The Barn House Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  APPENDICES

  Here is a link to the past, lost but for me.

  Anyone who fixes up an old house understands. . . .

  Here was where someone had built a life, and as far as anyone knew this was all that remained—their contribution to the enterprise in which we were somehow all engaged. That made the house a precious thing, a window on an age that had otherwise slipped away. It brought out your inner archaeologist. Just when you were fed up with leaky roofs and sclerotic pipes and at the point of calling in the bulldozers, you’d haul up on some dusty artifact from days long past, and instantly your mind would be as afroth with questions as if you’d found a fragment of cuneiform in some tel in the Mideast: What was it for? What did it mean? What were these people thinking? And sometimes, seeing as this was a house in the city: What went wrong?

  —from The Barn House

  “A lively, often funny, sometimes startling, occasionally surreal account of the rehabbing process, from getting the mortgage to choosing the architect to balancing dreams with reality. It’s the perfect book for armchair or would-be renovators.”

  —Booklist

  “Enlightening. And entertaining. [Zotti’s] humor brings to mind Dave Barry.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “If you are a do-it-yourselfer with a compulsion to fix up a house, this will be a fun read, and you can laugh along as Ed hires a homeless trumpeter to guard the open house, forgets to wish his wife a happy Mother’s Day, and single-handedly tames ancient radiators, forcing their rusted bushings to yield to his will. . . . I have no idea what a bushing is, either, but I read all forty pages about that incident, a classic tale of Man vs. Rusty Widget. It was just that amusing.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  YIEW FROM STREET 3·19·93

  New American Library

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First New American Library Trade Paperback Printing, September 2009

  Copyright © Ed Zotti, 2008

  All rights reserved

  Illustrations by Charlie Friedlander

  Frontispiece by Bruce Bondy

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  eISBN : 978-1-101-21213-4

  Zotti, Ed.

  The barn house: confessions of an urban rehabber/Ed Zotti; illustrations by Charlie Friedlander. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-21213-4

  1. Dwellings—Remodeling—Illinois—Chicago. 2. urban beautification—Illinois—Chicago. 3. Zotti, Ed—Homes and haunts. I. Title.

  TH4816.Z’.837—dc22 2008009397

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

  In that sprit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;

  however, the story, the experiences, and the words

  are the author’s alone.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To my wife Mary,

  and my children Ryan, Ani, and Andrew,

  without whom I’d have had no story to tell

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks first of all to Charlie Friedlander, a good friend and fine architect, who contributed most of the illustrations. I also acknowledge with gratitude the encouragement and good counsel of those who read the manuscript at various stages, among them Bob Bruegmann, my editor Mark Chait of New American Library, the Chief, Howard Decker, Charlie again, Ann and Jim Kepler, Ruth Knack, Ann LaFarge, my agent Dave Larabell, my wife Mary Lubben, Irene Macauley, Mike Miner and Betsy Nore, Jim Shapiro (especially Jim Shapiro), Sue Sharrock, and Bob Yovovich. If you think this book is a mess now, you should have seen it before. Thanks also to Bruce Bondy, Gabe Burgos, Ned Coe, Tony Czupryna, Diane and James Fitzhugh, Lisa Hoffer, Fran Markwardt, Kendall Mallette, Pat O’Neil, Ned Reece, Jane and John Santogrossi, Carol Sills, Mike Waechter, and the Rev. Jack Wall for their valuable contributions. Finally, my deepest appreciation to the workers too numerous to name who helped rebuild the Barn House, including my friends and relatives who volunteered—they proved craftsmanship isn’t dead, it merely awaits summoning.

  PROLOGUE

  A round noon on what was surely the worst day of his life, my friend Mike got a call from a neighbor telling him that smoke was pouring out of the chimney of his house on the north side of Chicago. It wasn’t the usual sort of smoke. The house was on fire.

  Mike hurried home to find his house surrounded by fire engines, policemen, and curious bystanders. Up on the roof of the front porch a fireman in a black raincoat stepped out of a window and came down a ladder carrying Mike’s ten-month-old daughter, Joanna. Her eyes were rolled up and she was covered with soot. “She’s alive,” the fireman told Mike as he put the baby in an ambulance. “What about the woman who was in there?” Mike asked. His housekeeper, Nina, had been in the house watching Joanna while he and his wife worked. “She’s dead,” a cop said. “We think she’s been murdered.”

  Nina had been beaten and choked and her body submerged in a running bathtub on the second floor of the house. Joanna had been lyi
ng only a few feet away. Apparently the killer then went down to the basement and set a fire in another bathroom. The bathroom was destroyed and most of the house suffered smoke damage.

  A few days later Mike asked several people, including my friend Mary and me, to help him sort through his family’s belongings and make an inventory for the insurance adjusters. I worked in the disheveled basement; Mary went upstairs with Mike’s wife, Betsy. We didn’t speak much that I remember. I didn’t ask Mike whether he and his family planned to stay in the house; probably at that point he didn’t know. In the end they stayed. Mike wrote a column about the experience for the newspaper both of us worked for. Joanna recovered uneventfully.

  Sometime later the police arrested a man in connection with another murder and a rape, and, in the interest of closing the books on Mike’s case, decided the fellow had killed Nina, too. Mike had his doubts, but the police didn’t pursue the matter further. The evidence in the other cases was persuasive enough to earn the man a life sentence; he was never formally charged with Nina’s murder.

  As time went on I saw less of Mike. By the time Mary and I started looking for a house—we were married now, with two kids and a third planned—it had been years since I’d been down his street.

  Mary and I (well, I) wanted to stay in the city. But the prices in the most popular neighborhoods were well beyond our reach, even for fixer-uppers. We started looking farther out, in areas that were still a little rough. One winter’s day Mary drove by a place that struck her, in what presumably was dim light, as promising. We both went back to see it.

  Yowsah, I thought as I peered out the car window. The house was the kind of place that the neighborhood kids probably held their breath and crossed their fingers when walking past. The front porch pillars splayed out and the porch roof seemed on the point of collapse. The steps and railings sagged. The paint, an ugly yellow and brown, was peeling in birch-bark-sized flakes. Some of the window sashes had rotted; pieces hung at odd angles. The roof had a misshapen appearance that bespoke weekend re-modelers with too little patience and too much beer. The entire building was covered with enormous weather-beaten cedar shakes installed by someone whose architectural goals had pretty much been limited to keeping out the rain. Still, it was big and cheap compared to other places we had seen, and sat on a lot that for the city was unusually large. We called the real estate broker and arranged a walk-through.

  That night I looked again at the address on the real estate listing. “You know,” I said to Mary, “this place is two doors up from Mike and Betsy’s. You remember. We went there one time.”

  “I remember,” she said after a moment.

  Two weeks later, in February 1993, we signed a contract to buy the Barn House, as the kids, and then we, called it. This is the story of that house.

  1

  I don’t remember when I decided I wanted to fix up an old house, but it must have occurred at an early age. The fixing-up part I came by naturally. My parents had started renovating their first house (of two) in 1952, a few months after I was born. I spent much of my childhood holding up objects (boards, pipes, screen doors) that my father was working on the other end of. My father was an irascible perfectionist in all things. I shivered in the cold for hours while he fussed with storm windows and chimney caps and asphalt siding. The experience taught me several things: Life is hard. Things take a long time. There is no job that, with advance planning, can’t be made twice as complicated. But also: There’s a right way to do everything.

  I became the family electrician at the age of fourteen, shortly after my parents bought their second house. This was partly by default and partly by design. The design arose from my determination to avoid plaster-mixing duty, the fate of my younger brothers, which I found tedious beyond description. The default part stemmed from the fact that all my father knew about electricity was that you weren’t supposed to connect the black and white wires together. I, on the other hand, had played with electric trains as a child and had owned Remco Thinking Boys’ Toys—men of a certain age will recall these as small cardboard canisters containing bits of plastic and wire that could be assembled into electric motors and telegraphs and such—and on the basis of this rigorous technical training had learned how to wire a three-way switch. In addition, I had a certain rough-and-ready ability to figure things out, although I claim no special gift in this regard.

  The key thing, and you’ll forgive my bragging a bit, was that I was dogged—again, not a unique gift, but an indispensable one for grappling with life’s more intractable tasks, of which home renovation was certainly one. Take the matter of three-way switches. As it turned out, there are actually two ways to wire a three-way switch, the way every electrician knows and another way that I’ve never seen before or since.1 This second way, I discovered one afternoon, had been used to wire the lights in the front hall of my parents’ home. The lights had manifestly worked at one time, but in trying to change the switches (they were the old-fashioned push-button kind, which my parents found unseemly in their updated house), I’d mixed up the wires. Now, examining the grimy interior of the switchbox, I discovered to my alarm that the available wires didn’t lend themselves to any combination that in my limited experience was likely to produce the desired result. It was like a third-year medical student opening up a patient on the operating table and finding a kidney where he expects to see a lung. I had no idea how to get the lights to work.

  Thoroughly confused and a little panicky lest my parents find out, I sat down with a piece of paper and a stubby pencil to draw wiring diagrams in an attempt to parse the matter out. It was a long afternoon, made longer by the fact that I had connected the wires incorrectly at one point, shorting out the switches and rendering them irreparable even if I’d been Thomas Edison. (They were the silent type, which used mercury as a conductor, and in shorting them I had apparently vaporized the mercury.) But by suppertime, by God, I’d figured the thing out.

  “Took you a while,” said my father, as I flicked the lights on and off at last.

  “Eh,” I said, “bastards didn’t use travelers.” My father had no idea what a traveler was, which wasn’t surprising since I myself had learned the term not three hours previously from a book I’d consulted in hopes of clarifying matters. But he was suitably impressed.

  My parents’ second house, in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, had been built in 1890; they purchased it in 1966. It had been reasonably well maintained, but no substantial work had been done on it in the seventy-six years since its construction. The kitchen was tiny and primitive; there was no family room. My parents proposed to remedy these defects by building an addition. They hired a contractor to dig out the basement, pour the foundation, frame the walls, and put on the roof. Most of the interior work we did ourselves. This included replacing the plumbing and much of the wiring, and then plastering the walls.

  My father’s principal assistant and consultant in this work was his friend George, a sheet-metal worker. George and my father had their hands full with the plumbing. One afternoon after hooking up the supply lines for the second-floor bathroom they signaled my mother to open the main valve. Water squirted from every joint—they’d used threaded steel pipe. The bathroom looked like the fountains of Rome. “Jesus Christ, Mare! Shut it off!” my father shouted from the top of the basement stairs. I was in stitches, of course. The old man was less amused.

  Preoccupied as they were, George and my father didn’t have much time to hassle me about the electrical work, which was fine by me. George didn’t know much more about electricity than my father, but he presented me with an electrician’s manual that he thought might help me out. It had been published by Sears, Roebuck—probably, as I think back on it now, in the wake of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. I remember there was something in there about how to wire up your egg incubator. The basic principles were universally applicable, though, and what I couldn’t get from the book I picked up by trial and error.

  There was a great dea
l of entertainment value in this process. I remember once I was connecting overhead lights in the kitchen. It was late in the evening; I was tired; I wanted to finish up and go to bed. My mother was providing assistance, which consisted of throwing switches on the main panel in the basement when instructed.

  I twisted one last wire nut. “Okay, Ma,” I shouted down the stairs. “Switch it on.”

  There was a moment of silence, then a loud pop. A shower of sparks shot out of the ceiling box. (I don’t remember what I had done—probably connected the black and white wires together.)

  Whoa, I thought. Being an electrician is fun.

  It was, too. Three things could happen during a wiring job. First, it worked. You had gloom and powerlessness before; now you had light. This was always cool. Second, you could be killed. The chances of this were small, luckily, but the possibility lent a daredevil edge to the proceedings that you didn’t get from mixing plaster. Third, you had a spectacular failure, which might involve a loud noise, destruction of tools, blackening of surprisingly large areas on exposed metal parts, loss of power to much of the premises, and alarmed expressions on the faces of those nominally in charge, none of which was likely to strike the average teenager, and certainly didn’t strike me, as problematic. (I’d long since gotten over the harrowing uncertainty associated with anomalous three-way switches.)

  Once, while working as a summer helper for an electrical contractor a couple years later, I was given the job of cutting the wires that powered the portable cloth cutters at a factory that made men’s suits. (We were replacing the old wiring with new.) The cutters used “three-phase,” a specialized type of high-voltage power. I was supposed to pull the plug out of the power source in the ceiling, yank the other end of the wire out of a retractor suspended below, then clip off the connector on the end. Pull, yank, clip. Pull, yank, clip. There were dozens of cutters, the work was repetitious, and it was a warm summer’s day. My attention began to wander. Pull, yank, clip. Pull, yank, clip. Yank, clip—pop! There was a blinding flash, a pencil-lead-sized hole appeared in my wire clippers, and all work on the assembly line involving cloth cutters came to an abrupt halt. The foreman ran over and chewed me out. I looked suitably abashed and promised I would never do it again. But I considered it a day well spent.