The Barn House (18 page)

I found out what had happened. With the rear fence removed, Cleo had driven over the concrete slab at the back of the lot. The slab, you'll remember, had been intended for an unbuilt garage. Now it was covered with matted debris. The debris concealed embedded bolts intended to secure the garage walls. Those at the front of the slab had been bent flat long ago. But those at the rear, near the fence, still pointed up. What was the harm? Nobody ever went there.

Cleo had driven over the bolts. He'd already called the repair service. He wasn't sure if the tires could be repaired. New ones would cost $400, more than he'd make on the job.

Cleo seemed strangely calm in the face of this disaster. Resigned is probably a better description. One puncture, now—that would have suggested an accident, in theory preventable, and he might have felt entitled to be angry. But
two
, precisely spaced—think about it, what were the chances?—that was fate. Cleo, an honest suburban boy sucked into a developing urban quagmire, surely sensed that he'd been doomed the moment he'd taken my call. There was no sense in complaining. He'd gotten his crane into position and was ready to work.

So we did. The project proceeded with what in my book was military precision—in fact, given what one hears about such things, it probably exceeded military precision by a considerable margin. On a clipboard I'd listed the current and final location of each radiator, with the moves scientifically ordered to minimize extra work; each radiator was tagged with a number and its destination room. I'd arranged for a squad of stout Polish carpenters to be on hand, along with the requisite dollies and hand trucks. The first radiator was an impressive twenty-one-finned monster so massive it bent passing starlight. We (well, the Polish carpenters; I supplied high-level guidance) muscled the radiator onto the dolly, then pushed it to the rear of the house, wrapped cables around it, attached Cleo's hook, and gave the signal to hoist away. Then we scrambled to the appropriate floor, hauled in the dangling behemoth, set it on a dolly, disengaged the hook, trundled it to the designated location, and tipped it off the dolly. We repeated the process thirteen times. I had allowed four hours for the job; we were done in maybe two. Even Cleo was impressed. “This was a real nice job,” he allowed ruefully, surveying the scene. I wrote him a check. He didn't ask compensation for the tires and I didn't volunteer any, which was perhaps ungenerous on my part, but I was a desperate man. I left a few minutes after what was surely the world's largest tow truck arrived.

The radiators having been properly situated, my task now was to connect them. The time was growing short. It was already November. So far we'd been fortunate; the weather had been mild. But the bitter Chicago winter would soon arrive. Though we'd removed much of the plumbing, we still had running water, a toilet and a sink, and I wanted to keep them operating if possible. To do that, though, I needed heat in the house.

A
natural corollary of the fact that there are a limited number of ways to do things right is that there are a more or less infinite number of ways to do them wrong, or, if one wants to leave human agency out of it, a very large number of things that can
go
wrong, wrong being broadly defined in the context of home renovation to include everything from getting stuck with a really yucky basement-floor paint color to having the house collapse. We pretty much ran the gamut during the time we labored on the Barn House, and this despite the fact that we had the pride of Polish manhood (I intend no snarkiness) working on the job. Quite a few more things would have gone wrong had I not opportunely intervened. Mistakes and near-disasters are a feature of any construction project, of course; the only specifically urban aspect of the bungling that occurred in city houses was that, since there was generally more to do, there was more to get screwed up.

One day a couple weeks after construction began I arrived to find that the bricklayers were about to begin laying the masonry foundation for the reconstructed addition. By this time trenches had been excavated to the requisite depth (I didn't personally measure that it was forty-two inches, but the formwork had been done in a manner sufficiently authoritative that I felt certain someone had), and the concrete footings poured to a few inches above the level of the surrounding earth. The foundation wall was next. It was to be constructed using what Charlie called a split-faced CMU, short for concrete masonry unit, which was a sort of upscale concrete block. It looked like every other concrete block on all sides except one, which had a bumpy surface that made for a loose approximation of what architects called rusticated masonry, which is to say, stone tooled to look as if it had been wrested from the earth by a caveman with an ax. Whatever may be said for rusticated masonry, split-faced CMUs in large quantities were excruciatingly ugly—tart it up how you will, a concrete block is still a concrete block—but in sparing amounts (we needed only four courses) they made for an economical alternative to the limestone used in the Barn House's original foundation, which we were so certain was prohibitively expensive that we hadn't bothered to get a price.
⁵⁵

The bricklayers had laid out the first course of blocks but hadn't yet mortared them in place. I noticed a problem right away—all the blocks had only one rusticated face. That was fine for a straight run of wall, but the outside corner blocks needed to be rusticated on two sides, as anyone having experience at Legos, or for that matter an IQ above one, will immediately grasp. Lacking the requisite materials, the bricklayers were evidently planning on using ordinary blocks at the corners, the flat ends of which promised to give the wall the appearance of having divots in it. I pointed this out to the person supervising the bricklayers, a natty young fellow with a leather jacket and a cell phone, the trappings of command in the trades. The fellow said that corner blocks of the sort I had in mind were unavailable. I replied that I knew for a fact that they were. I knew no such thing, but it stood to reason—not always an infallible guide in the construction business, but give me a break. The head bricklayer wasn't buying it. After a minute or two of fruitless disputation I told him to call Jerry. Jerry told him that of course you could get corner blocks, kolachkybrain. (The conversation was in Polish, and I could hear only one side of it; I deduced the above from a certain stiffening of expression.) The bricklayers weren't happy, since the job was delayed, but the corner blocks were obtained in due time.
⁵⁶

Then there was the matter of the chimneys. I realized I was going to have to hire someone to work on them at an early stage of the project. The house had two, each a formidable construction of brick. One rose through the center of the house; the other, near the front of the building, rose along an outside wall. The front chimney had three flues and the central one four, for a total of seven. Why this extravagant number I don't know. Only one flue was in use when we bought the house, for the gas furnace; two others served inoperative fireplaces. That left four unused, one in the front chimney and three in the central. A flue seemed an unlikely thing to need a spare of. I could only suppose that the central chimney had been mainly intended to do what central chimneys had always done—namely, hold up the rest of the house, in our case the heavy wooden beams supporting the floor joists. This practice is frowned on today, and caused Bob the engineer great distress, but the chimney seemed well suited to it. It measured seven feet by a foot and a half at the base, which, granted, was smaller than the colonial chimneys you saw preserved here and there on the East Coast, which were the size of small hotels, but still impressive compared to the glorified stove-pipes installed in new construction today.

We wanted to restore the inoperative fireplaces to working order, which in the case of the living room fireplace wouldn't be easy. Its flue had been diverted to serve the furnace and its firebox had been closed up with a cast-iron plate. The hearth tile was gone, although the shallow recess in the floor where it had been remained; someone had futilely attempted to conceal the depression with squares of thin vinyl tile. If there had ever been a mantelpiece there was no sign of it now.

None of the flues, we established, had ever been lined. Although the masonry looked solid from the outside we had been given to understand that if we burned wood in a hundred-year-old unlined chimney we were taking our lives in our hands. The chimney tops were crumbling, and the one on the outside wall had to be made taller—city code required that it be two feet higher than anything else within a ten-foot radius, and the peak of the rebuilt turret would be only eight feet away.

I knew two ways of lining chimneys. The more common method was to insert a stainless steel tube. The ballpark price we heard was a thousand dollars per three-story flue. Notwithstanding its stainlessness, the steel tube was subject to corrosion and would eventually require replacement. The other method, which we heard about from a friend, involved the creation of a “solid flue.” A cylindrical rubber bladder—basically a giant condom—was shoved down the flue and inflated. The bladder was then agitated while a watery grout was poured into the space between it and the surrounding brick. After the grout solidified, the bladder was deflated and removed. The result, theoretically, was a cylindrical flue with a solid masonry liner bonded to the brick. The liner wasn't subject to corrosion, and arguably added to the chimney's strength. It was also cheaper than stainless steel.

Our friend was enthusiastic about solid flue and to me it made perfect sense. I called the contractor whose number he gave me, Paul. It was only later that I discovered our friend had never actually gotten around to having solid flues installed himself.

Paul seemed like a nice enough guy when he came out to the house. We agreed that he would line the three flues in the outside chimney. He would also add to the chimney top and reroute the furnace exhaust so it used a different flue. At some point I would have the living room firebox rebuilt so I could use the fireplace again, and later still I would see about getting a hearth and a mantel.

One evening shortly after work on the chimney began—I hadn't visited the job site in a couple days—I got a call from Paul.

“We ran into a little problem,” he said.

There are three people in this world from whom you don't want to hear that you have a little problem. One is your heart surgeon, another your tax accountant, and the third is your chimney guy. I asked Paul what was up.

Paul explained that he'd inserted the bladders into the flues in the outside chimney and begun pouring the grout. Unbeknownst to him, the wall of the house concealed an old crack that extended most of the height of the chimney. When the flues were half filled the lateral pressure of the grout had caused the chimney wall to buckle outward half an inch. Paul had immediately stopped pouring and the buckling had progressed no further; nonetheless, the chimney was in peril of collapse.

I grant you there's nothing specifically urban about calamities of this kind. Anyone who renovates a hundred-year-old structure, and it may as well be in an alfalfa field as in a city, puts himself in the position of having people he barely knows tell him the side of his house is about to fall off. Still, I was . . . well, I was nettled, I'll say that. I asked Paul what he proposed to do. He said that the chimney's buckled outer wall would have to be taken down and rebuilt.

I suppose I sighed. I asked Paul what all this was going to cost me. Well, he allowed, the lateral pressure of the liquid grout was an inherent risk of the solid-flue process. (Later I heard about a house where the grout had burst a weak spot on an inside wall and filled up the bathroom.) He would take down the bricks and re-lay them at no charge. I assuredly sighed at this point, with relief. The only problem would be finding replacements for the bricks that had cracked.

That didn't look to be easy. The bricks were a deep red, quite handsome really, of a uniform color. Though common enough in old buildings, I had never seen anything like them in new construction. A previous owner of the Barn House had replaced a few chimney bricks with others of an almost-but-not-quite shade; they were conspicuous at fifty yards. The corner of the chimney where the replacement bricks had to go was the one closest to the street; I fretted that if the job was a hodgepodge it would be the first thing anyone approaching the house would see. But Paul had an idea. He was replacing a chimney in the western suburbs; he thought the bricks were similar to mine. He would get some samples.

I got a call from Paul a few days later and went out to the house. He showed me some of the salvaged bricks. When I got home I called Charlie.

“They're a dead match,” I said.

“Naw,” said Charlie. Charlie had a capacity for appreciating small wonders that was comforting at such times.

“I'm serious. Only problem is they're an eighth of an inch too short.”

“That's nothing. You can finesse that with mortar.”

It was even so. Paul dyed the mortar black to match the color of the original. (The contrast of the black mortar with the red brick was striking; one wonders why such things aren't done more often. No doubt the answer is that no one thinks to ask.) When he finished a few days later, the repair job was undetectable except at close range. As it happened we weren't done with the chimneys, but for now another bullet dodged.

 

I
nstallation of the heating system now commenced in earnest. Now that the radiators had been conveyed to the right rooms, I had to hook them up. It may be difficult for the reader having no knowledge of these things to appreciate the magnitude of this task. Imagine yourself trying to install radiators, a task you know nothing about and have never seen done—in fact, all you know about radiators is what you can pick up from looking at one, which I assure you isn't much. No doubt, you suggest, it's simply a matter of getting the pipes from point A (the radiator) to point B (the furnace). Well, sure. One can say the same of putting a man on the moon. It's the details that are a ballbreaker. We start with the matter of bushings.