The Urbane Homestead

It fills up those empty hours....

I've added another blog, Window on the Day. Here's the description:

Our house is tall and old. The third floor, which was once the attic, is now a bedroom, and framed in the two large windows to the west are the top branches of a maple tree, with nothing but sky beyond. This is the first thing I see when I wake up every morning. Every morning is different - the color, the textures, the light - and here I'm going to share a year of mornings with you.

The afterlife, and what you'll need there

Henry went to Home Depot and bought us a top-of-the-line sump pump, which comes with a lifetime warranty. At the check-out, the clerk asked him if he'd like to purchase, for only $19.95, an extended warranty. Hmm.

Process, not product

Last night, after dinner, I schlepped piles of wood around the yard, picking through stacks of lumber from the old basement that have been out there under tarps since last summer, setting aside the bad pieces to be cut up and recycled, carrying good pieces down to the new basement and finding places to put them. It's a Sisyphean task, because no matter how long I'm out there and how much my back hurts afterwards, there's still more to do. But I have to keep trying, and anyway, stomping around in my big rubber boots and floppy work gloves on a fresh spring evening brings its own kind of joy.

As I pulled rusty nails out of old pieces of trim (spraying lead paint dust all over me, I am sure), I realized that my task is not like Sisyphos' at all. It's always a new boulder that comes rolling back down the hill. I push and shove and sweat and finally get the kitchen painted, and then the plaster cracks in the living room. I finish the trim in my office, and the closet door doesn't fit anymore. It ought to be exhausting, but it's kind of exhilirating, and here's why.

When I knit, I love to start new projects. I like picking the yarn, knitting the swatch, casting on, and knitting knitting knitting, up to a certain point. Sometimes I finish everything but the sleeves. Sometimes I only knit one mitten. Sometimes I only knit a few inches, and then, on to the next project. When I do finish a garment, though, I'm almost always not quite satisfied with it; I think, "This would be better if I took it in a  bit here, and made the sleeves a little shorter, and...." It is the journey that is meaningful to me, not the destination. One of my very favorite poems, Ithaca, by the Alexandrian poet Cavafy, speaks to this in a lovely, poignant way.

At the same time, I have a vision in my head of the house when it is perfect and complete. Everything that needs to be done to it will have been done; each room will be optimally beautiful and optimally functional. It will be the most pleasant space to be in; the light and color of each room will be just right, the furniture comfortable, the composition of the gardens will be elegant all year round. There will be a place for everything. Because I am limited both in time and money, the chance that this will ever be a reality is very slim indeed. But, as I said, I have to keep trying.

There's a statement from the Pirke Avot: "[Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, You are not required to complete the task, but neither are you free to refuse it." This was intended to refer to Tikkun Olam, or the repair of the world. As I repair my house, though, I also repair a little part of the world. I keep trying.

There are pet psychics; maybe we need a house psychic

When the foundation was replaced, it caused a lot of problems elsewhere in the house: big cracks in the dry wall on the first floor, heaving between the bricks in the hearth, landscaping a la Death Valley, gaps between all the woodwork and the walls and floors. One of the more annoying results was that the floor of the small powder room off the kitchen now slopes up at so dramatic an angle that we had to have the door reshaped: a big wedge sliced off the bottom, and another big wedge installed at the top. It turned out that, because the foundation wasn't level, the previous owners had put shims under the joists under the floor in order to even it out, before installing some hideous and slippery beige tile flooring. So now, in addition to being ugly, when you walk into the bathroom it's like walking into the Mystery Spot—whoa! the laws of gravity defied!—and the only solution is to tear up the tiles, remove the shims, and put in new flooring. It would be a top priority if there weren't 732 things already in top priority position.

The main bathroom (the one on the third floor) suffered too. Ever since the construction, the faucet in the tub has leaked. Our best friend Larry the plumber has had at it several times already, trying to figure out where the problem is, but it appears to be deeply rooted in the, um, bowels of the bathtub, and resistant to discovery. In the meantime, we noticed that a damp spot kept appearing on the bathmat. We have elderly animals so this is not mysterious; a trip through the washer with some hot water solves this problem. But then the spot would reappear. And then it started reappearing even when when the cat was outside and the dog was diapered. And then we noticed that the grout between the tiles in the floor was looking kind of bubbly and yellow. And then we noticed a big drippy wet spot on the ceiling in the room below—and a pile of papers and photos on the desk below the spot that were (ew!) damp and moldy.

All this is annoying and frustrating, and part of the constant hemorrhage of money we enjoy as owners of a historic property. (Deciding between Puerto Vallarta and Tuscany for vacation this year? Never a problem for us! We're buying a new sump pump instead!)

The other night, though, when I got up in the middle of the night to use this same bathroom, insult was added to injury. The toilet seat broke when I sat on it. Henry says it cheered him up a bit; this, at least, is something he can fix. But I'm starting to think about Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror, and to wonder about our sanity.

The house on stilts

Okay, Jayne, here's the scoop:

This summer we finally bit the bullet, pulled up our socks, and jumped off that bridge: we replaced our basement. Of course, what I mean is, we contracted with someone else to do the actual work, but we were the ones who sold our souls to the bank (yet again) to pay for it.

In our neighborhood, most of the houses were built in the late 1800's and early 1900's, and the foundations were either constructed of nice solid stone, or site-mix concrete. Site-mix concrete is, as the name suggests, made of water, cement, and sand, rocks, and dirt dug up from the construction site. (If you're really interested in how concrete is made, read this article.) Site-mix concrete can work pretty well, for a while. Ours lasted for about a hundred years. But when we bought the house, we knew the foundation would need to be replaced. How did we know? Well, there were those big messy cracks in the basement walls and floor. And there were those crumbly bits of moldy sand falling off the walls, even when you didn't touch them. Also, the rotting bottom of the basement stairs, which made them wobble when you went up or down, caused by the muddy water which sheeted in through the gap between the wall and the floor every rainy day. Little hints like that, if you're sensitive, can clue you in.

When we bought the house, we got an estimate for a replacement — about $35,000. "No problem!" we said. Ha. Then one thing lead to another, and we weren't ready for such a big job, and we didn't really mind having to put on shoes every time we went downstairs, and then we didn't have any money, and then.... Eight years passed. We finally realized that anything else we did on the house—landscaping, plasterwork, everything—would have to be redone after the foundation was replaced, thus costing twice as much and taking twice as much time. Dawn breaks over Marblehead! That's why they call it the "foundation!" Because you have to do it first!

So we call in the contractors for estimates. Each one—even the one who had consulted when we bought the house—came in at more than twice the original estimate. Each one was higher than the last! We watched our vacation plans for the next thirty years fly out through the cracks in the basement walls. There's a happy ending, though: we found a mason whose bid came in much lower, who offered us more services, and who had great references. He fell like manna from heaven. Well, really expensive manna, and he didn't exactly fall, but he was great and his name is Paul Henes, and I recommend him if you are in Southeastern Michigan and you need a mason.

One day last summer I left the house as usual and went to work. At five o'clock, this is more or less what I came home to:
Yes, indeed, that's a road leading into my backyard and right under the house.

I experienced a mind-boggling very like what I imagine people in post-apocalyptic science fiction feel: suddenly, the world was not as I knew it. Worse, I had been plunged into a survival-of-the-fittest scenario without preserved food: our pantry and freezer had been in the basement that was no more!

It wasn't that bad, of course. We stayed in the house as long as we could; once they had to lift it (onto steel beams, just like when they're moving whole buildings), the gas and water were disconnected, and we stayed with kind neighbors for a week, and then with my parents for the remaining three and a half months (yes, months). It turns out that contractors of all sorts are very sympathetic when you explain that you are living with your parents or your in-laws, and they are willing to hurry things along as much as they can.

That big yellow thing under the back window is one of the steel beams the house is resting on.

You can see daylight under the house. Paul had lights strung under the house which were left on all the time. At night the house looked like an alien spaceship just blasting off, or one of those lowrider cars tricked out with neon underneath. For a while every time we came by, someone would be out on the sidewalk taking pictures of it.

This is the door to the basement, hanging in midair like the doors in Monsters, Inc. (speaking of nightmares...). The house had to be raised higher than it originally was in order for this door to be entirely above ground—it turned out that the property had been graded toward the house, rather than away from it. This may explain some of the leaking.

The first few courses of masonry.

Isn't she lovely, folks?

In the end, the new basement was worth it. The whole house feels more solid and less drafty, the basement stairs aren't scary anymore, and we can actually store stuff in the basement without it getting mildewy. Of course, now that the house is square, a lot of the plaster inside is cracked, the bathroom floor curves up like the Mystery Spot, and the cupboards are all crooked. That can all be fixed—someday. A more pressing issue is that we have about 50 cents left on our loan to totally (and I do mean totally) replant the yard, now a quarter acre sea of sandy, frozen mud. But that's a story for another day.

The house

When we were planning to move back to Ann Arbor, we made a list of characteristics that our new house absolutely had to have. We were accustomed, in Austin, to a spacious two-car garage (in which we never, ever had room for cars), so that was a must. We had a beautiful 1940's kitchen, with a giant range that was original to the house, and turquoise and yellow tile; a big kitchen was another must. And because we are packrats of the worst sort, we needed lots and lots of storage space. Did we end up with any of these things? Of course not! The house of our dreams turned out to have a kitchen the size of other people's bathrooms, a total of three miniature closets, and no garage whatsoever (although I frequently dig up bricks in the garden, so perhaps there was one at some point).

Our house has many other good qualities. It has well-proportioned rooms—not not too big, but not too small—oak floors and trim, a huge backyard, and a lot of just-post-Victorian Midwestern four-square personality. It was slightly out of our budget, it was on a busy street, and  it needed an awful lot of work. But just being in the house made us feel good and hopeful and at home, so here we are. It's still out of our budget, it's still on a busy street, and it seems to need more work all the time, but we're happy here and we'll never move.