Taking Shape

Friday June 24

It has been a busy week. A couple of rows of block got laid in the basement and another row of stone on the back wall. The drain tile is in and the sump pit dug in. Sam’s brothers came to help for a day or two but the two and a half inches of rain on Tuesday put us out of business for over a day. The mud in some places was ankle deep and on Wed. morning there was water 4” deep in the basement where we had planned to work. The only benefit to the weather is that it settled the fill prior to the pouring of the footings for the rest of the house which I hope we will be able to accomplish next week if the weather is cooperative. We managed to get back to work on Thursday as things began to dry out but we had to use plank and sheets of corrugated tin to make a path to the site in order to work. Sam proved to be a real trooper working in the mud. I think he is beginning to get his head wrapped around the enormity of what we have undertaken.

Footing poured and the first rows of stone laid on it to begin the four foot frost footings required on constructions this far north. It seems sad to put in so many hours of effort on a wall that will be buried and that no one will ever see. The benefit is that we can use all sorts of material to make it! The limestone from the old horse barn on the property is being reused. This week Roger sent up 3 small truckloads of broken up cement sidewalk that can be laid like stone and will be used as wall material on one of the footings. We will still be short of building materials to get us to ground level all around, so I’m searching for some old foundation or other to make use of and I got a lead on one this week.

Friday July 1

The last two days have offered up 90 plus degree days with dew points in the mid-seventies. We decided to not work in the heat of the day which is fine as there is lots of stripped woodwork to sand from the stack of 120 year old woodwork we will be using on the first floor of the house. We did get lucky this week finding two three by eight foot black cherry pocket doors for use on the second floor. Got them for under $50 and they should look spectacular in one of the second floor bedrooms… either as working doors or maybe even as an actual wall dividing two rooms. That is the nice thing about having an open plan that allows for easy changes in interior walls/rooms …especially on the second floor.

We are expecting severe weather this evening with possible torrential rainfall. There is already a tornado warning to the west of here. When a building site is open care must be taken to watch the weather. With the morning’s forecast in my ears, I went to the site early before the heat became unbearable and moved all the loose stone up on to corrugated metal sheets. If left on the bare ground during a rain they get coated with dirt and require extra hours of cleaning before they can be laid. The old sheets on the ground will keep them relatively clean for when laying commences.

For the last day and a half Wayne’s son, Tom, from California was here and helped us move stone into place. He wanted to watch the process of beginning a foundation as he plans some work of his own like this when he returns west. We had a great time in spite of the heat discussing politics and religion as we worked. He got a workout…both mental and physical before he left and promised to return later in the summer to help again or at least to look at the progress. Projects like this tend to influence the people who stop by to help and they often leave with ideas for their own projects. It seems to me what most people lack is the basic confidence that folks of 100 years ago had in their capabilities. Of course, we put lots of restrictions in the way, like unnecessary codes, convincing our citizens that only experts can do the various tasks of construction. Yet, what our often “uneducated” ancestors built on their own belies this notion. I keep telling Sam that this structure will outlast by generations any of the new wafer board and vinyl palaces built today in the suburbs…both because of how it is being built and because of the charm it will have by nature of its very uniqueness!

We keep stumbling on used or discarded materials to help us along and keep costs down. This week we were promised the furnace for the house by a friend who is installing a newer unit in his house. This gas fired boiler is efficient and will only have to have new natural gas ports installed to replace the current ones used for propane. A neighbor connected us with a friend of his cleaning out an old garage on a farmstead south of here who had a pile of lumber to get rid of. Turned out to be 2x4’s 2x6’s and a pile of 1x12’s all new and stacked away years ago. We will be able to use everything and were most thankful for the pile. Sam even got the stainless steel base from an old cream separator that he hopes to use for making maple syrup in the spring in return for hauling the pile of metal junk out of the garage for recycling. The metal should pay for the gas we needed to pick the wood up!

July 5

Sprinkles in the morning so we turned again to woodwork after sorting out the largest of the piles of stone from the old building on the site. The rest of the day we stripped more woodwork. Got an oak pocket door done on one side. It really looks huge out in the light and the color was magnificent! Two good weather work days lie ahead and I hope to help Sam get some serious stone laid!

A Basement Is Born

The birth of the basement came forth as that of a child. I hope that the process doesn't slow down. Immense progress was made today. The work of laying block was assisted by a friend of ours. I preferred the stone work over laying cement block. It was a little frustrating to keep the blocks level and flush in three directions at the same time. With a little more practice, or a lot, I hope I will be more proficient at laying block. We have a long row to hoe and a lot of cement to mix.

Excavating

May 14.

Today we cut a large red oak damaged by a storm last year from a friend’s woodlot. It will provide the center post for the staircase and the extension jambs for the windows and doors as well as the treads and risers for the staircase. They should be dried and ready for use in a couple of years when we need them. This was a positive culmination to a rather hectic week. For four days the construction crew were here digging footings here and looking for the sewer and water line to hook up to. For some reason the city maps only showed a water line onto the lot but there had been an existing house on the site that had both sewer and water before it was demolished. The city ran a camera down the sewer in the street and found the Y connection for the lot but could not tell us in feet where exactly in the street it was located. We dug for an entire day. An abandoned gas service line required a visit from the gas utility to gain assurance it wasn’t live and leaking. Then we discovered a 4 inch gas main and a telephone cable that had to be trenched between as we continued the search. By 3:30 we were all pretty frustrated. The foreman of the digging crew informed me that we might have to open the street at considerable expense and start over. He asked for another half hour to follow what appeared to be a fill line deep in the trench we were digging, thinking that it might lead somewhere. 40 years of his experience gave him an eye for such hints. The rented small digger had to be back by 5 PM. We were getting nowhere fast. The backhoe operator hit a stone and climbed down into the trench. I walked over to the foreman and said, “ There is an old Chinese quotation that says, When the horse is dead, get off. “ The guy in the ditch at that instant realized he hadn’t hit a stone at all and called out “I found the pipe!” Cheers all around.

We start the hook-up on Monday. I promised the crew lunch and a coconut cream pie.

I think it was a good couple of days for Sam too. He enjoyed jawing with the construction crew and relished the digging . He witnessed the finessing of both a city inspector and a neighbor who was not too pleased with what they thought the finished house might look like. With his eyes and ears open he will learn a lot more on this project than how to just build a house. Before a college degree was the be all and end all of one’s education this was how young people learned to negotiate the world and the workplace, and I believe that the world may have been a better place then for it.

It is still going to be an expensive dig but with a line off of the street, less costly than it might have been. I will be very glad to get this portion of the project behind me. Our photographer stopped by to take pictures of the week’s work and we all marveled at how all this digging of trenches and foundations and basements was done often by hand just a couple of generations ago. It gave us a real respect for a basement from the 1900’s!

Hot, Humid and Hole

Hot, humid, and the hole is being dug! The digger arrived this morning and went to work after we gave him a tour of the property and discussed the job at hand. The sewer and water will have to come up and under the brick drive, so we removed a twelve foot section of bricks (good thing it is brick otherwise we would have the added expense of laying a new section, in this case we can just re-lay the bricks when the water and sewer is laid and inspected). We took many water breaks, but nonetheless, I was a bit heat exhausted. The digger took apart the old stone shed foundation. In the northwest corner we found an old limestone hitching post! It took most of the morning and afternoon to load up the limestone, where it was dumped in a couple of piles to be reused in the future house foundation. The digger started leveling the terrain and digging the foundation. I am sure there are many more hot and humid days ahead, but today we have a hole.

Lawyers, Paperwork, Permits, Ptooie!

Feb. 11

Sam and I went to the lawyer today to work out an agreement that would protect us both during the construction process. When the lawyer saw the plan of the Octagon he looked at Sam and asked, “Are you sure you want to build this house? He went on to explain that value was determined by looking at the sale of houses of comparable kind in a geographic area, and that something this unusual might be hard to put a value on and hence to sell. I looked at Sam and smiled. I later explained that this is how someone who has spent their adult life as a lawyer sees the world. Everything is about the money. Aesthetics won’t pay the rent. I’ve known this particular lawyer since he was a boy and he is used to my eccentricities. He shakes his head at my lack of concern for the commercial value of things, for the normal way of doing things, but he also knows me well enough to know that his form of realism will fail to persuade or dissuade me. It runs in my family, he thinks. He will draw up the required legal arrangement and chuckle at my naiveté in the ways of the world.

Feb. 26

Today was the meeting with city hall about the permitting for the Octagon. I had spent several weeks working out R- values and u-factors and lots of other arcane necessities in order to comply with the universal building codes. Any number of things in this process amazed me. Houses now are required to be almost hermetically sealed, and then the state requires an active or passive air exchange system to bring fresh air into the structure…often at below zero temps here in Minnesota. How does that make any sense?

Windows need to have a minimum u-value of .35 (The lower the number, the better the insulation value). No one could give me a u-value for the traditional wood-framed double hung window with a simple single glazed storm window…long the standard in home construction. I was shocked to learn from an obscure government web site that the old style windows had a u-value of .44 , making the new window requirements only slightly better than the previous style. By increasing the wall insulation above the necessary r-19, I was given permission to use historical windows on the front side of the house because the total thermal envelope would exceed the requirements. What really seemed spectacular to me was the fact that the same State that put these energy rules in place for home builders, just this week heated the Humphrey Dome and its collapsed roof, thousands of square feet of space, to a balmy 85 degrees in order to melt all of the recent foot plus snowfall off the roof. This would be enough energy to heat the modest 1900 square foot Octagon house for, oh, maybe a thousand years? Penny wise and pound foolish?

After meeting for 45 minutes, all the paperwork was examined and passed by the city officials, paving the way for a spring permit without a hitch. Because I have had experience with the city, having reconstructed two historical houses already, I had some credibility. I thought of Sam. What if he had approached the same group with the same plan on his own, at 22, without a track record? Would he have received the same reception to the idea? I often feel that all the regulations which are there to protect us against the unscrupulous, really serve to stifle creativity and the building of the unique and unusual…part of the reason that our cities and suburbs look so ugly? Not a single Italian hill village or thatched-roofed English cottage would pass any codes I am aware of in this country. A homeless man cannot live legally in new construction that has no proper egress window of the right size and the right height off of the floor, but that same man in a homeless condition can live under a local bridge. Were you to live on 60 acres in the country and dig a pit toilet for one person and be found out, you’d face a significant fine, but on the same 60 acres 2, 000 pigs can shit in an open pit and, NO problem! Go figure.

Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles nowadays in many communities is the requirement to complete a structure or a project within a specific time frame…usually six months to one year. This almost precludes an individual building anything by themselves. Stonework takes time, especially when done by hand. The reconstruction of an 1850’s two story stone house I completed some 20 years ago took over five years. (That was before current regulations) How can anyone on their own complete anything interesting or even remarkable under these time restrictions? Maybe the better question is where did this idea of a time limit come from anyway? The answer lies with middle-class suburban women. Today we have covenants in some jurisdictions that prevent people from parking boats or R V’s in a driveway or in some cases even from hanging laundry out on a line. It seems it disturbs some peoples’ ideas of a perfect world. Have you ever seen a house that looks like a furniture showroom on the inside? Do you know any man who lives part-time in a garage because his house is off limits for any activity except those which don’t mess up his wife’s ideal of a well-ordered and clean home? During my last project this became clear to me when one morning I went out to the worksite.

City rules are often as not in place to avoid staff having to field complaints (usually from one of these women) about a neighbor’s property. So, a project that takes time to complete becomes an impossibility and we end up with bland plastic subdivisions where every house is completed within the time limit and every house is the same bland non-entity. Every house is gray, every lawn is mowed, every shrub is manicured, and no “mess” is tolerated!

When people complain about government intrusion I don’t think they are always talking about the big stuff. It is the nonsensical local requirements and crazy rule-making that drives some folks nuts. But all that is past for Sam and me. Permit almost in hand, we are on our way. All that inhibits us now is melting the 5+ feet of snow we’ve had this winter, spring flooding, road restrictions and the possibility of $5.00 a gallon gas should the mid-east remain volatile, and, of course money!

Sam and I Decide to Build an Octagon House

At 63 I have agreed to help a 22 year old build an 1850’s style Octagon house. I have read Fowler’s book, visited several period octagons, and begun preparing plans. The lot has been selected and awaits spring for clearing and digging a foundation and installing a sewer and water line. Sam (the young man who will eventually build and own the house) and I this last fall began to gather supplies. We removed the fir flooring from four rooms of a soon to be dismantled farmhouse and it is stowed away. I have begun to build the window frames for the house, utilizing some fine old Victorian sashes salvaged from a house that was being updated. The cedar sills came from cedar telephone poles rescued from a local farmer and sawed into one and a half inch slabs and later run through the planer here. Sam will have to strip and in some cases re-glaze the windows sashes themselves when the weather warms. We are currently discussing putting colored glass in the corner panels of the upper sashes and what colors they should be. I’m partial to different colors for different rooms, but we’ll have to see what Sam decides. He’ll be the one to have to live with them. There will be a total of 17 windows to construct but with the salvaged sills and sashes, the cost for each will only be about $15 each, not including the eventual storm windows.

Winter work

We have made great strides in collecting materials for the octagon house to come. Here is just a small sampling of the fir, maple, and oak flooring that we have been able to gather. A friend of ours was going to demolish their 1920s farm house. They said we could have whatever we wanted. The flooring was a dirty and dusty chore to take up, but an experience nonetheless. A great task to take up the flooring on a cold winter day. Once this is laid and sanded it will look marvelous in the second floor.