good floor

Bought our wooden floor today. rift and quarter sawn white oak, 2" boards, mostly 8-10'. very beutiful. very inexpensive. paid half what the going rate is. score one for the good guys

Epigraph

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places. -Ernest Hemingway 

There's a Hole, in my life, ya

A big hole. strike that. a biiiiiiig hole, much larger than i expected, under the house. From our meager (but sincere) beginnings with two shovel guys on day one, the concrete footing supporting the new staircase (and by load-bearing extension, the entire house), has mutated like the creature from the Black Lagoon, overflowing--or rather, undercutting-- it neat boundaries in the crawl space and intruding smack dab into...our sauna!

This thing has at least doubled in size and depth, fulfilling my worst nightmares of money poured into concrete under the house, all apart of the $20k Hiccough. Evidently Adam the Derailing Engineer (too obvious?) had second thoughts about the amount of money that needed to be wasted overbuilding this thing for the next millennium and ordered the new footing greatly expanded. His protrusion into what used to be Spa Moreno will now require a total reconception of how the underhouse works. Arg. That room made us so happy.

So RIP Spa Moreno. We hope you will rise again.

Integration

Nice meeting tonight with Shelby the Master of Experience and Nancy the Industrious Architect. Our initiative towar integration paid off nicely with new drawing and elevations defining many of the dangling participles of the design.  The elements are coming together very well and a feeling of wholeness has begun to permeate the design. One choice now leads naturally to the next, always a good sign that you are on the right track. 

Nancy has moved compellingly past industriousness and has begun to display a creative side. He evocation of light and dark as applied to the entry hall was inspiring, suggesting that the entry hall in shadows performed as a transitional space, with the lighter surrounding rooms pulling you into the house.  Heady stuff.

Steve stepped forward too, in the form of new sketches for the kitchen uppers much closer to his original inspiration. the working drawings had drifted to the banal, but he was able to reassert a creative randomness to the layout that brought back the excitement to the design.

Shelby spoke well again for various parts of the experience of living, a real strength of his. He is able to imagine house the shell will function to contain the life.

Together, the three of them are gelling into a balanced and effective design team, crafting together an integral vocabulary for the building. Very cool.

there is something emerging from this process, something about the way layers of information push and pull against one another until they all fit the frame. I can't quite articulate it yet, but it's coming.

Afterburn

consider that the new name of this blog.

Picture progress -Week 4

Disaggregate for Speed, Aggregate for Efficiency

Big meeting today with the design team, Steve, Shelby, and Nancy the Industrious Architect. Tieing up a dozen or so loose ends left  as placeholders in the design process.

In order to get the project going quickly, we disaggregated many parts of the design that would normally be finished before construction begins. Window placement, finish materials, range hood, front stoop, and the big kahuna, the master bath were among the many items we roughed in to speed the early steps in the process. Once we got a rough floor plan, we pushed it to the Engineers so they could solve the structural issues while we continued to design the kitchen. Meanwhile, we decided to put in some windows in order to get our permit process going, and worked in the background, mostly with Shelby, to decide on flooring, tile, doors, and other large interior elements.

Now that the framers are working on, they have run into the things we left dangling, an event I saw coming a couple of weeks ago but became apparent to everyone when they started to reframe windows. While the rough ins were all well built, many did not meet our needs, and I recognied the probability that time and money would soon be wasted redoing work that had already been done. 

so today , the four of us took four hours at the house walking the property and making concrete choices about a dozen or so critical items. We right-sized the windows, finalized the master bath layout, moved two interior walls (including a great idea to reposition the closet in Charlie's room and add a couple of feet to my office, creating a real third bedroom), designed a front stoop, created an intriguing ceiling soffit between the living room and dining room, and discussed the need for elevations of a number of items that had been dangling as sketches in the plan. Overall, i think we moved the ball considerably, and if Nancy can now translate these new ideas into drawing quickly, the framing team should be able to move full speed ahead. We disaggregated for speed, now we must aggregate for efficiency.

At the same time, Steve leaned hard on the engineers to solidify their new ideas, which include the addition of a couple of new beams and posts to support the roof.

Meanwhile, a team stripped the roof tile, leaving the house feeling very naked an vulnerable. Looking up through the many cracks between  the 80 year old roof planks and seeing blue sky reminds you of how vulnerable houses are, a feeling compounded by the crazy roof framing (remember the cracked ridge beam? you should see the spindly, weirdly angled 2x4 supports holding it up). 

Throughout the 13 years we've lived in this house, I recall many swings of the permanence pendulum. When the El Niño rains pelted the leaky garage and left 2 feet of water pooling on the clogged up drains,  the northern winds banged the metal awning against the house like a deserted Victorian in an old horror film, or the earth did its dancin' thing and the walls swayed precipitously Casita Moreno felt like little more than a tenuous woodshed on an old country farm. But when Shelby bolted the foundation, the windows snugged up against a raging Santa Ana, or simply the sound of Charlie sleeping soundly in his room reached my ears it felt indomitable, a permanent part of an impermanent earth.

So it is with this construction, each twist and turn exposing a flaw while reassuring you that even the most improvisational of construction techniques embrace great strength. Sometimes the house feels small, other time positively grand, one moment a generic stucco box, the next possessing of great character.

This being the first house I have ever truly been a part of, this process reminds me that there have been few moments in it in which I have taken it for granted. Our relationship has always been an active one, either because I was enmeshed in one improvement project or another, or because the house was reflecting back to me some part of our lives within it. Its as if we have had a running dialog over the years, this house and me, occurring almost below the level of perceptible volume but never quite silent. 

I look up now into the denuded roof and see the shell of what was, and its voice is very quiet, as if its protecting its precarious state. But I also feel the new voice rising within, perhaps only in my imagination of what it will become, but there nonetheless. I hope in what we build will live a newly stong voice that will speak to others as it has to us.

progress report.

From Mike, the edgy framer, via email.

Moreno

Tasks completed

a.Upper floor framed.
b. windows layed out and 4 completed.
c.Structural issues resolved and lumber ordered.
d.Foundation layout for Adams field observation completed.

Goals for next 2 weeks 
a.Complete the structural beam install.
b. Foundation poured.
c.Fireplace demo completed.
d. Strat framing of new addition.
Mike

The Music Box

thanks to The House on Red Hill blog for this classic clip, and early talkie short filmed in nearby Echo Park. These sorts of stairs run all through the hills here, built originally, I understand, to allow domestic help easy access to the homes that they kept.

Shake, Rattle, and Roll

There have been 478 earthquakes in California in the last week, according to the USGS CalTech Seismic Net report, 104 of them in the greater Los Angeles area. That's just an average week. It's been said that living here in the basin is like living in a bowl of splinters; the ground is never quite still. Most of the rumblers are small, well below the level of conscious detection, but they do add a subtle insubstantiality to life in LA that keeps us all a little  off balance. 

Only one of those 104 quakes really matters to me, however, the 5.4 temblor that struck near the Chino Hills--about 35 miles from here-- at about 11:30 this morning. It was a roller, lasting about 20 seconds or so and, because we haven't had a good one like that in a while, it got everyone's heart pounding. Though most of us are used to them by now, we have been in what feels like a prolonged period of seismic quietude and when we get a little wake up call like this one, the adrenaline starts pumping and we overload the phone system needing to ask everyone we know, "Did you feel it!?" We are a considerate city, if not the brightest in the world.

Of course, the  rocker could not have struck at a worse time for Casita Moreno.  With most of the interior walls gone, the floors stripped of any sheeting that might provide shear strength, and the 10 ton tile roof held up by little more than a few temporary 2x4s, she swayed and shimmied like a coked-up go-go dancer. The framing crew scampered out of there as fast as their legs could carry them, pie-wide eyes praying for the extra minute it would take them to burst through Montezuma's window to the relative safety of the front yard.

Luckily, the old lady stood her ground.  And a good thing she did. I did not, as of 11:30 this morning, have any insurance at all for earthquakes.  Eep!

Not for want of trying, mind you. When I went through the whole Allstate-dumped-us-buy-new-insurance thing, I asked about earthquake coverage. Somehow, it fell through the cracks (maybe I couldn't bring myself to write the check, again 2x what we were paying before). About 10 days ago, however, clear from any incipient paperwork demands, I restarted the process, which was set to go save for a single document the company required before issuing the policy. The company needed my contractor to sign off on the fact that the house was retrofitted.

For those of you unfamiliar with California earthquake building codes, the wooden frames of most houses built before the 1994 Northridge Quake basically sat on their concrete foundations like a hen on her nest. When Northridge hit , houses danced and jumped off their foundations like bacon in an iron skillet (we nickname our big quakes by epicenter, thus everyone knows what you are saying when you say "Northridge," "Loma Prieta," "Sylmar," or "Long Beach"). Thus was born the earthquake retrofitting industry, started by a nice orthodox jewish guy named Shelly Purluss. 

Shelly appeared at my door one day in 2001, kepah on his balding head, and patiently explained to me that retrofitting involves drilling through the sill plate of the house and sinking compression or epoxy bolts in the foundation, the bolting the house down to keep it from doing the jitterbug every time Mother Nature shakes her thang. Where cripple walls support the first floor above the foundation, plywood sheeting gets nailed to all the walls, stiffening their shear value and greatly reducing the tendency of these weakly constructed framed walls from collapsing. These were the two largest causes of damage in the Northridge quake, and Shelly, having pioneered the process before it hit, had pictures of two identical old houses near the epicenter, one of which was totally destroyed and the other, which he had just retrofit, virtually unscathed. The LA Times ran the picture shortly thereafter, and an industry was born. There are now hundreds of companies running around bolting houses. 

Shelly was kind enough to come out and bolt our home when Charlie was born, part of my "new Dad sleep better" initiative, reducing the fear that my house too would choose to tango-slide down the hill and, I suppose, fulfilling that primal father instinct to protect the young cubs. That, combined with the red yarn my mother suggest I tie under Charlie's crib mattress to keep the evil spirits from rising up from below and stealing his life in the middle of the night, seemed to appease the anxiety, at least until we discovered the cracked ridge beam and I almost simultaneously realized that being a parent meant slaying the dragons of free-floating anxiety every night for the rest of your life. But that's another story.

Writers are often given gifts by life, and in case you haven't gotten ahead of me here already, I could never, from the workings of my meager brain, create the delicious irony that I don't have earthquake insurance because the company writing the construction insurance policy on my denuded, matchstick-supported house needs to be assured that this fragile house of cards with the 10-ton roof, currently held together by little more than some old nails and luck, is properly attached to the foundation. 

The comedian Shelly Berman (no relation to the Quake guy) had a classic routine in the 50's describing the experience of flying on airliners assured that he was wearing his seat belt, because if he wasn't strapped to his seat, he might very well fall out of his seat, say, if the plane came to a sudden stop, say, against a mountain, in which case only the top half of his body would fly out of the seat, the bottom remaining sitting there, legs crossed, a macabre picture. I love the word macabre and this is where I learned it. Certainly, the mental picture of my collapsed house, a pile of splintered sticks and shattered red tile whose sill plate in nonetheless firmly attached to its foundation would be, in some small way, similarly macabre, if not nearly as funny.

Just to prove that some lessons are hard to learn, it actually crossed my mind to have a conversation with my new  insurance company in an attempt to explain the insanity of their request, but Alice's rabbit hole immediately opened its maw and, having spent quite enough time down there of late shaking my earthen head, I chose to banish the thought  and get Stephen to sign the damn paper.

On the bright side, I ordered a cup holder for my scooter, which arrived today, an invention that makes eminent sense.

Authenticity

It strikes me that there has been a lot of talk of authenticity involved in the house, especially in fit and finish, the things with which we interact. Aside from the Jungian implications, which I fully embrace, it strikes me that some people want their house to be stately, to stand proud and reflect well. Some want clean horizontal lines and uncluttered pen spaces. Some strive for peace or tranquility, and others a sort of messy id-ness, wearing their insides out. Traditional, historical, craftsman, victorian, colonial, a house reflects the self- perception of its creator or owner, some notion and some period of time of how life should be lived, in public and in private.

We seek authenticity, a sense that in our home genuine things can happen. Genuine love, friendship, connection. Genuine contemplation, conversation, and even (though increasingly rarely with age, it seems), genuine sleep.

I was thinking about this because it strikes me, in thinking of you, the reader, how easy it must be for some to find this journal overwrought, sentimental, or striving too hard to be meaningful. Passing for a moment the irony that would present for a creative life dedicated to eradicating those very qualities from the human story experience, it might be difficult for some of you to connect with something so innocent and permeable as the search for authentic expression. 

We have so many filters in our lives, so many ways to take the real and recontextualize it in ways that diminish its significance, as if we're afraid to admit to ourselves that the breaths we take are precious to us and we care deeply about how, where, and under what conditions we expel them. To cite a banal example, I notice how fast Barak Obama's message of hope and rational government has been pushed away by a parody of saintliness, as if striving to be better (could our government be worse?) was too insignificant to admit that we cared about it, and this by those very thinking people who, I'd wager, for years have pined for just such a rational and intelligent approach to governance.

The political message is not the point here; the psychological process is.  Some might call this process cynicism, but I think that's too easy. We wrap ourselves in a general blanket of dismissiveness for protection against the authentic, to protect ourselves from a harsh life, a life that often feels like its getting away from us, moving too fast, getting too complicated, getting too regulated or just too multifaceted for us to make sense of.

But a home is the shelter from that life, the external container of our internal space. How we shape and form it should be emotionally naked and raw. Most people don't get this opportunity, however, the space and time to make it just so. They either do it bit by bit over time, an epic narrative, or live in various states of benign neglect, making do with what shelter and comfort we can find within the walls we inhabit.

I am increasingly aware that we have been given a great gift, albeit one born of adversity. We get to reconsider and reconceive our home almost from scratch. We didn't choose this path; it has been thrust upon us. But it may prove great nonetheless. In the seared and empty walls of the wooden box on Moreno Drive, we can pour the imagination of who we are and aspire to be. And we're trying to do that honestly, authentically, and with heart.

In that space, I think, there is no place to hide.

So pardon me if I can't muster ironic distance, clever retorts, mild quips, or even--most of the time--a wry smile toward this experience. I know it is vastly more entertaining to read that sort of narrative. Goofy characters, quirky irony, etc.  I can be funny (I think). But every time I try, I simply revert to a contemplative space closer to the bone. I don't want to push this away, or wrap myself in a warm blanket of protection. I want to breathe clean air, to get the smoke out of my lungs, to stay clear and present to the experience (perhaps that explains the scooter). 

This journal hopes to find a way to share with you that exposed feeling so that you can touch that parts of yourselves as well, to find in the space of our reconstruction a bit of your own inner authentic space. I want you to put this down and look around your room and think about how the home in which you live effects you moment to moment, plays in your senses like flavors play on your tongue, writes the narrative of your inner life. I want to find a language on these pages that you can embrace with the same emotional nakedness that we feel, turned out of our home into that speeding world,  trying to find both a way back in, and what "in" really is.

Picture progress -Week 3

Our small framing crew is being very productive. Good lesson to remember: sometimes the few can accomplish well what the many will only fuck up in confusion.

I also have to remember this is a visual medium. Poke me if i forget to post some photos every now and again.

The old stairs are gone. I suppose this is the Amazing Floating House Pt1 pt 2, as the stair return started it all. But we'll just celebrate its passing after 80 years of carryin' that weight.

Burnt subfloor and joist mad new. The fire started in the far left corner, where the much despised floor furnace used to live. Very happy to see it gone.

That's the right wall of the new staircase going in. The first brace is tacked where the fridge will go

Framing in the master bedroom upstairs.

Lingua Franca

Construction speaks a language of its own, of course, but what comes as a revelation is the language of fit and finish. We are deep in the process of selecting the textures, surfaces, and materials that will skin the sticks and nails of the structure, and each, we are learning, comes with its own quirky language. Tile, for instance, as durable and solid a materiel as one could wish for, comes pillowed. This cement-affixed man-made stone, measured in tonnage, can have pillow, a slight curve  on its top edges. A square of red clay roof tile (100 sf) weighs about 1000 pounds, depending on the style in question, which means our roof weighs about seven tons. You could not imagine, however, ordering seven tons of pillows.

Red clay roof  tile, for the record, has no pillow.

Our guide through the world of finish materials is Shelby, a sweet, art school-educated former furniture maker now turned go-to guy for all that looks pretty in a house. He roams around the city, showing up periodically at our door with a sample of this, or a board of that, illustrating a stain color, a tung oil texture seal, or a plaster technique. Elicia and I murmur appreciatively, pretending, I suppose to know one thing over another, voicing our likes and dislike oblivious to any coherent sense of appropriate style. Shelby must make sense of our whims and try to fashion a coordinated whole.

We've made the job harder I suppose, by trying to primitive pico hacienda on a 1920's Spanish Revival house. The Spanish revival, for all its now quaint charms, in fact tried it damnedest not to be Mexican. It strove to be Spanish, or Moorish, or Andalusian, anything but Mexican casita. Thus our little house had pretentions of a much larger Mediterranean palacio; cove and tray ceilings, and precise textured wall plaster (originally, degraded over time), and faux peg-and-plank floors ( a bit of an architectural oddity for the style, but popular in LA in the years after the house was built. Though it had 1-3/4" red oak floors, workmen went door to door during the depression and sold a sort of retro fit which involved routing out and darkening grooves every 5" or so to illustrate a wide board, then drilling and sinking dark walnut "pegs," to simulate the look on the cheap). It had, despite a small floor plan, a formal dining room and a huge trapezoidal window in the living room facing the street (another oddity-- most of time you will see a arched cathedral window there. we fondly called it "Montezuma's Window"). The living was in the front of the house, near the street, despite setting back only 10' from the curb, so that the servants, of which there were probably none,  could work in back.

We're undoing all that. Our floor plan is open, rustic, and modern, with the movement from kitchen to dining area to soft furniture to deck almost seamless. A house in which to wander and flow, to entertain in cozy zones all connected by geometry and viewing angles. No walls downstairs, nothing stopping the sense of connection. We're moving all the living to the back of the house, where the Big View stars, and all the utility to the front. We're going for a "Drunken Mexican" roof, "freestyle" wall plaster with "cats faces" and trowel marks, wide plank flooring, clay bisque foor tile with hand painted talavera accent tile. We want things made by hand, soapstone you want to touch, walnut cabinets whose dark grain paints swirls and movement through the mellow-toned wood, tile painted by someone who works for a living.

And, of course, all mod cons. the best cooking and food storage machine made, soundproofing that turns my buzzing, whining, whirring, humming house into a sanctuary or silent contemplation (at least when Charlie isn't playing drums). Shelby has to assemble all that, on a budget.

The process is oddly fun, tactile, and shifts in tone and mood, but is also fraught with worry. Every decision seems laden with something, but we can't figure out what. David, Marcelle, Bill, Rose, all our designer friends seem to do it so easily but for us each decision is pondered and let to bubble until we're sure its right for us. Somehow, we know we will shine through all the choices we make.

I started this post thinking I would writing something pithy about the language of finishing the interior of a house and have spent most of it talking about our sense of style. But in a sense, the choices you make, the textures you touch, the colors you see become the language of the home, and by extension, your life. Early on in this journal, I remember posting about how moving through your home, from object to object, pile to pile, room to room, formed a sort of narrative, the syntax of your life, making the home not a space, but a series of moments, like words, that tell the story of your day. Perhaps what we are experiencing is the process of trying to write that story, or at least outline it's next chapter. Each day we struggle to pre-visualize the sorts of experiences various materials will provide for us. Will that tile be comfortable to walk on in bare feet, or too bumpy? Wouldn't it be nice if the french door had inner screened panels that we could open at night to get a cool breeze through the house while keeping the dumb beetles out? I can imagine enjoying that. What will it be like to set the table while Elicia is cooking? Will Charlie be able to get the silverware while safely avoiding a swinging chef's knife?

These are the questions we ask ourselves as we contemplate each choice before us. What will be the story of our lives in this home each day, each minute, each experience? What story can we write here? What language will it speak?

Perhaps Shelby has a bigger job than I first thought...

Quadrahousia

I got a scooter. Call it a mid-house crisis, a funny-money toy, or what you will. Got tired of getting into my rolling living room to get the mail.

The scooter, a -- get this -- Geniune Buddy, is, in a word,

 fun! (exclamation point included). Since having it, I'm simply happier. Each day, I get 20 minutes of sun and wind and smiles at the people I pass. Vampire no more, each night I dream about where I'm going to scoot the next day. I take the long way home, intentionally riding around the block, or around the lake, to get to the simplest place. I forget things at the store so that I have to go back. I stop by friends houses as I pass, just to be able to detour a little out of the way and prolong the ride. So, in addition to the fun, I sitting with friends drinking coffee in the afternoon, just enjoying.

Sometimes a toy is a toy, but in this case, it's a different life.

When we first bought the house, when Elicia sat crying on the kitchen floor about how ugly it was and I told her I would fix it and set out to do so, I first demo'd the room, ripping out the old laminate cabinates and Z-brick faux-brink wall covering and the chocolate brown sink. It was August by then, and hot, and the sweat dripped down my face catching the whispy-fine strands of my hair and glueing them to my forehead. It was then, as I started to build back what i had ripped out, that I cut my hair buzz-cut short for the first time. I had always been a longhair, but the time had come. Myra came and cut it on the newly stained deck, and I proceeded to put down the backer board and hang the cabinets in what would be come our new kitchen.  My hair has been generally short since then, the moment of building back that house being a turing point of sorts.

Perhaps that's what this silly scooter is. Not to make too much of it, but sometimes it's just good to open a new door, to see things a different way, and it is not the thing that you do that is the change, but the new perspective you gain from having done it. 

I scoot through LA, where before I drove. I feel the sun on my suddenly vulnerable skin and the wind past my helmeted head. And I smile more.

The Amazing Floating House, pt 2

and poof! it was gone.

Strike another blow for the forces of good, truth, and structural integrity.