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?