remodel wasn't an addition after all, it was a saga.
It began in 1995 as we were contemplating an adoption in China (yes, I
know - our boys are from Cambodia - but that's another story). We needed
another bedroom and our L-shaped home lent itself perfectly to second
story addition above the short leg of the L that was our one-story garage.
The new space would be accessed from the second story of our existing
home where we had cleverly placed a wide bookshelf-lined hallway in the
original construction. The custom floor to ceiling bookshelves on one side
were planned to be removable just in case we did a future addition. So far,
so good.
Steve and Al were custom home builders who constructed our original
home. Steve was the guy who would think through a construction detail and
come up with carpentry suggestions. Al rode herd on subcontractors.
Steve complained in later years that Al was always on the phone or running
errands, but in fact they made a pretty good team and did decent work. We
trusted them and wanted them back for our addition, but by the time we
were ready to build, they had split up. Al was working sales for a local
cabinet maker and Steve was working on the North Slope.
We waited for Steve to complete his contract up North and hired him to
build the addition. He estimated that our two new bedrooms, bathroom,
laundry room and playroom would run about $50,000. I thought he was a
little low, but I didn't know how low.
My plans were approved by the Municipality of Anchorage within a couple
weeks of submittal. They made us add monster earthquake bracing to a
few studs in the garage, but other than that, there were no surprises and
we gave our building permit to Steve. It was mid July. The original home
had been constructed in six months, including clearing the land. We
expected our addition to be done in four months or so.
Steve's son, Casey, was working with him. As a teenager, he had helped
with the original construction. The first task was to remove the roofing from
our garage and modify the trusses and plywood roof deck to create a new,
level floor deck. The original plywood decking still looked brand new.
I asked Steve if we needed to remove everything from the garage since the
roof was coming off. He said no, we could leave things as they were, stuff
could be protected. New walls were soon going up and a hole was punched
from the second floor library/hallway to access the new rooms. Plastic was
draped over the entire construction and the effect of having a giant skylight
was pretty nice, even if temporary. Steve carefully removed the tall
bookcases that he had crafted some years before and placed them in the
garage to be re-installed elsewhere at some future date. Since the garage
was 27 feet deep, we could still park our cars inside.
The open web wood trusses of the garage roof, our future floor trusses,
were exposed from the top side once the roof came off. Steve thought we
could preserve the garage's gypsum board ceiling that was attached to the
bottom of those same trusses - but he hadn't counted on Casey. Somehow,
without ever falling completely through or killing himself, Casey managed to
repeatedly misstep and plunge hip-deep, foot between trusses until the
ceiling was thoroughly trashed.
Johnie insisted that the new addition have a seamless appearance, so our
original vertical tongue and groove cedar siding was removed from the
lower walls such that the new second floor siding and the older boards
would feather together as if all had been installed at one time. An exterior
wall light had to be removed, too, to accommodate the siding change out.
We ordered Andersen vinyl cased wood frame windows that would have a
natural wood finish on the inside. With the walls up and exterior plywood
sheathing on, Steve was ready to install the windows, but they were still in
transport. He packed his tools and started another job on Anchorage's in
hillside area. The windows arrived, but by then, Steve was too engaged on
his new project to leave it. Days (weeks?) passed before he eventually
showed up and work commenced again.
Subcontractors arrived for electrical rough-ins, plumbing, and roofing. But
not before we experienced a howling windstorm. It was at this point that, in
the dark of night, that we heard a bang and lights went out. I found a
thrown breaker and tried to reset it, but it shut down with a larger bang and
that was it. Remember that exterior wall light that was removed? The
electrical wires had not been protected and the wind blew bare hot wires
into each other, hence the direct short that caused our outage. When I told
Steve about it, he said, “Hmmm, must have forgotten to tie those off when
we took the light down.”
There was more than wind. There was rain. Our awesome plastic skylight
was still in place and totally incapable of keeping major rain out. Water
poured into our garage to further demolish the foot-punched gypsum ceiling
board, but worse, it poured through cabinets along the north wall where I
had stored years of my photography - mostly 35mm slides. The wet
transparency frames became swollen; transparencies rippled and some
even stuck together. Hundreds (well, lots - I can no longer remember) of
slides I had taken in Oregon, Washington and Alaska were destroyed. I
didn't even try to hold them up to the light to see what was lost - I just threw
them out.
The wind that whistled into the unprotected garage caught the eight foot tall
bookshelves that Steve had stored there, free standing, in front of our
parking spaces. They were no longer weighted with books, so they toppled
and fell onto Johnie's sporty Saab 900 S.
The Andersen windows arrived and were installed, but Steve complained
that they were missing exterior trim. We found the box full of trim under a
plie of lumber he had discarded. There should have been more than
enough trim for all of the windows, but somehow it got used up in a series
of cuts that left us with unusable lengths. More had to be ordered.
A huge wild fire had raged in the Big Lake and Wasilla area north of
Anchorage earlier in the summer, so incidental labor was hard to find that
year as people hustled to rebuild damaged cabins and homes. Never the
less, a siding guy drove up one morning as I was leaving for work. His
special saws and tools were carted on a trailer behind his battered pick-up
and Steve informed us that our vertical cedar siding would be done in a
week or so. I think the siding guy expected an easy jobs.
The south side of our addition was the existing house wall, except that the
garage and addition extended a couple of feet farther on the east side. On
the remaining three sides there were a combination of cantelevered bays
and a recessed bay. In sum there were at lot of corners and a lot of ins and
outs. Not only that, Mr. and Mrs. Jones didn't want the tongue and groove
cedar to abut big clunky corner boards - they wanted continuous cedar
siding with nicely finished corners. It didn't take this guy long to figure out
that quicker, easier money could be made elsewhere. He was probably
pretty steamed by mid-afternoon; he loaded up his equipment and informed
Steve that he would not be back.
There were other subcontractor who were less than impressive: a grumpy
plumber who seemed careless about resting sharp, heavy objects on new
Corian countertops and who forgot to install a floor drain in the new laundry
room comes to mind.
Part of the reason we built a new laundry room within the addition was to
get this area of high humidity under what is called a “warm roof” in Alaska -
a roof on which rigid insulation is placed over a vapor barrier on top of the
roof deck and than covered with a roof covering. Think of it as an
unventilated roofing sandwich which in cold climates is much less
susceptible to the formation of troublesome condensate inside of the
house.
There were some very impressive new single ply roofing membranes on
the market, and that is what I chose for our new roof. Since this was a
mere residence and a job of small scale, I called a respected local roofer
with whom my architectural firm, Kumin Associates, had experience. I told
him what I wanted to do and asked for the exact terminology that would get
us what we wanted without using a seven page commercial specification.
He obliged and in about five lines we had the roofing described: the vapor
barrier, insulation boards, protection boards, and roofing membrane
assembly to be installed over our new plywood roof deck. Simple.
Meanwhile, various subcontractors came and went. I was mildly concerned
that in Steve's absences and Johnie and I both being at work, construction
supervision might be lacking: not a problem if you have experienced and
reliable high quality subcontractors, but a little risky if you are dealing with
grumpy guys in beat up pickup trucks.
Steve's presence became more and more limited. We heard later that the
other house he had stated shortly after ours had gone badly. Remember
the big wind that took down our bookcases and turned out the lights?
Steve's other project was underway at that time with unsecured rigid
insulation on it's roof. The big wind blew roofing insulation boards over
miles of Anchorage's hillside area.
The roofers came and completed our roof. It looked nice, in fact, in looked
great - but it wasn't what I had specified. I called Steve; he was clueless. I
called my friendly roofer and asked him if they just put whatever they felt
like on a roof regardless of the printed instructions. He was stunned and
said he'd find out and call me back, which he did. So here was the story:
Steve calls roofer and says he has a house on Shore Drive, an
addition that needs a roof, and “I guess she wants a torch down.”
The individual taking the order doesn't know that his boss has told me
exactly what to put on my plans or that Steve hasn't a clue what the
language means, and so he writes up what Steve asks for. Steve
never reads the information on the plans to the guy taking the order.
Long and short: we got a different roof, a more old fashioned roof,
but a serviceable one.
But...there was another little glitch in the roof installation. Our roof design
was “low slope,” meaning it looked flat but in fact was pitched to interior
roof drains. Not long after the roofers left, there was a tremendous
downpour. Rain water raced to our interior roof drains. It gurgled and
bubbled and guess what? It poured into our unfinished addition. The roof
drains concentrated buckets of water that poured through the roof as if they
were not drains at all but mere holes. In fact, that's pretty much what they
were: holes. The roofers must have been thinking about Friday night
beers at Hooters when they packed to go because in their haste, they
forgot to tighten the thru-bolts that secured the roof drains.
After work, I would walk through the house and check things out. I
recognized one day that no blocking had been installed for towel bars in the
bathroom and reminded Steve; he seemed surprised that he'd missed it.
Then, another surprise. Two highly agitated Municipality of Anchorage
inspectors arrived on site to shut the work down. Some snitch had reported
unpermitted work going on at 1640 Shore Drive.
Steve pulled the building permit out of his pocket. “Well, I just hadn't
figured out a good place to post it.”
Why the muni's inspectors hadn't bothered to check their records before
sending two guys on a goose chase was probably just as egregious as
Steve's posting failure.
The sheet rockers arrived and they were an amazing group - all members
of an extended family, each with a particular specialty. The first were two
middle aged men who arrived to cut, lay-up, and screw the gypsum board
in place. They were done in a day and left a huge mess of cut gypsum
board ends and dust all over. Their clean up crew arrived the next day;
they hauled out the mess and swept the place bare. Next came the taping
and mudding cousins, two slightly younger men who raced through their
work, and finally a lone texture guy. He was young, clean, neat, quiet and
obviously a perfectionist. It was an amazing performance - kind of like the
Walenda brothers of sheet rocking and a bright spot in the construction
sequence.
Fall arrived. It was by now too cold to backprime and stain the cedar siding
that remained uninstalled but stacked in our yard; Steve had found a new
siding guy but he didn't have anyone to stain the boards. Johnie and I set
up shop in the garage to warm the siding and following our day jobs, we
began our nightly nine to midnight job. After dinner and getting Leslie off to
bed, we back primed every board and stained every front side. Our entire
garage was full of dryng boards.
The new siding guy showed up and regaled us with stories that were funny
-I wish I could remember them exactly, but the essence of the best was
something like this: competing siding installers got into a big fight. One
pulled a gun (remember - this is Alaska) and shot at the other three times.
He missed twice. The surviving wounded became known to builders
around town as “One Hole.”
Still, the siding was a tough install. Steve and Al, when they built the
original house didn't get it quite “square” and as all home builders know, a
foundation out of square creates problems that are magnified as
construction goes on. Why this was not lost on the Egyptians, but has
continued to surprise builders for hundreds of generations since is perhaps
a bigger mystery than the lost construction techniques tackled in “Floating
Stones” by cousin Sam and his co-author.
In any case, our new siding guy got to the point where he just couldn't get
closure. Tongue and groove vertical siding is not forgiving when walls are
not perfectly plumb and true. Johnie and I had already discovered some
years before that our garage walls flared a little from foundation to roof.
You couldn't see it, but when we installed shelving in an alcove, every shelf
as we went up had to be cut a little bigger. Imagine trying to compensate
for the size increase in flared walls with vertical 2 x 6 siding boards - they
don't get wider at the top. Steve knew a wood wizard, and that's how we
met Tim.
As I recall, Tim had a degree in psychology from a major California
university. He was working as a framer while putting himself through
college when an old German craftsman recognized a young man with
talent. Tim became his apprentice and learned the skills of a true master.
Tim made the adjustments for a perfectly beautiful siding installation and
saved us all from huge headaches. Steve's siding guy tried to hire him, but
Tim worked independently.
Tim was a big boned, gregarious young man whose favorite attire seemed
to be canvas shorts, even when temperatures were dipping into the 20s. A
music lover, he typically wore headphones and listened while he worked,
but he also wisely protected his hearing with a big headset. Sometime
after our project was done and Tim's second child was born, he told us that
the baby girl was an extreme screamer. When his school teacher wife went
back to work and Tim stayed home with the baby, her screams registered
something like 110 decibels on his sound metering equipment. He would
stick a bottle in the baby's mouth and the earphones on his head.
We went to our condominium over the Thanksgiving holiday to ski and
have fun. Work continued in Anchorage, but on Saturday, I got a call from
Steve. He and the ceramic tile installer had arrived to tile the tub/shower
enclosure but there wasn't enough tile to complete the job and there was
no matching tile in Anchorage.
Maybe plain off-white mat finish 6 x 6 inch tiles just weren't that popular.
By now we were getting anxious to keep the job moving, so I drove into
Anchorage.
We had nine foot ceilings in the addition and planned for the tile to extend
to the ceiling; the low sidewall that enclosed a whirlpool tub and faced the
bathroom was also to be tiled. I suspect that whoever ordered the tile
ordered just enough for a standard tub/shower enclosure with a lower wall
height and no tub front. Maybe they missed the ceiling height. Maybe they
never saw the plans.
I picked out a complementary white tile with a subtle rippled texture and
hauled boxes of it home. The tile man, meanwhile, was contemplating his
installation and explained to me where he would make his cuts. I didn't like
his proposal. Where were the large scale drawings that I had carefully
drawn to show exactly how the tile was to be placed? Johnie and I had
already lived through replacing a bad tile job when we built the original
house and didn't want a repeat performance. The tile man had never seen
my drawings. I looked at Steve; he looked sheepish. The tile man
suggested that every tile job has one bad cut. And that's when I blew my
top. Steve and the tile guy exchanged looks.
When I was done ranting and found a set of the enlarged tile drawing for
the tile guy, he explained: “I used to work in Sun Valley, and they always
wanted good tile jobs there, but then I came up here to Anchorage and
everyone just wants the work done fast.” He took my drawings, made a
couple of suggestions, and performed a perfectly beautiful installation with
no bad cuts.
Steve would assemble bills on a monthly basis and we paid them directly
while compensating him separately for his supplier or subcontrator markups
and time. It was a reliable method to assure that all bills were paid. At
somepoint the subcontrators just started billilng us directly, presumably on
Steve's instructions, and gradually we came to understand that he had
pretty much abandoned the project except for an occasional appearance,
and that TIm was now Steve's man in charge. I'm not sure if Tim ever got
specific orders from Steve, but somehow, work bumbled slowly along.
Neither TIm nor Steve were around much. December came and on the
24th. day, Chirstmas Eve, a worker show up to install sheet vinyl. We were
replacing older sheet vinyl in the three existing bathrooms as well as
installing it in the new laundry room and bathroom, so there was a fair
amount of work. Johnie and I both left work early that day, so we were
home from noon on. The lone installer worked hard; he seemed to be on
his hands and knees for hours and he perspired profusely; I brought him
cold water and he slugged it down. Then he asked to be paid: $900. He
had a daughter going to school in Idaho and hoped to send her Christmas
Break ticket. He still had a couple more rooms to do, but Johnie wrote a
check and around 4:30 PM he left to get it cashed. I wondered if he would
be back.
We prepared dinner. The tile man reappeared around 8 PM and I
pondered...should I invite him to eat with us? But as he came through the
door, a ragged looking girlfriend came with him and I decided to let them
fend for themselves. Shoot, what a Inn Keeper of the Christmas Tradition I
am! The vinyl installation was completed shortly before Santa Claus'
predicted midnight arrival.
A painter arrived. He started staining the interior wood trim of our Andersen
Windows and right away, I could see that any housewife could do a better
job. His work was uneven and sploching; we called Steve and told him to
let the paint shop owner know that his guy needed help.
Much earlier we had picked out wall paper and paint colors at a local store
that Steve recommended. I think his wife worked there, but I knew the
name and they were a reputable business. They stapled the color samples
we selected into a file folder. When Steve hired a painter for the work, the
painter called for the paint numbers, but he didn't buy the paint there.
Leslie had selected a light citrus yellow for her new bedroom walls. Johnie
came home one day and the room was painted. When I got home later, he
called me to look. He didn't like what he was seeing. It was a dark beyond-
school bus yellow. By then I didn't really remember Leslie's choice.
We looked in our sample book, and sure enough, her selection was much,
much lighter. It wasn't really the painter's fault, because when he called for
the paint number, the paint store gave him the wrong one. The staple
holding our sample in the store's file had pierced the number so a 1 looked
like a 7. We couldn't very well hold the paint store responsible since they
were just doing the guy a favor and didn't even sell the paint to him. We
just paid to have the room repainted. I was gaining a better appreciation of
the safeguards afforded by submittal and review processes used in my
architectural practice in which contractors presented to us for approval the
materials, colors, samples, etc. that will be incorporated into work before
installation.
Except for the Christmas Eve sheet vinyl, very little work got done through
December and January. Johnie called Tim, whom we now trusted to be the
closer for unfinished work, and Tim promised to show up soon. It was
mostly small stuff that remained within the context of the overall remodel,
but we were seven months into the work. Tim would come and go, finish
little bits of work, and then disappear. We could see that when he actually
did anything, it was first class and done quickly. We had grown fond of Tim.
Finally, Johnie announced to me that he was going to have it out with Tim.
He was going to demand the the project be completed and that it be done
on a schedule. I warned Johnie that TIm wasn't just any finish carpenter -
he was and artist and you can't treat artists they way you do accountants.
When I came hope home that night, I asked Johnie how things had gone
with Tim and he had just four words: “Tim is fucking crazy.”
Strange as it may sound, after Johnie's harsh demands, he and Tim
bonded almost like father and son and we all remained friends. I think TIm
may even have called Johnie one Father's Day a year or two later...but
maybe it was just any Sunday. Tim started working again and finished the
job. Steve came by for a final settling of accounts. I wanted to tell him how
he could have avoided some of the problems that our job encountered;
Johnie told me I was wasting my time - and of course, Johnie was right.
Oh...remember Steve's $50,000 guesstimate? It was low. Way, way low.
-END
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