March 28, 2006 Synopsis

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Stitch-up

We have been surrounded by new construction in our neighborhood for the last six months. Being absorbed in the world of construction has been consuming. Our once quiet property has two new homes beside it; right now, I can hear a nearby backhoe digging the footings for a new foundation down the road. We have become familiar with the amount of work and time that is required to build a house from the ground up. When our house arrived, David and I thought of the set day as the end of the road. In actuality, the house was delivered in a bare bones state. If I passed by a home that was in the stage that our house was delivered, I would imagine that the builder had another 5 months of full-time work in order to complete it. We were hopelessly unrealistic about how long it would take us to complete the house… doing most of the work ourselves after work and during a time of year when the sun sets early. And since our quiet town is experiencing a mini-boom at present, we’ve had some opportunity to observe less successful builders stagnate with their projects. In the end, we received our certificate of occupancy one year and two days from the day that escrow closed on the land purchase.

The very first moment I walked into our house, I put a 4” nail through my foot. I think that I am now distant enough from last years’ events that I can see that it was a fitting entrance. It was very frustrating to have our house set on a Friday. The house was set on the foundation with shims over the weekend and we had to walk around the modules gingerly until they were fully set and bolted the following week. They were very unstable where they sat and there were also gaps between the modules. We were very worried about Walter falling through the cracks and hoped that there wasn’t an earthquake or a wildfire during this vulnerable time. I was very eager to get to work on the house since I had been dreading the stitch-up period for many months. The gaps between the modules turned out to be strangely fortunate since we had no other way to remove the metal roofing that was shipped loose in the modules. It was like a ship in a bottle; the pieces were so long that there was no way to get the pieces out the door without bending them. We removed the pieces in tandem; David and his mother’s partner (who is also named David) fed the pieces to me outside and when there was enough distance between David and me to support the weight of one piece, “Grandpa” David dropped down the front door to help on the other side.

Here's an image of our floor plan, the pink lines indicate where the roofing was laid.

Removing the metal roofing consumed an entire day and that was the moment I started to fear that my stitch-up schedule was moot. In fact, I looked at an old spreadsheet recently and have to shake my head that I thought that I would have the interior painted by the end of that Sunday. It still isn’t done.

My attitude of desperation, imagining that we didn’t have time or options was very unproductive… such as dreading the stitch-up and wanting that period to be over with as fast as possible. I feel that we were bungling, not taking the time to figure out the little problems but most of all, not taking care of ourselves and allowing stress to utterly overwhelm our lives. We ate very poorly and sometimes would go without eating just so we could complete the current task. Dealing with such an incredible amount of stress really forced me to re-examine my reaction to everyday pressure and I am trying to be more easygoing about life in general.

We spent so much time at Home Depot that we became very familiar to its employees… and especially the roach-coach vendor outside the store. Every outing to Home Depot took precious time away from the house and our trips were especially filled with anxiety. Worse yet, was when we needed to make trips to the Burbank IKEA for forgotten handles and replacement parts (which I think must be the most hectic and hostile IKEA on planet Earth). On average, we have made two to four trips per month and accidentally assimilated the IKEA lifestyle. Walter and I even eat some pretty strange fish products and various Swedish foods. I made traditional Swedish split pea soup for Christmas, decorated our tree with IKEA ornaments. I really had no idea I was doing all of this; I had no control over these Swedish impulses.

We received a lot of help from our friends Jon and Vitri, who once resided in the guesthouse that sits 1” from our property line. We’ve known Jon since college; he tunes and repairs Gamelan (Indonesian percussion instruments) as a side job and is consequentially very handy with woodworking and tools. His wife is an architect from Jakarta, and she was helpful when we were trying to decide issues such as where to place the handles on the kitchen cabinets. They worked for pennies and always maintained that they were helping us for selfish reasons… being that they were helping us move in our new house so that they could move into our old place. They put in the entire cork flooring, assembled many of the IKEA wardrobes and cabinets, painted a couple of rooms, completed countless other tasks around the house and on top of everything, helped us move. Walter, David and I enjoyed spending time with them. They were always very calm and they taught Walter the names of our different fans (Whisper-Cool, Honeywell and Lasko); we had many fans running since it was at the end of summer. Just yesterday Walter and I were in Home Depot and he said to me, “Mommy, that fan is named Honeywell” and he was right!

My mother-in-law, Janet, and her partner, David, were invaluable to us during the stitch-up. They drove every weekend from San Dimas to help out, for months. Janet is a fantastic cook and every week she brought casseroles and our favorite dishes to the house because she knew we didn’t have time to make food. Then she watched Walter while David, David and I worked unfettered until it grew dark. They insisted always that they would help the following weekend even though they were tired. My dad also stayed for a while to help us out just before he left for Northern California to build a house of his own. We also had another day when our friends, David’s sister and her husband (who is also named David!) came to help in full force. David’s father was also a great moral support and we welcomed his company, compliments and diversion during times when he was able to pry himself from his busy concert and teaching schedule.

We gradually grew less frantic and became more realistic about our capabilities until we completed the barest minimum in order to earn our certificate of occupancy and convert our loan to a mortgage in November.

I hope that by being honest about our experiences this blog has been useful. When we first planned to build a home, the process seemed shrouded. Nobody wanted to freely give information about the day-to-day experience of building a home. We heard many pessimists who told us “careful that you don’t get divorced!” If building a home was so terrible, I wanted to know why it was so terrible and what was involved. Anyway, I hope our experiences have been insightful to those who are interested in taking a similar road.

Foundation Contractor

The day finally came when we could no longer hope that the contractor would either finish the work or pay us what he owed us for not completing the work. I got so worked up talking and thinking about him that I am afraid that I sounded like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction whenever he was mentioned... “and I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furrrious anger…!” We retracted an earlier complaint that we filed with the Contractor’s State License Board because his wife gave us a sob story about having trouble making their mortgage. I don’t know if I mentioned this in the blog but he bounced a check to the concrete supplier for our second pour and the concrete company inevitably placed a lien on our property; we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to close our loan because of the lien. Fortunately, he paid the concrete company and four months later, when the remaining work was still unresolved and we couldn’t imagine this guy having ever completed a job to satisfaction, we knew we had to re-file the complaint.

I was not prepared for the quick response from the License Board, they were clearly very unhappy with this contractor. We suspected that there may have been multiple complaints against him and David also did a great job of documenting our complaint. We received a call from the License Board just a few days after sending the papers from this nice woman who asked us, “Is this amount all that you want? Where do you want him to send the check?” I do not know what she told him, but whatever it was, it worked. We almost felt as though we were sending the Mafia after him.

We recently discovered that the architect who referred us to him just filed a $40,000 claim against his bond and has also filed a complaint with the license board.

Pictures of our current progress

Front View of the house; it is raining right now.

We still have paint, hardware and supplies lying around since we're still using them.

South side of the patio.

This is the north elevation. The evaporative cooler is our bane; we have ideas of how we can cover it up. For the time, I appreciate that it's energy efficient.

The yellow color is what I'm painting over and the tan is the natural color of the Hardi-plank. Yes, I know it's looks like a mess...

It's time consuming to paint siding by hand!

Entry

We like how spacious our house feels.

Family Room

Obviously, this is the kitchen.

When we retouch the wall, we'll also bring the dark gray to the other side of the wall.

Our laundry room. This is where we want to put in an aluminum roll-down door.

This will be a "living room" when we furnish it. Can you see the boxes of cork planks in the backgroud?

Master bathroom

Master bedroom

Music room

Walter's room

This is our view from the supposed living room.

Remaining Tasks

There are several remaining jobs left on the house but fortunately, we are hiring others to complete many of them. We just cannot see ourselves taking on any more large projects. The rain slowed us down considerably over the last months. We’re starting to return to our normal life of friends, food, music and family and many of the remaining jobs we just are not capable enough to complete. I will continue to update regularly.

For now I’ll skip the narrative and list our remaining items:

Contractor jobs:

• Deck railing
• Plaster over the patio
• Seal the patio
• Foundation vents
• Solar installation (hopefully)
• Fence and gates
• Gravel driveway
• Drywall patching
• Electric (some of the outlets and switches do not work)
• Paint the front door
• Install aluminum pull-down door for the laundry room
• Level and adjust all doors

Our remaining jobs:

• Etch the front door and the sidelight
• Finish/repair roofing and edge metal
• Repaint the exterior and paint touch-up
• Drive nails/spackle holes on the Hardi-board
• Spackle numerous drywall checking cracks
• Repaint the interior
• Install one more exterior lamp
• Install kitchen backsplash
• Install bathroom backsplash
• Clean and seal bathroom slate
• Install gutters and rain chain
• Repair kitchen cork flooring
• Install kitchen toe-kick
• Replace range vent ductwork
• A bit of miscellaneous hardware
• Seal cork floors with polyurethane substitute
• Replace some baseboards
• Furnish the house

As you can see there are many more remaining items. The paint has always been an issue since we have completed things piecemeal. Also, the newly primed drywall soaked up a lot more paint that we anticipated; it also behaves a little differently since it is a no-VOC paint. As a result, it is spotty. There was also the issue of not being able to complete the paint while the drywall was being stitched between the module marriage lines. Either from procrastinating the trip to Culver City for more paint, or moving things around in order to finish, the final coat fell by the wayside in the last months.

We have an ongoing leak from our brand-new LG dishwasher that in turn, ruined the flooring in the kitchen. We also had to replace an adjacent cabinet door that delaminated because of escaping steam. We haven’t been able to finish the cabinet toe-kicks because we need to lightly mop up the floor and cabinets after the dishes dry. Another issue in the kitchen was with the range vent. The ceiling hole is not at all centered with the vent itself. We tried using double galvanized elbows in order to make up for the distance but it just wouldn’t fit. The cheap dryer vent-esque ducting will have to stay there until we have time to address that issue.

Our dark gray painted interior wall really took a beating while we had many supplies and fixtures piled near it and against it. We also need to continue the color on the right side. David recently ripped off the baseboard so we can replace it with stainless steel or something that is lighter gray and also fix the slight bowing when the drywall was seamed together.

Before we moved we gave away/donated a lot of our older IKEA furniture. Our house is Spartan in the meantime but we do have a grand plan of making our own plywood furniture soon. We could furnish our house with more IKEA furniture, but I think we have already exceeded the acceptable IKEA content in our home. We bought a router and we are very eager to start on our plans. I hope we can fabricate all of our furniture with the exception of dining chairs.

We finally got most of the siding up. Goshdarnit, we were so sick of seeing the words “Tyvek” on the side of the house. Actually, there is one or two more courses that need to be in and I think “Tyvek” can still be seen. We originally painted the entire back module yellow and even though we didn’t like it, we went with it, since we needed to have it painted any color for the appraiser. Then I thought it was best to wait for the rest of the siding to go up before I changed the color. I started repainting a few days ago and now it is my current project and will have to wait until the rain clears up on Thursday.

fabprefab Zone & Modernism

It was very interesting to hear the discussion at CA Boom 3 over the weekend. There was some dialogue about the same type of difficulties that we’ve experienced such as fair appraisals, modular/manufactured terminology confusion and financing. We managed to make things work, even though it was a difficult process and none of the battles that we were involved in last year matter now that we are living in our home and nobody cares or knows that it was trucked in from Utah.

Our project was truly born from this online community and it was great to meet Gregory La Vardera, Michael Sylvester and Marshall Mayer in person. David and I are so proud of our house and we consider ourselves fortunate that Greg designed our home. Judging from the attendance at the fabprefab zone, it seemed to me that interest in modern prefab has exploded in just two years since we first started. When I was waiting to introduce myself to Marshall, there was a sweet elderly couple talking to him at the mkd booth and they were armed with all sorts of prefab brochures, not at all the typical stereotype of a modernist.

For us, having a modern home has already had a tremendous impact on our everyday lives and we are starting to feel that our work was worthwhile. The design of our house provides great cross-ventilation and natural light. We crank open the windows nearly every day and we never have stale air in the house. In fact, we took off the screens and it is feels very close to being outside; we’ll have to put them back on when the mosquitoes come back. We have a whole new attitude about spiders and insects and many times they wander into the house and we have fun identifying them and then take them outside. We are already aware that yellow jackets and most bees die off in the winter, which is something I never paid attention to before we moved. We get to watch the moon cross the sky through the different windows in the house and sometimes we get to watch it while we go to sleep. We are also so much more aware of the seasons and are very eager for the warm weather to return. In our old house, seasonal changes were nearly unnoticeable. Also, now that we have in-floor heat, ecological paint and cork flooring I no longer have asthmatic symptoms. I haven’t used an inhaler since the dust settled during construction. In addition, I felt as though we were in a restorative environment during flu season. Anyway, these are some of the many things we appreciate about our new home.

Landscaping

We are very lucky that we found our property at all, much less bought it for the bargain price of 90K. In return, I hope we can make the best use of the land that we do have. Much of what I had planned earlier has changed now that we live on the property. I am sure that a lot of the final execution will depend on how we see the property change in the seasons. We took out the pond and instead are planning a marsh area. We had our backhoe guy dig out the area. Executing that will take a lot of work and that is something we will be working on probably in the fall. The area is technically in the actual floodway and receives very little sun, there are strange mushrooms growing there and most of the surface water drains there. I hope we can house some nesting blackbirds and frogs in the future. We will be landscaping it with native riparian plants like cattails, sedge, rush and barberries. The Theodore Payne Foundation has been a great resource for learning about and acquiring native plants.

We’re planning an organic vegetable garden and started our plants on our warm floor early this year. I’ve held off from transplanting them since we have a serious gopher problem near the vegetable garden. I found a pellet from a Great Horned Owl that has been haunting our property. It was a nearly intact pocket gopher. So I will probably let nature play out and it the meantime, continue to spread fox urine in the gopher holes (yes, fox urine).

We also built an herb planter from the remains of the tiki bar slab. Actually, I think I am typing at the exact spot where it once stood! We also used the chipped eucalyptus trimmings (when our trees were trimmed) for mulch.

Here lies the tiki bar.

We’ve also considered moving the south fence to the actual property line. The fence is shy 10’ on the longest border and someday it would be nice to reclaim our space.

The property line is near the peppertree in this photo. The wash is just beyond the rocks.

I’ve completed most of the major cleanup work and planted the grapes, sage, toyon, yarrow, irises and matilija poppies. Natives are bought very small relative to their mature size so everything is very bare still. We will also include a few non-natives like flax and millet to keep things looking tidier in the summer. I the meantime, I will have to wait to continue the landscaping after the fence is in place. As usual, one job holds up another and we’re about to enter another construction period soon.