Engineering despair

Dumped my frustration on Steve today. Didn't mean to, but sometimes it just comes out. five and a half weeks ago, we sent our drawings to the engineer for engineering. Engineer Adam seemed like a nice enough guy--lives in the neighborhood, has a couple of young kids, visited the still-smoldering house, seemed to get our situation--but for three weeks after receiving the plans, he keeps telling Steve he's working on them. Then he sets up a meeting at the house , which I attend, with an associate of his who he is "bringing on to help." Loose translation? "I haven't done a damn thing on your project for 3 weeks and now I'm bringing in someone to bail me out."

OK, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. He's not an asshole bullshitting me, he actually got overcommitted, fully intended to get to it but couldn't, and when he realized how in the weeds he was, he threw up a flag for help. I don't know if I believe it, but for this moment, I'll celebrate the innate goodness of humankind.

Whatever the circumstances, at this meeting, the reality becomes quickly clear to me, so I take great pains to reinforce the tick-tock of this project. And I make clear the double-whammy: it's not just the fact that my family is living on a rented bed and drinking from rented glasses on rented chairs, its that as of January 9, 2009, we start paying for This Rented Life to the tune of about $6 grand a month. And that's on top of our mortgage and expenses in our home, call it another $3k. He seems to hear me and promises a 2 week turn around.

Back to the goodness of humankind. Unintended delays happen, sure. He didn't mean to cost me $7500 by dicking me around for 3 weeks. Did he? Did he? Insert Serenity Prayer here. Ooooooommmmmmmmmmmm. 

So here we are, two and a half weeks later, and I may get his work next week.

Here's where I lose my shit. If you lie to me--oops--I mean, cause me an unintended and extremely costly  delay, when you finally get around to picking up my piece of paper, you had better not put it down until you are done. No juggling other jobs, no working bits and pieces, no further delays. I waited in line. I paid my dues. Now deliver. I mean, how many hours could it possibly take to do to my little house whatever it is that engineers do ? 40? 60? 80? 120 hours? I'm going to end up paying these guys something like $6 grand for how many fucking hours exactly? If they worked full time for three weeks, I'd be paying them $50 p/hour, but let me tell you something, there is no fucking way they are putting in that kind of time. I'm going to be generous (here's that fucking goodness of humans shit again) and believe that they are putting in half that, about 60 hours. But at $100 an hour, it takes some kind of fucking gall to delay 3 weeks, cost me an addition $7500 on top of your fee, and then take 3 weeks to do 60 hours work. 

Add in the extra week and a half it's taken to do a week and half's work, and the grand total cost of delay is about $10k. Thanks, Adam. I'll send you my bill.

When is the moment in recorded history when we decided that other people's time is ours to waste? When did respect take flight? Doctors are the worst at this. Why do we bother making a doctor's appointment when the likelihood of the doctor actually seeing us at that time is nill? Doctors decided at some point that their time is more valuable than ours, so go fuck yourself. After one particularly egregious visit, where after waiting 90 minutes I was finally told, after repeated enquiries, that the doctor had in fact left the office on an emergency call 10 minutes earlier, I completely lost it. "When were you planning on telling me?" I fumed. The nurse actually had the gall to be petulant with me, as if I was somehow unreasonable to ask such a question. In the grand Handel tradition of my father, who to his dying, shaky scribbling day, wrote angry complaint letters to major corporations or local politicians or anyone else who pissed him off (another example of a family tendency to look for love in all the wrong places), I wrote the doctor a nasty note and included a bill for my time. He never paid it, but I wrote it off my taxes as a bad debt. 

Take that.

More to the point, the weirdly unique fact of our current situation is that our construction project and our life restoration are inseparable. House and home, as much as I believe they are separate qualities, are in us conjoined facts. We cannot begin to heal the home as long as the house sits dead on its lot. The structure needs sweaty men crawling on it, hammering and plastering their life force back into the denuded skeletal framing before we can psychically feel that we are progressing, that the days of rented placemats and motel artwork will soon be over  (did I mention that they sent rented art along with the rented toaster oven and rented broom?)

Steve and Joe seemed to get this from the beginning, knowing when they took on the job that  they were taking on the responsibility for our lives as well, a far larger task than simply building a house. How astounding. Lesser men would have run.

But subcontractors are a different story. To them, it's just another job, to be managed as best it can, doing a "good enough" job without pissing off too many people. 

Nothing makes us feel more powerless or more despairing. Every day now is a mental slog to twist the mirror's reflection of hopelessness into a stalwart Pilgrim belief in the eventuality of success. But like water from a thick towel, no matter how hard you twist, a bit of liquid bitterness always remains.

Nothing to fear...

"We shape our dwellings. And afterwards our dwellings shape us." - Winston Churchill

Soapstoned

We are soapstone people. In the world of kitchen countertop materials (and you didn't know there was such a world, did you), soapstone is a lover, something you just can't help but reach out and touch. People admire their granite, are pleased with their corian or ceasarstone, think their tile is pretty, and love their soapstone. Reading posts on our favorite remodeling community website, GardenWeb, you can hear in the voices of contributors their rapture every time they slice an onion or burn some toast. the passion is palpable.

We want that. We want our space to be a living expression of our lives, not a picturesque shell that contains them. perhaps it is because I spend so much time at home. Writing and living in the same space, I can go days without leaving the house. But E feels the same way (I think). We seek that sense that the house is an extension of what is valuable to us, and that tends to express itself less like objective beauty (What lovely granite!) and more like something that is itself alive (This room feels so warm!).

We also want a house that ages in beauty. You can read into that whatever you like ;-)

Upstairs in the master bathroom, we are considering a unique Moroccan concrete tile (made in Thailand...what a wonderful world) whose color is pressed into the wet concrete under tremendous pressure

 before it is fired. the result is a soft, matte finish tile in those powdery colors one associates with Greek islands and north african mosques. Like saltillos, very soft and inviting.

Driving home from the airport this evening, lamenting being once again in the habitrail of the los angeles freeway system, I started wondering why we were so enamored of all these soft, erotic, and sensual materials. Our last house had none of it. Lots of colorful mexican glazed tile work, talavera sinks, and hand-painted stuff, certainly, but nowhere near the obsession we now seem to feel for building materials you want to touch. 

I think we might be afraid, on some deep level, afraid of the house, of houses in general, and in our attraction for soft comforting materials seek a home of warm embrace, a home we can walk around on and have every surface respond gently to our step or touch, a home not singed by a sharp tongue of flame or grinding grit of charcoal and ash. 

Burnt wood is cold and desolate. think of the logs left cold the next morning after a campfire. it is as if we want our house to be as enveloping as the white egyptian cotton spa robes Elicia loves so much and quickly replaced (as anniversary presents) last week.

In architecture and design, the phrase they use to describe the style of highly detailed repetitive patterns--usually in tile-- that cover every available inch of moorish-style buildings is horror vacui, latin for "fear of empty space" or more poetically, "fear of emptyness." As the Artlex artists dictionary defines it:

horror vacui - The compulsion to make marks in every space. Horror vacui is indicated by a crowded design.  Some consider horror vacui one of the principles of design. Those who exclude it from their list of principles apparently interpret it as posessing an undesirable, perhaps obsessive quality, in contrast to the desirable, controlled principle of limitation, or perhaps to that of emphasis or dominance.

When you live next to the Sahara, a fear of empty space is a rational response.

I think we suffer (without suffering) from something else, a fear of deadness perhaps, or more generally, plasticity. Horror mortis, perhaps? Having seen our home reduced to a dead thing, we want to restore it to life--our life--with surfaces that though inanimate are nonetheless alive to the touch, breathing in their softness and sensuality, and warm in their spirit. 

if the house could, like some mushroom-fueled shimmering mirage, respirate of its own accord, we would, I think, wish it.

Epigraph 3

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” - Charles Darwin

Spring has sprung

Spring came to the house as if it didn't matter if we were there or not. It's startling. The Australian tea trees ( left) have never looked lovelier and all the butterfly bushes E planted (right)  look like inviting pollen factories for our migrating Monarchs.

David next store slips by every once in a while and waters things, a kind and delicate gesture. i do as well when i go to pick up the mail.

Before the fire, we had just removed a beautiful Altissimo vine rose from in front of Montezuma's window to make way for the new lawn. After the fire, all of our burnt possessions were piled on the front lawn for weeks, effectively killing whatever grass was not destroyed by the firemen. it left our front lawn a hard packed patch of ash and cinder, liberally mixed with pieces of glass, metal lathe, 90 year old nails, charlie's marbles, melted plastic,and whatever else got dragged outside. the watering system was wholly destroyed of course, and so the former lawn dried to a Bonneville Salt Flat firmness.

As March came in like a lion (well, more like a puddy cat in LA), not one, but three stalks of the aforementioned rosebush poked their tender shoots through the clay and sprouted green leaves. 

Tenacious little bugger.

Holmes is Where the Heart Is

About a month after the fire, my brother-in-law Gene, a commercial contractor by trade, tipped me to a home renovation show called Holmes on Homes. It was, I think, his sly way of preparing me for the renovation to come. General Contractor Mike Holmes, a Canadian cross between GI Joe and Mr. Clean, hosts the show. His gig is simple: he shows up at homes whose construction projects have gone awry and "makes it right.”


It’s a simple but effective formula. Each week, Mike corrects the evils done by some previous contractor, and restores all that is good and right in the world. First we hear the heart-rending tale of woe, then Mike gets to work. Walking through the home, this bulldog in denim overalls affects a convincing air of disgusted outrage over the failure of others and mixes it with a fair measure of exasperation that he alone, among all of god’s creatures, must now make it right. Then he tears the place apart. Every misplaced socket or irregular cabinet spacer is an excuse to pour a new foundation, rewire an entire house, and tear the kitchen to shreds. “Look at that paint!,” he yells, shaking his exasperated head. “It’s all gotta go.” And the next cut shows his crew dutifully ripping everything to the studs.

I exaggerate about the paint, but you get the idea. In the black and white world of Mike Holmes, nothing is good enough.

Each show concludes with the mandatory “reveal” when the grateful homeowners get to oooo, ahh, and weep over the miracles of granite and drywall Mike hath wrought. The show’s measure of added charm lives in the fact that most of the homes are modest suburban tract homes in which the most pedestrian of appliances gleam like Vikings. Mike gets hugged a lot. It’s the show's mix of horror and fascination--coupled with a firmly Protestant sense that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things and the way is clear -- that wins the hearts of anyone who’s ever had a handyman cut a corner. I love it.

Strangely, Charlie does too.

He walked in while I was watching an episode one day and became engrossed with the whole thing. What in a nearly-seven year old boy would care about the trials and tribulations of witless homeowners eluded me, but I suppose all the hammering and crashing of walls had its own adolescent attraction, and I’m so happy when I can just kick it on the sofa with my kid that as long as it isn’t some incomprehensible and terribly loud cartoon, I’m fine. Any discernable narrative will do.

Charlie then took to watching the show without me. Dutifully using his new found literacy (the wonders of first grade, when the world opens like a unfussed Mimosa), he would scroll to it on the TiVo and punch it up on a lazy Sunday morning, in between episodes of Ben10 and Smashlab (another show that glorifies in destruction and mayhem, this time in the name of science.)

The year of the house stretches on, and while Elicia and I dream of kitchens to come and collect samples of Saltillo floor tile and soapstone counters, Charlie goes about his first grade life in seeming peace, at ease with the impermanence of it all and the strangeness of this rented American life.

Today, though, as he and I curled up in the light of the setting sun watching Mike deliver a tiny little kitchen to another hugging wife, he quietly turned to me and said, “I wish he would come to our home.”

That’s all. Nothing more.

Charlie is not one who easily speaks his feelings. But if I listen carefully enough, sometimes he speaks volumes.

I quietly ruffled his hair and assured him that we would one day soon have our home back.

I said that we didn’t need Mike Holmes because we had Steve Pallrand. The name is not as poetic, but the hopes, now much higher.