The Barn House (19 page)

A bushing is a sort of metal collar used to make a big hole into a little one. You screw the bushings into big holes in the base of the radiators. The bushings have little holes that you hook the radiator valves into. One may ask why the radiator manufacturers hadn't furnished their products with little holes to start with, rather than yawning two-inch orifices such as might be needed to connect the radiator to the cooling pipes for a nuclear power plant. I can't say. Perhaps someone was on the take from the bushing cartel. No matter—I had to take out the old bushings and replace them with new ones. The radiators having been rearranged and the thermal characteristics of the house having changed (we were going to insulate the walls, of course), the pipes were all different sizes.

The existing bushings had been rusting in place for ninety-seven years—for all I knew they had fused inextricably with the radiators' molecular structure and were held in place by the strong nuclear force. The only tool I had with even a gossamer promise of removing them was an eighteen-inch-long pipe wrench. It was a stout little instrument manufactured by the Ridgid Tool Company, best known for its calendars depicting busty maidens wielding oversized Ridgid tools with come-hither looks and God knows what salacious intent. Still, eighteen inches, whatever the busty maidens might think of it, wasn't going to do me a lot of good with a radiator bushing. I wrestled the wrench onto bushing A on radiator #1 on the third floor (one always pipes radiators from the top down), and gave a tentative tug. Nothing. I ratcheted up the joules and applied—well, I won't say hernia-inducing torque, but certainly enough to pop the bolts on, say, an automobile wheel. Still no go.

I was discouraged, but only momentarily. I knew what I needed, and browsed around the house in search of it. Those who have been down this road before will know what I was after: a cheater pipe. I found one in the basement. I had laboriously unscrewed several hunks of the old threaded radiator feeder line and hadn't gotten around to discarding them, or more accurately, the neighborhood metal scavengers (more on them later) hadn't yet spirited them away. I found a five-foot length of pipe an inch and a half in diameter. If I slipped it over the handle of the wrench I would be able, through the principle of leverage, to apply substantial additional force, which would either budge the bushing or snap the wrench, a sight worth seeing either way.

I strode purposefully back up to the third floor, grappled the wrench onto the bushing again, slipped the cheater pipe over the wrench handle, then looked for a suitably Archimedean place to stand. The preliminaries having thus been efficiently addressed, I applied prodigious force. Nothing happened initially, but one felt—one
sensed
—internal seismic shifts, as ancient and implacable forces conceded the jig was up. I gave it a little more gas.

The sucker turned.

Oh, yes. It wasn't
happy
about the situation, and I needed to reseat the wrench and cheater pipe multiple times in order to coax the bushing through the better part of a revolution before I could finish the job with the wrench alone. But it turned.

One recognizes that in the context of pivotal world events—the battle of Midway, for example, or the invention of movable type—the loosening of a radiator bushing doesn't loom very large. But it was (so to speak) a turning point for me. I had established, first of all, that the stupid bushings
would
turn, a matter of which till then I'd had no personal experience. More to the point, they would turn on my say-so. It's all very well to know, in an abstract way, that humankind can harness the forces of the universe. One still wants firsthand assurance that they'll toe the line for you.

For a time thereafter things proceeded with reasonable dispatch. After I had removed the old bushings, I screwed in new ones of appropriate size, having first daubed the threads with a white Teflon crayon. I did this because plumbers always did it, or else used a sort of gray ectoplasm called pipe dope (Teflon was more high-tech), having in my mind the idea that the stuff would prevent leaks, although Kevin the plumbing guy later informed me that the true purpose was to reduce friction and enable me to screw in the new bushings to pinnacles of tightness previously undreamt of, thereby ensuring (I guess) that the next guy who had to remove them would likewise bust a gut. This done, I noodged the radiator into its final position using a crowbar. (Well, not final final; I had to move it around numerous times for the drywallers and floor sanders and such, but you know what I mean.) I screwed the valve and return elbow (the part that hooked to the pipe on the other side of the radiator) into place, marked the floor immediately below, and drilled holes for the pipes that would drop through the floor. Then I walked downstairs, looked up at the holes in the floorboards above, and considered the matter of pipes.

 

A
lthough this won't mean much to you unless you're the type who spends your lunch hour prowling the plumbing aisle at the True Value, pipe fitting these days is an order of magnitude simpler than it was when my father renovated houses, largely as a result of the substitution of lightweight, easily worked, and (no surprise) cheaper materials such as copper and plastic for cast iron and steel. The introduction of new products—vinyl siding is the obvious example—has arguably led to an erosion of quality in many construction trades. Plumbing isn't one of them. Some will dispute the merits of plastic pipe—when used for drains, as I've already pointed out, it can be embarrassingly noisy; the fumes from the glue used to assemble it can be toxic; and there is some lingering concern about whether noxious chemicals can leach from plastic pipe into drinking water. (The current research consensus: Don't worry about it.)

Copper pipe, however, is superior in almost all respects to the material it replaced, threaded steel. It's vastly easier to install, for one thing. Cutting and threading steel pipe involved numerous steps using tools that would fill a small machine shop. You clamped the pipe in a vise; cut it to length using a cutting-wheel tool that you clamped against the pipe and then rotated, screwing the wheel progressively tighter until you had sliced through the pipe; reamed out the burr; applied a thread-cutting die set into a multiarmed die holder having the appearance of an airplane propeller; squirted on oil to reduce friction; muscled the die through an arc of ninety degrees or so; applied more oil; rotated the die another ninety degrees; and so on till the thread had been cut to the necessary depth. Then you removed the pipe from the vise, flipped it around, clamped it in the vise again, and threaded the other end. On a good day cutting and threading a single length of steel pipe took two adolescents twenty minutes (I suppose if we had really busted our humps we might have done it in ten), without even getting into the business of fitting all the pipes together and stopping the innumerable leaks.

Soldering copper pipe, on the other hand, required one merely to cut the pipe using a tube cutter, which was similar to a steel-pipe cutter but maybe one-fifth the size; burnish the ends to a shiny finish with sandpaper to ensure proper bonding of the solder; daub on a jelly-like substance known as flux, which melted when heated and distributed the solder uniformly around the joint; assemble the pipes and fittings; and then solder the whole mess together using a portable torch. The work required some skill, and carried with it the not insignificant risk of setting the house afire, but in terms of physical exertion it was a frolic in the daffodils compared to fitting steel pipe. Plus it was twice as fast and, since the pipes were light, could be done without a helper.

Soldered pipe had one other large advantage as well. Threaded pipe had a tendency to leak at the joints—sometimes copiously, as my father had discovered to his sorrow and my amusement, but more often in minute amounts that no amount of tightening could entirely eliminate. Even in the best of circumstances a few joints would weep, which rankled the old man's perfectionist soul, but there was little he could do about it except wait a few weeks till rust plugged the gaps. A properly soldered joint, in contrast, was watertight from the start.
⁵⁷

The upshot of all this was that while piping a house full of radiators using threaded steel pipe wasn't a practical possibility for one man with limited time, few tools, and no experience, it wasn't out of the question using copper. That's not to say it would be easy. I'd sweated pipe, as plumbers say, exactly twice before, both times small jobs at my mother-in-law's. Unfortunately, by the time I began working on the Barn House I'd forgotten how I'd done it, as I discovered one morning when I spent an hour trying to hook up a temporary water line for a toilet and wound up burning a hole in the pipe with the torch.

Now I was faced with repiping the entire house—perhaps a thousand feet of pipe and hundreds of solder joints—and I had to get it finished before the arrival of sustained subfreezing temperatures, perhaps six weeks. Or at least get it finished enough to start the furnace. Here I had done one smart thing. In designing the piping I had divided it into two loops, one supplying the radiators in the front of the house, the other those in the back. Each loop was to be isolated from the other and from the furnace by valves. My plan was to finish one loop and stub out the other as far as the valves—a matter of a few inches of pipe. Then I could shut the valves on the unfinished (indeed, unstarted) loop, open the valves on the finished one, fill the system with water, start the furnace, and warm the house sufficiently to keep the water supply pipes from freezing. After that I could finish the other loop in . . . well, comfort perhaps is not the appropriate term. But at least I wouldn't get frostbite.

Still, while I had a big-picture sense of where I wanted to go, I was resoundingly ignorant of the details. What's more, there was no one I could ask. Finding a male acquaintance who knew the basics of pipe soldering wasn't that difficult, but guy-knowledge of hot-water heating systems had fallen to historical lows. The technology hadn't disappeared—the term used nowadays is “hydronic heat”—but it had become a specialized art, like rigging solar panels or rebuilding carburetors. I knew no one who had ever installed radiators, not counting my father, who with my grandfather's help had installed one in the rear addition in 1958, too long ago to count. Kent the engineer had some book knowledge of the subject, and could answer the occasional technical question, but for many practical details my best bet—often my only bet—was to study the antique hot-water system I already had.

I did have one odd nugget of knowledge that was to prove unexpectedly useful. Somewhere along the line I had picked up the idea that the pipes needed to rise continually (or, to use a term that hasn't come up since high school algebra, monotonically) en route from the furnace to the radiator. I wasn't sure why this was so—electric pumps made it unnecessary to depend on convection to circulate the water, and could push it down as easily as up. Nonetheless, I went to great trouble to ensure that the pipes sloped in accordance with what in retrospect seems an almost superstitious conviction, and for reasons that didn't become apparent till much later was fortunate that I had.

I'd gotten off to a modestly encouraging start. Having positioned the first radiator and gone mano a mano with the bushings, I'd established that I'd launched a project I had some prospect of successfully concluding. Now I girded myself for production. First I set up a work space. The previous owners had left a beat-up old wooden workbench in the basement. I dragged this up to the second floor and lined up my collection of pipe fittings, solder, propane torches, and other plumbing gear on top of it. Then I hung a fluorescent shop light overhead—the bright circle was cheering—and got ready to go to work.

It wasn't long before I ran into another obstacle. The short pipes dropping down from the radiator needed to make a ninety-degree turn and run about eight feet horizontally to the risers, vertical pipes running up through the walls from the basement. To enable the pipes to make the horizontal run, I'd have to drill holes through a series of joists, the long planks tipped on edge that held up the floor above. The joists were closely spaced and the pipe didn't have enough flex for me to shove in a single piece running from radiator to riser. Instead, I'd have to cut a series of short lengths, one per joist, slip them into the holes, then solder them together with couplings. Running two pipes eight feet would require fourteen couplings—twenty-eight solder joints. Progress would be agonizingly slow.

Another problem became apparent once I got started. Some of the joists were so close together, as little as ten inches apart, that it was impossible for me to fit an electric drill between them at the requisite angle—I couldn't drill the holes. I made repeated trips to hardware and home improvement stores to buy bit extensions, flexible shafts, right-angle jigs. Nothing worked. After three days I'd extended a pair of pipes approximately four feet. I could go no further without help. It was time to call the Chief.

 

T
he Chief 's real name was John, but no one who knew him in high school ever called him that. He was a wiry little guy who played the tambourine and sang in the school folk group. I hadn't known him well in high school, but we'd become buddies while helping organize our fifteen-year reunion. He'd never married. He lived with his beloved West Highland terrier Duffee in a Chicago suburb called Westchester. At one time a branch line of the L had operated in Westchester. One day in 1951, while the Chief's mother was pregnant with him, his father had been killed in a head-on collision while working as a motorman on this line. I was born the same day. No significance is to be attached to this coincidence, but it lent the proceedings the shivery air of fate.

The Chief was a man of unexpected talents—in seventh grade he'd taken second place in a citywide math contest. After college he became the teletype operations manager for a brokerage house at the Chicago Board of Trade. The brokerage house had been sold after suffering financial reverses and eventually the Chief had been laid off. At the time that I knew him, he had no obvious means of support.