The House at Royal Oak (7 page)

“How much air?”

Depends on how much water you use, he said. We both thanked him and one of us mumbled something about old houses. He looked up then, taking his eyes off the furnace for the first time.

“Best thing to do with an old house? Take it as it comes.”

He also explained how and why to bleed the radiators. As he got in his truck, he called out a final piece of advice. “Never can tell when someone who knows a house is empty might come by and siphon off your oil.”

Hugo pulled the dangling, unused padlock off the side door and attached it to our new $500 oil supply.

Air
in
the water tank. Air
out
of the radiator so hot water can come in and warm the room. If only you could bleed the radiators and the tank would fill with air. By the time he left, the house had warmed up to sixty degrees and I unzipped my jacket, thinking about the former owner's choice of words. “Enough oil to get started.”

“Frankly?” contractor number three said, echoing what the two before him had said less directly. “Knock it down and start over.”

Hugo explained that we couldn't afford to do that. We needed to get a business up and running more or less right away.

“Better get a plumber then,” he said on the way out.

Contractor number four looked around, admired the old woodwork, and stubbed out his cigarette on the dining room floor. “You've got a couple of foundation sills to replace, some floors. . . If you're not going to tear down, well, I'd say twenty-five thousand, maybe thirty, will go a long way toward fixing this thing up.”

Repairing the listing foundation at the back of the house would run a fraction of that. He couldn't say exactly how much, but he'd only charge “time and materials, like all the contractors around here do with this type of job.” I had heard about this local custom, and he came recommended. Elated that his estimate fit the budget, we hired him on the spot.

The correct order for doing the work, this contractor also explained, was foundation repairs first, then plumbing, then finishes. He couldn't count how many people got mixed up—he glanced at me—and started on finishes first, only to have to go back later and redo them.

Of course, we both said. I put away the color swatches and fabric samples I'd collected, the pretty magazine pictures of my ideal garden, and the catalogues of heirloom roses.

Hugo couldn't repair the foundation himself, but he intended to do the rest of the work, except for plumbing and wiring, with help from me when I wasn't at my day job. We sat up late making plans. Hugo drew up a bigger list now of everything we thought that needed doing.

1.
Foundation: sound, according to home inspector, except three sills and joists

2.
Original wood floors in dining room, parlor, bedrooms, owners' space: Keep and repair

3.
Plumbing: Any pipes to replace? Furnace very old but hopefully functional

4.
Shed/laundry/furnace room: Fix or tear down and rebuild

5.
Baths: One needed for each guest room

6.
Kitchen: New appliances, sink, cabinets, flooring (to replace linoleum), vent fan, lighting

7.
Interior finishes: Patch and paint walls, ceilings, doors (14), woodwork

8.
Exterior: Siding and trim, scrape and paint

9.
Front porch: Roof and foundation solid but some floor rot. Build steps, balustrade, and cladding for spindly posts

10.
Interior floor finishing: Sand all floors upstairs and down, stain new wood to match original, seal

11.
Landscaping: For curb appeal, work on front first—take down dead tree, plant shrubbery along walkways, around porch and driveway

12.
Fences: Build high fence along side of property where space “leaks” onto road. Paint antique iron fence and have replacement sections made for gaps

13.
Walkways: Replace concrete slab with old brick

14.
Electrical work: Exterior lighting for walkways and ask electrician to check entire house. Knob and tube wiring safe?

Each of these projects, we came to see, entailed another dozen or more associated tasks, some of which only emerged once you got into the project.

The general contractor turned out to be a fantastically lucky, if nerve-shattering break because he did exactly what he said he would do. He hired subcontractors, Larry and Buck, a father-and-son team who came to jack up the sagging sills, just three at the back of the house, and repair as many joists. They arrived promptly at seven every morning in a rusty, dented Camaro with the front seats replaced by aluminum lawn chairs tied down with bungee cords, and they sat together in the car having coffee and donuts before starting the dirty, dangerous work. Over the next days the slimmer of the two, Buck, in his old high school football jersey, slid under the house while his dad passed in shovels, concrete, jacks, bolts, and, last, new joists.

Hugo worried alternately that the house would collapse on them or that they would jack up the house so fast the remaining ceilings would come down. He ran outside the morning he heard Buck bellowing, “Daaaad, Daaaad!”

He found Buck wedged in tight under a joist except for one lower leg and hurried to get Larry, who was checking the jacks on the other side. Larry came around to where Buck lay, gave a powerful yank on his son's leg and Buck slid out uninjured, pants down to his ankles.

Maybe because of that, they jacked up the house so fast four windows popped their glass. An electrician who was upstairs at the time came running out screaming at them to stop because, “A mother of a crack is opening up in the back wall!”

That evening Hugo read that an old house should be jacked up very, very slowly over a period of days if not weeks so it can have time to adjust, stretch, and settle. A perfect description of what we needed in our own lives, but time and money were not going to allow. Even here some cracks were beginning to show. Hugo seemed disappointed that I couldn't spend more time on the project. I tried to fight off resentment that he had painted such a rosy picture of the work to be done.

The young carpenter who followed Buck and Larry came recommended by someone who couldn't fit the job into his schedule. Clear-eyed and articulate, this carpenter offered to frame up the new bathrooms for a reasonable fixed price, a necessary step before a plumber could come in. He could start right away.

The one and only existing bathroom upstairs first had to be gutted of its cheap, stained, and mostly broken fixturing. A former sitting room, it was spacious enough to divide into two baths, I realized, and situated, luckily, so that it would make en suite baths for two of the guest bedrooms. The sitting room for the third guest room had been turned into a kitchen by the former owner so the plumbing was already partly in place for a third bath.

Five days after the carpenter finished the better part of the framing, he vanished, leaving all his tools and materials neatly fanned out on the floor alongside a dead flying squirrel. I called him half a dozen times and left messages, offering to pay for what he had done, even if he couldn't complete the job. He never called back and in a month his phone was disconnected.

Something happened to that guy, Hugo kept saying, something bad. He didn't seem like the type to be spooked by the house's wildlife visitors.

Hugo studied the work, decided he could complete it, and did. It was a start. After that he went on to fit in about forty hours a week around the catering business he still ran to keep some money coming in. Eventually, he took down and put up walls, fixed doors, windows, plaster, and drywall. He patched, sanded, stained, and finished all the floors and trim—inside and out.

The problem was that the closer you looked at the house, the rougher you could see it was. It was easy to fall into self-loathing at our naïveté and there was a lot of time, while working, to consider exactly how we got into this pickle. Such feats of imagination are a survival mechanism, I decided, because they let you take leaps you would never otherwise consider.

Hugo didn't start out knowing how to do this work, but he learned fast. There was no choice. We needed to open for business before money ran out. By night he read up on home repair and watched a lot of episodes of
This Old House
on TV. By day he decided to work alongside a handyman for a month, someone who would let him watch and help. He needed to learn skills, what tools to buy, where you could take a shortcut, where you couldn't. The carpenter's work, even without the carpenter himself, had taught him some important basics.

Duane, the first handyman who returned our phone call, agreed to give Hugo a crash course in what he needed to know.
But at $18 an hour, eight hours a day, six days a week, we couldn't afford him for long. Duane also proved ingenious at linking one task to another so that he stayed on not for a month but two. At the end of his last day, we drank a beer together and he promised to come back anytime we got stuck.

My eyes welled up as his dented gray truck backed down the driveway. Now we were really alone with an enormous mess that looked, depending on time of day and blood sugar levels, almost impossible or completely impossible to fix.

Hugo eyed the gargantuan amount of thick drywall Duane had ordered, no doubt as job security for himself. Stacked three feet deep in the front hall, it instantly created a pitch in the old wood floor—something else to fix. Conveniently, this drywall, which wouldn't be needed for months, was so heavy Hugo couldn't possibly carry it up a ladder himself and hold it in place while nailing it to the studs. He called Duane.

Duane came back and helped with that, and then a day here, a week there. Every time we said good-byes, wished him well, and finished the day with a beer until it became a joke and we stopped saying good-bye.

A good work crew would have accomplished everything in six months. The miscalculation of how long it would take us was fourfold. To compensate, Hugo revved into high gear, working mostly alone five days a week, sometimes six or seven when there were no catering jobs. Time lost its usual meaning, speeding or slowing depending on how the work was going, but mostly it seemed nonexistent. In its place, strings of tasks stretched out of sight. While Hugo matched up doors he found in the garage with empty doorframes and got glass cut
for all the broken and cracked windowpanes, I scraped away crumbled glazing, which holds panes of glass in old-fashioned windowframes, and learned to apply new glaze. This tedious process requires practice to create smooth, straight lines of glaze. My first attempts looked like fat, wiggly worms and because these were the prominent front porch windows, it all had to be chipped out and redone. I counted thirty-seven trips up and down the ladder before the first window was finished.

Taking a break from the physical work, I planned décor for the new bathrooms. Initially, I considered doing a vintage number with dark floors, wallpaper, and claw-footed tubs, then settled on an all-white, fully modern approach with a clean feel but with vintage touches, such as a vessel sink in one bathroom, a shell-shaped pedestal sink in another. A junk-store find—a mirror in a hand-carved frame with a flower motif and beautifully scraped clean of its paint to show pale wood—would hang Victorian-style from a molding on a dark blue, tasseled cord. Under a linoleum floor, Hugo discovered wide pine planks.

Whenever I took time to notice, the sun was always rising or setting. We dropped out, saw almost no one, and kept in touch with family mainly through late-night phone calls. Gatherings with friends, movies, books, dinner out, doctor checkups—all were set aside. Wisely, friends stayed away, even turning down invitations to stop by for a barbecue and check it out. “Thanks, we'll see it when it's done” was the unanimous response.

Family members took a different approach. Ethan, Lucy, and Amanda, along with my sister and brother, apparently
discussed the situation among themselves and agreed it was serious, because they arrived at strategically spaced intervals, from Washington, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, and New Jersey to encourage and lend a hand.

My sister announced that she didn't do home renovation. She would come to town and take us out to dinner. True to her word, Linda and her husband arrived a couple of months later, checked into an inn, and paid visits to the work site. One night we drove three miles into town to Paul Milne's restaurant. Feasting by candlelight on Paul's oysters in pink champagne sauce, local asparagus, filet, and good wine, with loving faces across the table, everything seemed possible. After eating, we sampled most of the restaurant's brandies. Each one brought more toasts for opening day and the success of our new life. I looked over at Hugo and realized how long it was since I'd seen him laugh. By the time we left, amused at everything and nothing, the project seemed wonderful again, even inspired. A burst of energy set in that lasted for months.

By some miracle my brother, the handiest, can-do member of the entire family, was on sabbatical that year from teaching and he came for two or three days at a time, sometimes a week, to work. Together Hugo and Rick installed a ninety-foot fence where the side of the property joined a public road. They tore down and rebuilt what was left of the front porch, built new windows, and every night they fortified themselves with pizzas, crab cakes, and beer. They drank more beer than I thought necessary, but Rick, a ceramic engineer, was studying the strength and “fracture behavior” of glass bottles for a lawsuit involving a beer company and he needed randomly selected empty bottles for testing, he
explained as he unloaded four cases from the trunk of his car. I caught a flash of a grin.