The Barn House (15 page)

With these facts in mind, few in Chicago would dispute the following: (1) Getting a building permit was an important civic duty; (2) it was still a pain in the butt.

I'd heard the process was arduous. Charlie told me his firm's clients sometimes hired expediters whose job was to stand in line waiting to get the paperwork approved. I didn't intend to go that far; I didn't figure I had to. The people who needed to fear the process, I felt, were either small-time chiselers who were trying to sneak a mother-in-law apartment into the basement, or else Republicans.
⁵²
I, on the other hand, was getting professional advice. I had a formidable collection of drawings, with impressive-looking title blocks and symbols and inscrutable instructions such as 16” φ TYP. and SHT MTL CRICKETS AS REQD, and embossed stamps saying STATE OF ILLINOIS * LICENSED ARCHITECT. In addition, I had the perhaps silly idea that getting a permit would be fun. I did my own taxes, too. For excitement I don't claim either ranked with bungee jumping, but they were challenge enough for me.

City Hall in Chicago—properly known as the City-County Building—is a large cubical edifice occupying a full city block in the Loop. It's split down the middle. The eastern half contains the administrative offices for Cook County, of which Chicago constitutes the larger part; the western half houses those for the city. The city half is where most of the excitement is. The ground-floor lobby is a study in marble and terrazzo, impressive in a 1930s B-movie kind of way, full of cops, clerks, and scurrying citizens, with quiet eddies here and there where well-fed parties in expensive suits conferred with leaner individuals—lawyers, likely—regarding matters of dizzy import, such as the Bears game.
⁵³

One applied for construction permits at the building department, which was on the eighth floor of the city side. One saw fewer people in expensive suits, and more nervous-looking nebbishes such as myself. Inquiring at the counter, I was told to fill out a form stating the particulars of the project. One of the blanks to be filled in was the value of the work. I completed the form and handed it to the sad-eyed man behind the counter. He studied the form for a moment. “You sure it's going to cost this much?” he asked.

Clearly I wasn't supposed to be. “More or less,” I said.

The sad-eyed man looked at me and sighed. I'd gotten a similar look from an old cabbie when, as an eighteen-year-old summer fill-in driver, I stood at a counter in the cab barn and filled out a federal tax form with the amount of tip money I actually made.

“The form is used by the county when they reassess your property after the work is done,” the sad-eyed man said.

“Oh,” I said. I took back the form and scratched off a zero.

The next stop was the zoning man, a youngish fellow in a polo shirt. The zoning man glanced through the drawings, then pushed them back. “You need to get a driveway permit,” he said.

“No,” I said. “It's an
existing
driveway.”

“Doesn't matter,” he said. “You still need to get a permit.” He gestured toward a counter on the far side of the room.

This was unexpected. I could understand permits for new construction, but who ever heard of getting permits for things built twenty years before? The notion seemed to open the door to all manner of bureaucratic meddling:
We're sorry, sir, but we shouldn't have given out that driveway permit to start with. And while you're at it, tear down that eyesore of a house, too.
I also knew from Mike Royko books that the sale of driveway permits had once been a lucrative sideline for unscrupulous Chicago aldermen. While I was reasonably sure those days were gone, I wasn't eager to put the matter to the test. Plus, there were sure to be more delays and fees.

No use complaining, though. I went to the indicated counter and explained my problem to the woman sitting behind it, one of those stout bottle blondes who, in Chicago as in probably every other city, accomplish all the useful work of government. She handed me a form.

“Fill this out and bring in a photo of the driveway,” she said.

“A photo?” I said stupidly. I didn't see the point, but at least they weren't asking for an environmental impact study. I rolled up my blueprints and went home to get the camera.

A couple days later I returned with an envelope full of driveway pictures. I handed one to the woman behind the counter. She studied it, then handed it back.

“Your driveway is cracked,” she said. “You'll have to get it repoured.”

“Repoured?”
I looked at the picture. The driveway had some cracks across one corner. The affected area amounted to about a square foot. Repouring seemed absurd. More important, it would take days, maybe weeks depending on whether they expected me to replace a corner or the entire driveway. It was already the end of September. How much longer it would take to get a building permit once I got the driveway permit I didn't know. I was planning major structural work that would leave much of the house open to the elements. If I lost a month we would be working outdoors in the depths of a Chicago winter. I thought of Napoleon on the banks of the Dnieper.

I looked down at the remaining driveway photos and had an idea. Shuffling through the stack, I placed a different one on the counter. “You know,” I said, “I've got another photo here.”

The picture showed the driveway from a different angle. The cracked corner wasn't visible.

The woman looked at the photo, then at me. All of us encounter these little face-offs with destiny at some point in our lives. In some the fate of nations hangs in the balance. Others are about driveways. “Let me ask the boss,” the woman said. She picked up the photo and walked into a nearby office. A few moments later she returned and shoved the photo back across the counter.

“Okay,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said. One down.

Back to the zoning man. He looked through the drawings for a second time. I hoped he would find nothing to object to, but no. “Can't do this,” he said, pointing.

I leaned over. On the drawing for the third floor Charlie had labeled one room OFFICE and another FUTURE BATH.

This problem I understood. Months earlier Charlie had faxed me a page from the city's building code about the “minimum number of exits.” It was written in typically opaque building-code style, but after some study I gathered that, if you had a two-story house, the city would let you get by with one set of stairs between floors, but if you had a
three-
story house, you needed two sets of stairs, both serving all three floors. The idea was to provide an alternative fire exit in case the first was blocked.

In the Barn House, the first and second floors were served by two stairways, but the third floor as originally built could be reached by only one. An exterior fire staircase had been added at the rear of the building, presumably when the house was divided into apartments, but the wood was rotting and we were going to demolish it. Charlie had made several stabs at designing a replacement stairway, but none had been satisfactory—too big, too ugly, blocked the windows on the lower floors, and so on. There was no way to fit another interior stairway into the floor plan. In the end we deferred the question. We left a door at the back of the attic, but with no stairs attached; the door opened into the void. (Well, not the void exactly; the doorway deposited you on the roof of the second floor, which jutted out below. But there was no deck or railing.) Charlie had drawn in rooms on the third floor but added notations indicating that the finishing work would be done at some future time.

That wasn't good enough for the zoning guy. He wanted me to scratch out FUTURE BATH and OFFICE and write in STORAGE.

I considered. Though a small thing, this was a more emphatic declaration than I cared to make. Charlie and I had discussed an exterior spiral staircase, which would be less obtrusive than a bulky wooden one. We'd arrived at no decision, but a spiral staircase now seemed like a better solution than going on record as saying the third floor would be devoted to storage forevermore. I asked the zoning guy if I could amend the drawings.
Sure,
he said. I would find a place to do so out in the hall.

I gathered my drawings and went out in the hall. I found several rows of tall tables. Various parties were scattered about with drawings strewn in front of them, furiously scribbling. I found an unoccupied spot and prepared to do the same. I didn't know exactly where the spiral staircase should go, but figured as long as I got it somewhere at the back of the house we could work out the details when the time came. I marked up one set of drawings. The staircase looked as if it had been drawn by an alert preschooler. Well, Charlie could make art out of it later. I marked up the other copies.

Back inside. Next stop was the plumbing man. There was little on the drawings having to do with plumbing, and what there was I had mainly done myself. This consisted of a 3-D schematic of the pipes showing the various risers, drains, and vents, the original for which I had laboriously sketched out in pencil. Charlie had taken my diagram and rendered it into an intricate arrangement of parallel lines punctuated by curlicues and doodads.

The plumbing guy flipped through the drawings and found the diagram. “You forgot to put in the diameter of the pipes,” he said.

This was true. Nobody had said anything about pipe diameters.

“You also need a grease trap.” Damn, the grease trap. I'd forgotten.

Back to the tables in the hallway. I wrote in some plausible pipe diameters and a little box labeled “grease trap.” I copied these notations to the other copies of the drawings. Back inside.

Flip, flip, flip. Pause. The plumbing man reached for a rubber stamp, smacked the drawing with it, wrote in his initials, handed back the drawings. Now we were getting somewhere.

Next the electrical man. I'd done the original diagram for the electrical drawings, too. In contrast to plumbing, however, with the electrical work I knew what I was talking about. The electrical man took the drawings. Flip, flip, flip. Pause. Smack. Scribble. Three down.

Last stop. I approached the architectural examiner and handed over the drawings. Flip, flip, and so on. Another pause. The pause lingered. Trouble.

“There's a problem with these stairs,” the examiner said, pointing to the spiral staircase I had drawn.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“For fire stairs you need a thirty-six-inch-wide tread. You've only got thirty inches here.”

Crap. I'd made the spiral staircase five feet in diameter so it would be less conspicuous. I didn't want a piece of apparatus six feet in diameter bolted to the back of my house; the place would look like an oil refinery.

“I don't get it,” I said. “You see houses all the time that only have one set of stairs up to the third floor.”

“That's an existing condition,” said the examiner.

Huh
, I thought. An existing condition. That put matters in a new light. Evidently it was illegal to
create
a building code violation, but not illegal merely to have one. Low thoughts crowded my mind. I wanted to be law-abiding, you understand. However, on a short-term basis, I was . . . well, let's say I was willing to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I gathered my drawings, went out to the tables in the hall, scratched out the spiral staircase, and wrote in STORAGE.

By now it was near the end of the day. The architectural examiner I had talked to initially was no longer on hand. Instead I spoke to a professorial-looking fellow in glasses. He inspected my drawings, then reached for his rubber stamp.

I cleared my throat. “At what point does the city usually come by to inspect?” I asked. The examiner had undoubtedly heard this before, and had seen the scribbles on the drawings. He gave me a stern look. “The inspectors can come by at any time, without notice,” he said. He paused, then continued in a milder tone: “But on average they come by sixty days after the permit is pulled.”

I thanked him, picked up my drawings, paid the fee to the cashier, and received a cardboard placard reading BUILDING PERMIT in bold type. Nine months after first laying eyes on the Barn House, we were ready to begin the serious work at last.

 

A
couple days later I got a call from Eddie. He was experiencing severe stomach pain. He had been in to see the doctor; he feared the worst. He was sorry, but he had to withdraw from the project. I wasn't to worry, however. He was turning the project over to his cousin Tony, in whom he had great confidence.

It was now early October. Already the days were growing noticeably cooler. The work hadn't yet begun, and my project was in the hands of a man I'd never met.

T
ony was unlike anyone else I knew in the building trades.

The thing was, and I marvel at it to this day, he returned phone calls—and what's more, he returned them promptly. This trait is exceedingly rare among contractors and tradespeople, as anyone who has dealt with them knows, which in turn is exceedingly mystifying, since it seems to defy ordinary expectations of rational behavior. It wasn't like you were trying to collect money from these guys or serve them with a summons. On the contrary, typically you were proposing to pay them—in many cases pay them a lot—to pursue the calling in which they were nominally employed. Yet it might take a week and three or four attempts to get one to call you back. It was the damnedest thing. They couldn't spend
all
their time hunting, or sleeping it off, or whatever it was they did. Even people in the business didn't understand it. “Don't these guys have
families
?” my plumbing contractor, Kevin, once plaintively inquired, speaking of the journeymen he had to coax into accepting a paycheck. Of course, then I spent a week trying to get Kevin to call me back, so he was hardly one to talk.