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.

Window Tax

Having stripped the house, I think we have solved one of the lasting enigmas that had puzzled us since we bought it.  Downstairs in the living room we had early on discovered two large 4' windows that had been boarded up and plastered inside and stuccoed over on the outside. In the dining room, more obviously, was a similarly sealed picture window, much larger, which though plastered inside had been left framed on the exterior, its sill intact, a piece of plywood where the glass once lived.  We heard told that the picture window was removed by the last owners, and English family, to make room for the large family heirloom china closet they put on that wall. Ron, the old man who lived next door for 45 years,  told us this.

But we had never figured out the living room, resting with an assumption that the windows had been boarded when the house next door arose to present a view of a stuccoed garage wall.

Having stripped the plaster thoroughly, though, it now appears that the wood used to close all three windows is identical, leading us to now believe that the three windows were all boarded at the same time.

History supports this view. During the late 17th century in England, the King wanted to raise funds. Unable, or unwilling, to leverage an income tax on a landed aristocracy that found disclosing your income bad form, but wanting to draw revenue from the rapidly growing merchant class, they came up with the inventive progressive solution to impose a "glass tax." Working from the assumption that the richer you were, the larger house you could afford and the larger the house, the more windows it had, King William III instituted a tax on windows in under the Act of Making Good the Deficiency of the Clipped Money in 1696. The more windows you had, the more you paid.

The tax was unpopular, as all taxes are,and some by some as a tax on "light and air." Nevertheless, it persisted for 200 years or so, forging an indelible mark on both English architecture and culture. Anti-tax crusaders (the Republicans of their day no doubt), rather tan risk getting their heads chopped off or some other medieval grotesquery, simply bricked up their windows. Over time, people built fewer windows into their homes and got used to living in the dark.

Which brings us back to Casita Moreno. Our English predecessors, presumably attracted by the lack of rain but repulsed by the incessant beating of the glorious SoCal sun, simply boarded it up, removing any pretensions our little box had to sunny warmth and, coincidentally, destroying any flow-through ventilation the house ever had. Though the saying supposes that mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, perhaps it's because when you go out you can wear a hat and even Englishmen won't wear their bowlers around the house.

Our new casita will have glorious light and the wafting scent of night jasmine and mock orange blossoms on the cool night air. It will breathe once again.

The Amazing Floating House

When I began working on the house back in 1995, one of the first clues I got that I was in over my head was the amazing floating staircase. It was a split level stair, and the top return created a nook in the kitchen under which the stove and fridge tucked. When I stripped off the plaster, I discovered a rube goldbergian framing in which one thing was attached to another, but none seemed to attach to anything that descended to the ground to carry the weight. It just seemed to float.

At first, I attributed the confusion to my lack of experience, but one by one my construction savvy friends came to look and all went away scratching their heads in amazement.  One one header, scrawled in child's crayon, were the words "fix this Cornor," (sic) scribbled, no doubt, by a barely english literate Italian workman and heeded, seemingly, by no one.

In the end, i threw up my hands, figured it had been standing for 80 years and wasn't going to fall down now, strapped everything to everything else with flat metal plates, and closed the whole thing up like a bad family memory that you suppress and only recall at thanksgiving meals.

Over the years, I ran into other examples of framing that looked like it had been completed by a severely ADD limited nailer and the hand of God, but nothing as bad as the stairs. Until today.

Having removed the stairs completely, I was faced with the framing designed (and I use the term loosely) to hold up the entire upstairs bathroom and part of the roof, two 8' 2x12s sistered together supported where they met the wall by a single 2x4 and at the other end by...nothing. They were simply end nailed into a floor joist.  I know this because, after 80 years of supporting the 800 iron bathtub, all the  fixtures and walls of the bathroom, plus the trodding of countless humans, the joists had sunk a full 1/2" exposing the three slender nails holding the whole mousetrap together.

Now, to be fair, 1/2" sag over that time is remarkably little, but still, had I known that critical parts of the house were joined by little more than duct tape, I think those Thanksgiving dinners would have been even uglier than they were (Did I tell you about the 6 months staring up at the ceiling over our bed knowing that about 20,000 of clay tile and wood directly over our sleeping heads were being held in place by a ridge beam that had cracked in two places? No? Remind me someday.)

Perhaps the controlling metaphor for this reconstruction should be the joining well of that which was only loosely held in place, as if the years we spent keeping things going, scratching to get by, were just a house of cards that held long enough for us to build the strong internal bonds we would need to confront this project. Now, older, established, we have the opportunity to bind our home together with bonds as strong as the bonds of love with which we built our family, with which we survived tough times, infertility, the death of both of my parents, career transition, Charlie's adoption, successes and failures, with which we persevered one slow step at a time into the middle of our age like we were driving at night, seeing only as far as the headlights would shine but knowing we would get there nonetheless.

Now we get to make our small spot of earth as permanent as a person can, which is to say not very permanent, but perhaps, at least, well built.

Can you build in space with a hammer a reflection of the far more difficult -- and ephemeral -- construction that is your life? Should you try?

Weak #1

First week: not stellar. 

We have a hole (thanks Jose and Arturo!) for the footing that will support the new staircase and, incidentally, the center of the house. The old staircase is gone, as is the wall between the dining room and kitchen. the place seems larger, of course, and I'm sure a lot of ordering/planning/scheduling happened in the background, but we haven't had a crew more than 3 on the property yet and I'm hoping that changes soon.

We had so much pent up energy for the project we assumed the contracting crew did too. But I suppose it is more reasonable to understand that a project like this will ramp up. I kinda want to grab a hammer and get to it, but I'll keeping pounding on the keyboard trying to get this draft out. Perhaps the two are related. Wouldn't be the first time my work and life were moving on invisible but parallel tracks. In those cases, I only discovered after the fact, and perhaps that will be the case here as well.

Steve and I continue to go back and forth over the contract. The latest notion is that "I want my cake and to eat it to," which i confess I found a bit unfair, even if it might have been made in half jest ("kidding on the square," Al Franken calls it). I'm trying, perhaps futilely, to build a time plus materials/not to exceed contract that includes both an incentive fee for them to come in under budget, but also some enforceable control on overages. Steve's first draft basically said the budget was a guide only, and provided no guarantees. That seemed too much risk for me./ I want to share the risk and share the reward. He, justifiably, wants to protect himself. I believe we can find a middle ground, but in so doing, the number keeps going up. It's making my brain hurt, but I'm going to see it through. the annuls of construction are littered with the remains of unprotected homeowners. Mikey Holmes taught me that (;-))

Also, in a fit of I-don't-know-what, I bought a scooter on Saturday. Funny money impulse buy. I hope it doesn't kill me. If it does, this blog is done and everyone should know that Elicia and Charlie are the two most important, beautiful things that ever happened to my life (Just thought I'd put that down in print somewhere, in case).

The scooter's cool, though. Comes in this week.

a Holmes returns

yup, Mikey is back.
TLC just picked up Holmesy in... get this...HD!

Did I mention the fact that our cousin Pam is head of Legal and Business Affairs for TLC?

I SWEAR she had nothing to do with returning Mike to the US. I SWEAR. Really. 

the release:

TLC Premieres HOLMES ON HOMES
Hit Series Joins All-New Episodes of DATE MY HOUSE Beginning June 28

Los Angeles, CA – June 24, 2008 – The hit series HOLMES ON HOMES has found a new home on TLC beginning Saturday, June 28, it was announced today by the network.

HOLMES ON HOLMES, which most recently aired on sister network Discovery Home, follows construction and renovation expert Mike Holmes as he visits unlucky families who have been swindled or abandoned during their home improvement projects. Mike uncovers shoddy construction methods, improper techniques, and down right rip-offs, working to uncover and fix the problems, while explaining how homeowners can safeguard themselves from these unscrupulous builders and dishonest contractors. Viewers can learn valuable lessons for their own home renovation projects, such as the importance of a good contract, proper payment terms and what good craftsmanship should really look like.

“As more people focus on renovating the homes they have, instead of moving to new ones, it’s important to be informed and aware of the ‘right’ way to tackle any construction project,” explain Holmes. “Through the experiences and stories of the homeowners on the show, viewers can avoid unexpected disasters and big headaches. It’s great that HOLMES ON HOMES will find a new audience on TLC.”

the "news" part

When i went to the house to see the workmen, I found a delivered copy of the LA Times. We suspended service shortly after the fire, postponing it for the maximum 6 months allowable. It resumed today.

Jung would call this "synchronicity."

I postponed it another 6 months. I wonder what will happen then.

Groundbreaking News.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. -Anais Nin, (1903-1977)

In my mind, this was a momentous day. In my mind, the day workmen began rebuilding would be a flurry of activity, a cacophonous post-modern symphony of sloshing portapotties, grinding hydraulics, crashing metal dumpsters, screaming men's voices in Spanish and English, bleeping cell phones, attacking hammers and squealing crowbars as a dozen or more workers descended on Casita Moreno in a flurry of industry and creative destruction. In my mind, this day would be the release of all the pent up frustration, twisting worry, and force of will it took to get here, to keep family spirits high and emotional keels even, to wring sufficient dollars from reluctant Allstate (still in process), to believe that this day would come. In my mind, today the unstoppable force of man's desire to build would overwhelm the unmovable object of charred entropy on Moreno Drive and yield the beginnings of a shiny new life.

Instead, we got Jose and Alberto digging a hole. A modest hole, granted, perhaps even a sincere hole. In fact, as I consider it, a beautiful hole. But on this, the first day of new life for Casita Moreno, we got two guys with shovels.

They seem to have brought a white microwave oven which they have put beneath my house. This is a mystery I choose not to solve. I have done so poorly so far.

Evacuation

the portapottie is back. we're back in business.

Permit Me

Permit achieved.

[PICTURE OF PERMIT TO COME]

After a Kafaesque process, they signed. I went down to the city to view firsthand the machinations of this secret bureaucratic cabal in person. the office where all the decisions are made about what is built and how in the entire city of Los Angeles is an absolutely featureless room with 6 empty desks arranged in kneewall cubicles. Scotch-taped to the wall above each is a single sheet of white paper with a single number, handwritten, to denote each station. there is absolutely nothing else on the walls. Nothing. Rein. Nada. Nil. Zilch. Not a sign. Not a poster. Not a picture of a house.  Nothing. you could perform open heart surgery in this room.

Presumably, the sterility of decor removes all possible distraction for the plan checkers whose job it is to get endlessly lost in a repeating feedback loop of inane regulations and code requirements. If they had a touchstone to remind them of the real world outside this austere room, presumably, they would not be able to so completely, quickly, and repeatedly lose sight of the big picture of what you are trying to accomplish.

Each time they touch your plans, they immediately go down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass in a ribbon of linearity, going from point to point down some supernatural checklist that only they can navigate, until they hit a bump in the road, and no matter how many times you have explained, clarified, and agreed to the resolution to that bump, they stop dead as if frozen deer, panicking lest some lag bolt or flashing has been tragically misplace, dooming the entire project to imminent destruction.

At one point today, the über-boss was looking at our plans and describing how, because of current setback requirements, the "addition" to my house (which, I remind you, involves simply adding a wall to enclose already existing space within my already existing foundation footprint) would now have one wall that must angle five degrees in order to set it back 5" from the property line. This would be in the middle of my bedroom. And after ten minutes of explaining the reasons for this, and us trying to explain the inanity of this, he says that's the way it has to be "unless, of course, you have the signatures of your neighbors," which, of course, we had ten days ago and had shown them twice. Shown a third time, he says, "Oh, well why are we talking about this? I'll sign." and we are done.

Next up: Sweaty men on the property...if, of course, I can get my builder to draft a contract. but that's another story.

Gardener 2

Tiburcio, our mow-blow-and-go guy hit me up for "me checka" yesterday. Six months back wages.

So much for all that sweetness and light.

Oh well. the guy's got to pay the bills.

pause.

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems. -- John W. Gardner

the permit, she still has not come.

Hoops of fire

Last weekend, I spent 3 hours catching up with every neighbor whose property surrounds ours and walked them through our plans in order to gain their approval for our addition. Evidently, our proximity to our neighbors required a sign off for what the city called a "yard reduction."  Though we have no yard, per se, I thought this reasonable at the time because enclosing the rear sun porch, though it lies within our existing footing, steal 7 feet from the outside space, making it inhabitable.

then i read the form, which clarified that what i need to spend all that time on one of the hottest days of the year attaining was permission to reduce my yard from 2'6" to 2'1", a reduction of 5". Had I not received it, I would have had to move the back wall in the 5" along the 12' stretch of patio.

5".

10 days ago, I cajoled our new downhill neighbor to sign a city-mandated affidavit acknowledging that we shared a sewer line and if it broke, the county was not responsible. We had it notarized, on the paperwork provided us by the city.

Today, I got a call from Nancy the Industrious Architect. 

"Nelson, we have a problem."

Love a call that begins that way.

Turns out she went to file the doc and the county did not accept it.

"They no longer accept notarization on the form they provided," she said. "It must be notified on this page instead."

And she faxed me the doc, which contained the EXACT SAME VERBIAGE in a different font.

there is a point in the process of getting the final permit to go ahead and begin reconstruction when your spirit and rational mind is utterly shattered.  I may be there.

Numbly, I trudged off down the hill to the Korean notary to get him to duplicate his stamp on the new page provided. Nancy the Industrious Architect arrived at my door 20 minutes later to shuttle the corrected document to the county. $37.50 per hour for an errand girl.

I now jump through hoops of fire without complaint. At some point building will begin. But will I any longer care?

Party On, Dude.

Given the sustained lack of life in the shell of our home, we decided to do the most absurd thing we could think of: cater a cocktail party in the rubble of the front lawn. Large Marge Sustainables prepared the food. Here's the menu:

Mt Tam triple cream and Mission fig sandwiches with arugula on crostini

homemade ricotta, grilled radicchio and lemon zucchini on crostini

rustic herbed heirloom tomato tart with caramelized onions and olives

honey cumin picholine olives and almonds

crudite with Asian walnut dip, and basil and lemon mayonnaise

fresh strawberries and minted whipped cream on walnut cornmeal cookie

Yum.

Don't think I related the story of Large Marge. Large Marge is actually small meg. Meg appeared in our lives days after the fire at the beckoning of our good friend and neighborhood connector Cheryl Revkin, who procured Meg's services to make us a home cooked meal after the fire. So on the first night in our new (rented)house, with no furniture or personal possessions to be seen and only our plastic inflatable mattresses on which to sleep, Meg

 appeared bearing iron pots full of luscious victuals, which we consumed on her plates as a picnic on the empty, echoey living room floor. It was the first food made by a real person we had eaten for days and it

 was like penicillin.

A few months later, we decided to make a dinner for the firemen who had diligently saved both our homes and many of our precious belongings in what was truly extraordinary work (remind me to tell you the story some time). Meg was the obvious call (since we didn't, and don't, yet own a knife sharp enough to cut through a tomato). She appeared bearing racks of chickens, which we fed to the dozen or so hungry and charming firefolk who inhabit LAFD station 56 on the C shift. It was a wonderful evening,a nd the men seemed to appreciate the care. It was an opportunity to share our appreciation and gratitude, and for Charlie to connect with those who spend their lives in ther service of others (the ride in the ladder truck with the siren on didn't hurt either).

So now Meg is an integral part of our narrative, as inseparable from the journey as the flashlights I keep in my car so as to be able to enter the darkened house. once again, she did not disappoint.

I think about 40 people showed up, plus a pack of kids. The adults stood amid the crushed ash, singed goose down, and broken glass and drank gin and tonics, wine, and beer, laughed and shared stories, and toured the denuded shell while the kids played mad and endless games around the property. There was joy, and life, and a revivified sense of the deep connection we feel for our friends and neighbors. The builders were there as well, and the net result of the evening was to bring once again to that forlorn property the sound of laughter and the ambiance of society, to remind it, perhaps, that it was not forgotten, but rather hibernating before it's next life begins. i think even the Buddah, which sits guard over the property since the day after the fire when we bought and installed it there, smiled.

With luck, groundbreaking next week.

I forgot to take pics, but Chris sent along a few, following:

Holmes pt 2.

Holmes on Homes was cancelled this week, run off the US airwaves by a rebranding of the network on which it ran, no longer "Discovery Home," now "Planet Green."  Nothing Green about 'ol Holmsey. He was a one man waste creation system, and now he has seemingly been banished back to the snowy north from whence he came.

Is there some poetic symmetry here, that the show ends just as construction begins? I will miss my Holmes fix. He provided odd comfort in time of preparation purgatory. Watching him reassured me that somewhere, someone's home was being Made Right. That gave me hope that one day soon ours would be too. 

Perhaps the plumber's torch has been passed.

Now I will take the lessons he taught me ("Un-Acceptable! This has all got to go.") and guide the work on our hoose.

Bye Mike. See you on the other side, eh?

wakefulness

somehow got turned back around this weekend from the vampire hours I've been working on the book, and woke up Monday morning...dare I say it...happy. The first time I think I've felt this way in months. I had, without realizing it, slipped into a low level depression fueled by lack of sleep. Life had gotten gray and dolby-ed, little got through and if it did it was more often enervating than not. I was conducting myself in three hour blocks of productivity and sleep, working two jobs (building house, writing book), often the first to the detriment of the second.

Monday, I awoke rested to a perfect spring day and felt alive again.

A good reminder of better days to come.

We're Having a Party

On Friday the 13th. Go Figure.

Evite, June 8, 2008.
With your love, support, and, let's face it, seemingly endless patience with
our recent travails, we have made it to a major milestone. Sweaty men will
soon be crawling on our home to make it whole again. Construction begins
soon.
To mark this moment, and express our appreciation of how patient you will be
with us during the next six months of actual construction, we'd love it if
you could join us amid the rubble and broken glass of our front lawn for a
sunset cocktail party. Frozen blender drinks and hors d'oeuvres will be
served. Wear durable shoes.

Those of you interested can tour the house, now gutted to the studs and
subfloor, and see the plans of what is to come. Everyone else can just hang
out and celebrate with us the absurdity of life. When the idea of milling
about the front yard of an abandoned house loses its charm, we can retire
quietly to David & Marcelle's new backyard next door where at least it is
possible to sit down.

Stop by and booze it up. Life is short.
--
Men have become the tools of their tools. -- Henry David Thoreau

Down the Rabbit Hole

We're in plan check now, sort of a bureaucratic purgatory where the city building and safety office reviews your architectural and engineering drawings against a byzantine mosaic of applicable building codes to see what bizarre contortions you will have to go through to achieve a home. Sometimes, the codes are about building safely. Other times, I learned, they are about something altogether different.

My first encounter with Building and Safety (which from now on we'll simply call BS) came shortly after the fire. In the first few moments when I began to allow myself to dream of a real future for the house, I recalled a brilliant plumbing innovation I had learned about 8 years ago while writing for This Old House magazine called Pex. 

Pex is a system of flexible hose that does the same job as the rigid (and now extremely costly) copper pipe most commonly used in Los Angles area homes, but with some significant advantages. Let's review each system briefly, so you can see what insanity drives the LA BS.

 With a copper system, the water comes into the house through a single big pipe which then narrows and branches in a continuous steam throughout the house to reach each sink, shower, ice-maker, and toilet appliance you have. from the main street valve, each length of pipe must be cut and fit, with corners and tee joints, like a giant erector set,

 each length carefully aligned and inserted through holes or notches cut  in precise alignment into the joists, and then each fitting individually fluxed and heated with an acetylene torch before being soldered together. Every time a pipe path turns, it diminishes the overall water pressure through the system, so the whole system must be carefully designed to maximize strait pipe runs. Additionally, careful consideration must must be given to the distance between the hot water heater and each appliance, because to draw hot water when turned on, each appliance must draw all the standing cold 

water from the pipes first. We all know the experience of waiting for the shower to warm up and thinking to ourselves what a waste of water it is. That's because the hot water heater is usually located close to the kitchen, which is the most frequent hot water draw in the house, and further from the showers, which could be anywhere in relation.

Copper replaced galvanized steel as the metal of choice for household piping in the last 25 years or so, as galvanized tends to rust over time, restricting water flow, causing leaks, and contaminating the water supply. Copper does neither, was easier to put together (soldering is faster than fitting threaded joints), and was, in its time, less expensive. In the last few years, however, the price of copper has more than tripled, making it very costly to use (and, in a brilliant stroke of the Law of Unintended Consequences, improving the lifestyle of thousands of homeless people who scavenge and resell scrap copper).

Pex, on the other hand , is a very different beast. To visualize a pex system, think of a hose bib, that spigot you use to water your lawn with a garden hose. Pex pipe is almost exactly like a garden hose, except it doesn't break 

or leak and lasts 25 years or more. to repipe, say a sink, with pex, you run two long lengths of flexible pex hose through the walls from hose bibs near your water main and water heater to the hot and cold spi

gots on the faucet. the hose is totally flexible, like electrical wire, and can twist and turn as many times as you need without effecting flow pressure. Instead of measuring pipe, aligning holes, and soldering all day, you simple drill holes in the joists more or less at the same height, start at one end, and thread the pipe all the way through the house to the appliance just like you thread a tent pole through a tent. Your mother-in-law could do it.

Now imagine a single pipe, a foot long, with, say, eight bibs coming off it. That's called a manifold and in a pex system, you hook up as many of those as you need close to the hot and cold water sources (each sink, for

 example, would need one bib from the hot supply and one from the cold), and run a hose to each appliance. This design is called a "home run" and though at first seems less efficient than an integrated whole house

 design, is in fact much more so. 

First, pex hose is much cheaper than copper, so you can use more of it for the same overall cost. Second, there are no fittings or soldered turns needed, saving all sorts of time and toxic materials. the hose is attached to fittings with a simple crimping tool that takes about 20 seconds per fitting or less.  Third, as I mentioned, you can repipe a typical house in a day. And last, and this is the beauty part, you save a ton of water. Instead of needing to empty the standing cold water out of the entire house every time you turn on a hot spigot, you only have to empty the direct run from the hot water source to the appliance you are using, hoses that are varying diameters depending on the amount of water they need (you would have a bigger hose going to a bathtub, for instance, than to a powder room sink).

Cheaper, faster, more reliable, more efficient, and more earth-friendly. Seems like a no-brainer, eh?

Well, it certainly seems so to most of the world, which has been using Pex in everything from residential construction to office skyscrapers for 20 years without any complaints (there are some urban myths about mice liking to eat the hose, but none have been substantiated, and if a leak does occur, it is simpler to repair than copper, too). In seismic zone, like LA, flexible pipe dramatically decreases earthquake damage by virtually eliminate temblor-caused leaks common to rigid pipe, and in fact, there are thousands of buildings in Los angeles that are piped just this way. 

But no longer, a fact I discovered when i called the Plumbing desk at BS back in February.  As i recall, the conversation went something like this:

ME: Hi, is Pex pipe approved for use in Los Angeles?

Plumbing Desk Supervisor: Nope.

ME: Really? why? It's been in use around the world for 20 years, is cheaper, more efficient, more earth friendly, and more earthquake proof. Why wouldn't LA approve it?

PDS: Good question.

ME: Is there an answer?

PDS: Well, they used to approve it, but no longer. In fact, there are thousands of building in LA that have it with no problems.

ME: Then why not now?

PDS: they changed the rules.

ME (getting a little frustrated by his obvious reticence): Why??

PDS: Honestly?

ME: YES, HONESTLY.

PDS: Politics.

ME: huh?

PDS: The plumbers union and the metal companies make a lot of campaign contributions. There's no other reason you shouldn't be able to use it. In fact, you should go ahead and do so. I did. My son and I laid out the whole thing on my front lawn and repiped the house in a day.

ME (incredulous): Are you, the head guy on the plumbing desk at BS, telling me to go ahead and use an non-permitable and unapproved plumbing system in my home? (I might not have been this obvious, but you get the idea)

PDS: Yup.

ME: And you're telling me that you did this on your own house, without a permit?

PDS: Yup. Who's gonna know?

ME: Wow. Wow. I'm recovering from a fire. Won't they have to inspect the plumbing before we drywall?

PDS: Oh. In that case, you're shit out of luck.

I may have simplified this conversation, but not by much. The guy in charge of plumbing permits, a nice guy really,  basically told be to ignore building codes and permit requirements and do the sensible thing, just like he did, unless, of course, you think you'll get caught. And these are the guys who now sit in judgement of our architectural plans and are the last barrier to having sweaty men crawling on our property.

Something tells me that the permit process will soon give new meaning to the term roto-router, with me on the prison-shower end of things.

Insurance travails pt1

There are too many things we do not know about how to live a life in USA 2008. More than any one person should have to know. In fits of political pique, I often attribute this to Ronald Reagan, who first deregulated virtually everything in our lives and in so doing set loose the mad dogs of hypercaptialism. On a practical--nonpolitical--level, this means that rather than deal with one phone company every month, I deal with four, plus my internet provider, plus my satellite TV company plus plus plus plus, well, you get the picture. Life, the monthly maintenance of which used to involved writing about five checks to pay my various obligations, now requires several hours of bookkeeping (the only word in the English language with a triple double letter, btw) and even more phone calling, the latter activity aimed at correcting the various ways various service suppliers try to fuck you up each month, either through gross errors or deliberate malice.

Which brings us to the topic of the day: Insurance companies.

In what I can only attribute to an unquenchable need to reinforce every stereotype and cliché of the industry, our homeowners insurance company, Allstate, has decided to drop us from their rolls.

Just to get the pathos out of the way early and get to the meat of the matter (corporate criminal behavior), let me paint the human picture for you. We live in a slightly shabby rental home, with rented furniture, rented dishes, rented candles, rented brooms, etc. (see This Rented American Life) while we await the rebuilding of our almost totally destroyed home. 80% of our personal possessions have been totally destroyed, the remainder being precious (artwork and photos) but not practical (can't eat off a painting). Elicia and I both work full time, high value jobs in addition to the ongoing reconstruction of our lives. 

For Elicia, that means managing a personal possessions claim involving 120 pages of totally lost items, 15 items per page, handwritten in almost indecipherable penmanship by the team hired to excavate our lives after the fire. Each item requires that she correctly identify it (name, make, model number), ascertain its original purchase price, age, quantity, and replacement cost, and then back that info up with receipts if we have them, going back 7 years. Her process is further complicated by Allstate's insistence that all submissions be handwritten on the same messed up pieces of paper they handed us and their refusal to provide us or allow us to use any electronic means of communication, like a database.

For me, that means managing the complete reconstruction of the house, in addition to the ongoing wrangling with Allstate to get them to pay a reasonable amount of money to accomplish this.

Both, full time jobs, in addition to our full time jobs.

Now, as if we were not burdened enough, Allstate is trying to dump us.

So, other than the obvious lack of compassion, what is wrong with this picture?  Here's what you don't know about your homeowners insurance.

Insurance companies have what they call "underwriting guidelines," basically, the circumstances under which they consider you an insurable risk. They have the right to dump you if you exceed these guidelines, as long as they do so uniformly and without discrimination, ie, everyone gets treated the same. Though these guidelines are registered with the state insurance commission, however, Allstate (and probably your company too) does nothing to make this information readily available to its customers. 

Why is this a problem? Their lack of transparency allows them to profit at their customer's expense by selling products you cannot use.

Here's how it worked in our case. We paid top dollar for Allstate's lowest deductible policy, covering the replacement cost for all losses to our home and personal property above $500. Allstate's unpublished underwriting guidelines, however, allow them to dump anyone with two claims against their policy within a five year period. Last year, believing that I had paid for insurance that would cover me for relatively small losses, I filed a $3000 claim to replace my golf clubs, which were stolen from my car during the summer (the car was stolen and recovered, sans clubs, which were in the trunk). Allstate was very cooperative in handling the claim, and happily applied my $500 deductible before paying me about $2000 toward the cost of the replacement clubs.

Then the house burned up.

Now, a mere two weeks before we begin reconstruction, Allstate has sent us a letter telling us that they are dumping us from their insurance rolls, leaving us uninsured during reconstruction and at the new house, which, by the way, they are paying for. They have decided, and incredible as it sounds, that having filed 2 claims within 5 years (for a stolen car and a destroyed house, neither of which we were within a mile of), that we are a higher risk for filing another claim this year.

So after 10 years of dutifully paying premiums, adios dude.

Now I am out in the wooly world of insurance shopping with claims on my record.  Not fun. No, not fun.

Spring 2

I learned yesterday that our long-time "mow, blow, and go" gardener, Tiburcio Alamillo, is still coming by the house to care for the front yard on Saturday mornings. 

What a beautiful gesture. Trudging over the blackened patch of ash, glass, and plaster that used to be the beautiful fescue grass lawn he had recently installed, he trims and prunes, waters and weeds our two small bits of garden with the same care and attention he gave every week we lived there. 

I wonder what he thinks, as he cares for the roses, pentas, and Brazilian skyflower now appreciated only by the butterflies and passersby. Gardens, after all, are artificial constructs of nature, careful arrangements of the wild into the tame. Though philosophers  have argued the esthetics of gardening at least since the late 17th century, no matter where you fall on the arranged vs. wild-seeming axis, it is indisputable that, like tanks at the Aquarium, no garden exists in nature. In our case, it is merely a floral decoration before a now indecorously charred wooden box.

Perhaps, though, as one acculturated to the careful tending of the land, he knows instinctively that what lives demands attention, and that our future is built on the patient ministrations of today. 

Clip and shear. Fertilize and hydrate. Process over product. Structure follows strategy. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single snip.

Fire! (works)

Did I mention that one of the few things that survived the fire were the fireworks we bought in New Mexico?