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.