractor but a civil engineer, one of what, to those left behind, must have seemed like a frightening number of professional people draining out of Poland in those days—our cleaning lady had been an attorney. Leaving Poland wasn't easily accomplished, but Tony contrived to obtain a passport and a tourist visa—how, I didn't inquire. Having arrived in the United States, he got the visa extended. Time passed; Tony didn't return to Poland. Deportation papers arrived. Tony married an American woman of Polish descent—a lovely lady, I hasten to say, to whom he remains married to this day. The point was, he stayed.

Immigrant communities in the United States often specialize in certain trades. In Chicago, Koreans run dry-cleaning shops, Thais and Vietnamese open restaurants, and Mexicans work as landscapers. Poles in Chicago commonly get started cleaning houses and office buildings—Tony in fact had run a cleaning crew for a time. The other trade open to Poles was construction. Why this should be so isn't entirely clear, although the cost of entry is low and Poland's vocational schools are said to turn out excellent tradesmen. Tony had never been to vocational school, but he'd grown tired of emptying wastebaskets and swabbing toilets. He acquired two partners, both Polish immigrants, one a writer and the other a stuntman. (A movie stuntman. I had to ask that this be repeated, too.) One may ask what there was for a Polish stuntman to do in Chicago. Apparently not much—the fellow was amenable to Tony's suggestion that they go into the siding business. Tony knew nothing about siding, but—you can see why I liked the guy—figured he could learn. Here his professional background was helpful, since as a former engineer he was acquainted with such concepts as plumb, level, and true, which gave him a leg up right there. Plus, he was honest, industrious, and shrewd.

The siding business lasted only a season; the writer and the stuntman went back to Poland. With winter coming on, Tony decided he would expand into general remodeling. A few sessions of eating dirt were enough to convince him he wasn't cut out for manual labor. He decided to become an entrepreneur.

In Chicago in those days—I don't claim things are drastically different now—there were a number of remodeling firms of somewhat shady reputation that ostensibly were general contractors but in reality were mainly sales organizations, making their money on brochures and smooth talk. A job having been sold and a contract procured, an expediter would then set about finding someone to do the work. The screening process wasn't rigorous. If you had a truck and tools and could stand upright unassisted—tovarich, you got the job.

In bidding on such work, Tony developed a two-part strategy. First he'd visit the job site, partly to look over the project but mainly to schmooze the home owner. Over a cup of coffee he'd review the items to be accomplished, taking care to omit some essential task. The alarmed home owner would pull out her copy of the contract to show Tony the agreed-upon scope of work. Tony would smile, concede she was right, and note the contract's bottom line. Thus prepared, he'd submit his bid—on a $7,000 job, say, he might calculate that he could do his portion for $3,000, bid $4,000 (which would cause the general contractor to squawk, but not throw Tony out of the office), and settle for $3,800, putting him $800 to the good.

That showed a certain cunning, but the devious part was this—Tony would then do a competent job
.
The happy customer would sign the completion form and pay the general contractor, who in turn would pay Tony. Meanwhile, the subcontractors hired to work on other houses would bungle their assignments, tick off the home owners, and get fired without being paid, whereupon the general contractor would ask Tony to salvage the jobs. Tony would visit the home owners, ask to see the contracts (he needed to see what had been done and what hadn't, didn't he?), then bid as if starting afresh. The general contractor, anxious to avoid having the jobs botched twice and aware that his outlay up to that point had been basically zip, was disposed to accept any reasonable offer. If some of the fired subcontractors' work could be salvaged, so much the better for Tony.

After a few years of subcontracting to other companies, Tony was sufficiently well established to strike out on his own. Eventually he was joined by his brother Jerry, his junior by fifteen years. Jerry worked for Tony for a while, then started his own company. He and Tony had agreed to pool their resources for the purposes of our job.

As the preceding makes evident, Tony was well suited to work on the Barn House, but I didn't know that when we first met. All I knew was that Eddie had recommended him and that Tony, on the basis of the half hour's acquaintance we had prior to signing the contract, seemed like a nice guy. I don't claim it was a shining example of due diligence. Looking back on it now, in fact, I'd say most people do a better job checking out strangers they pick up in bars. But it was now early October, with not a nail driven. I signed.

Almost everyone who worked for Tony and Jerry was of Polish or at least Eastern European extraction, except for those in trades that had become the province of other ethnic groups, the example coming most quickly to mind being Mexicans, who, in addition to landscaping, had cornered the market on drywall. Alex, my real estate guy, who did some rehab on the side and thus had occasion to hire, was of the view that Polish drywallers were, relative to the Mexicans who had supplanted them, older, slower, more expensive, and possessed of a greater proclivity to drink. I have no personal knowledge of any Polish worker with the last failing, although now that I consider the matter it might explain the unfortunate fellow who kept falling off the ladder and suffering grievous bodily harm. For the most part, though, the Polish workers were skilled and hardworking, and I grew fond of all of them, particularly the noble Chester, the head of the framing crew. Tony employed them, or at least a large subset of them, through an arcane system of labor subcontractors, the details of which were elusive but which had the effect, as I understood it, of shielding him from adverse financial consequences when business slowed down. Tony was perhaps unschooled in some fine points of American business practice, but he was no dope.

At an early stage of the program I developed great confidence in Tony, which was perhaps surprising in view of the somewhat rocky start. The back of the house had to be demolished, to aid in which process Tony and Jerry had hired a Polish fellow with a backhoe. I wasn't present when the work began, but judging from the results the backhoe man had gotten a little carried away. I'd instructed that the rear of the kitchen was to be knocked down, but that the floor joisting—the century-old, twenty-five-foot-long two-by-tens—was to remain. The backhoe man had consigned the floor joists to history, and while he was at it had knocked off a corner of the limestone foundation, destroyed the cellar door, and for all I know would have flattened the rest of the house, except that at the climactic moment the goddess of home improvement had decided,
enough of this malarkey
, whereupon the backhoe popped a hose, spraying hydraulic fluid over the ruins and bringing progress, if one could call it that, to an abrupt halt.

When I arrived at the Barn House the next day I stood in the basement and surveyed the scene. The back of the house had the appearance of a bombed-out cellar on the western front. Above me yawned the heavenly vault, occluded to some extent by the upper reaches of the neighboring elm trees, then showing the first tinge of autumn. The splintered lumber formerly constituting the kitchen, the rear addition, the second-floor porch, the rear deck, and appurtenant structures lay in an untidy heap behind the foundation wall. At the edge of the wreckage stood the crippled backhoe, the ruptured hose hanging limp. I knew nothing about backhoes, but I bet you twenty dollars that with a length of garden hose, a couple clamps, and a quart of brake fluid I could have gotten it operating well enough to move it. It wasn't my backhoe, however, and frankly—my serenity on this point now strikes me as remarkable—it wasn't my problem. Tony would fix it. (Actually, through some division of responsibilities not clear to me at the time, it was Jerry's job to fix it, a matter in which Tony seemed to take a grim satisfaction; I could only assume Jerry had hired the backhoe guy.) The backhoe man showed up later that day and spent a good hour ineffectually maneuvering the shovel, presumably in an effort to retract it to the point that he could extricate his machine and drive it to the repair shop; but eventually he abandoned the effort, and apparently the backhoe as well. All I know is it wound up parked on the street a half block away, where it remained for a month or so until purchased by the Irish water-service installers Kevin had hired, who had wonderful brogues and the wit to deduce that here was a pigeon ripe for the plucking. Demolition was completed by a crew of Mexicans, too freshly arrived to have learned the art of drywall, who removed the shattered remnants by hand.

I observed these proceedings with detachment. I had decided, on the basis of some ineffable vibe that I can't persuasively explain but that till then had seldom steered me wrong, that the project was in good hands. Besides, I had other fish to fry. I had to figure out what to do about the radiators.

 

I
t's customary in old-house books to rhapsodize about the carpentry, the smell of fresh-cut pine and manly sweat, the scream of the circular saws, and other signs of a construction project in progress, but if you don't mind we're going to go easy on that part. I don't mean to minimize the importance of the Barn House's carpentry, or to deprecate in any way the quality of the work, which was a wonder to behold. Indeed, particularly with respect to the framing of the multi-angled turret roof, I regretted more than once that we were going to have to cover it up, and gave some thought to leaving it exposed, either by giving the room a rustic treatment or somehow putting the framing under glass. The latter idea was facetious, of course, and Charlie talked me out of the former. Still, when it came time to put up the drywall, I felt as though I were draping a muumuu over Catherine Deneuve.

Anyway, while carpentry will get its due in this book, I'm not going to dwell on it. I was more interested in other aspects of the house—namely, the electrical and mechanical systems. It was the Remco Thinking Boys' Toys talking. Carpentry had its points, I conceded that. You got to pound intractable objects with a hammer, grip mouthfuls of nails, and operate power tools shaped like an assault rifle. It tickled the Y chromosome to do such things from time to time. But one didn't want to get carried away. My brother John, for example, was one of those guys who thought nobody could call himself a man who hadn't framed a hipped roof, the kind that slopes down to the eaves on all four sides. Please. It was a useful skill. Knowing how to light a fire with two paper matches in the rain was a useful skill. But the breed of individual who had taken apart clocks as a child and cars as an adolescent knew there was more to life than lumber. Way more. I'm speaking of pipes, ducts, and wires.

Houses nowadays have a lot of pipes, ducts, and wires. Indeed, in any restored home one principal difference between the updated version and the original is the vastly greater amount of stuff hidden in the walls. If you'll excuse my once again getting ahead of my story, we tallied up the reels for the different types of wire and cable we installed at the Barn House, not only for the 120-volt AC supply but also for the intercom, the telephones, cable TV, and so on; the total ran to fourteen thousand feet—and we hadn't installed the extensive data wiring common today, nor an infrared-controlled sound system. We did install an alarm system, but I didn't do it myself, and so don't know exactly how much wire it required, but looking around the premises afterward I guessed it had to be another one thousand feet, meaning we used close to three miles of wire and cable all told.

When we were well into our project I visited a new house constructed for a friend, who had made provision for every electronic gadget then known; his basement utility room looked like a telephone exchange. “Cool,” I said when I saw it, and I spoke sincerely. I loved this stuff. I won't claim I understood it in detail. My alarm guy, one of those carefree electronics geniuses to whom the word guru could be unsarcastically attached, used to explain how the various systems worked, larding his conversation with such terms as “zero crossing” and “trickle current” and the like, as if I knew what he was talking about. Up to a point I did—I'd subscribed to
Popular Electronics
for a year at age fourteen—but inside of fifteen minutes he'd always left me in the dust. No matter. I was in my element and happy.

It would be a while before we got to the wiring, though. First came the pipes.

When the likely expense of renovating the Barn House first became apparent, I considered doing all the pipe fitting required, including that for the plumbing in addition to the heating. But the more I thought about it the more I realized this course was impractical. It was partly a question of time and partly one of skill. I had seen enough plumbing work done to know that it involved considerable craft. Among other things we would have to run some gas lines, which required threaded pipe. I knew, as all red-blooded lads should, how to thread pipe, having found it useful as a means of dodging plaster duty on days when the electrical business was slow. It required jigs and dies and cutters and vises; copious amounts of thread-cutting oil, the scent of which to this day takes me back to the blossom of my youth; and a thing called a reamer, about which I'll say only that if you thought
Marathon Man
was a movie to chill the blood, wait till you see the remake done with a reamer. But I hadn't had primary responsibility for hooking the pipes together, and with my father's example vividly in mind, I decided that if leaks were an inevitable part of the learning process, it was best not to start out piping gas.