From: xanga@xanga.com
Subject: YOUR NEW HOUSE
Date: May 4, 2006 2:50:19 PM PDT
Reply-To: Al Jones
Al Jones has sent you this message!
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I saw your house. I can say without hesitation it is incredible. My partner, Ron Jones, and I are doing a small job down the street. Met the framers over there and I must say they are friendly and good at what they do; got their cards.

AL JONES

Thank you, Al-- for your good wishes, and even more for your honesty in raising these issues with me. I respect a man who says what he thinks and says it graciously but to the point, as you have.

In a few short paragraphs you have hit on many issues with which my wife and I have wrestled for almost two decades. I'll respond just to the first one now, but I hope to respond to the others in the weeks to come, as time permits.

1. Why would you put so much money in so much house in that neighborhood? ...You have clearly overbuilt for the area... I can only imagine that you intend to reside their until our maker calls you.

Good guess: we never intended to build then sell in a few years and make a profit. We hope to raise our kids and grow old and grey in this home.

But there is more to it than that. Financial profit is not our concern, with this home: spiritual profit, social profit, relational profit, those are what we kept in mind as we designed and as we build.

And you bring up an interesting issue with this question: is it wrong to put "so much money" into a house in a poor neighborhood? Set the resale value aside for now and consider another implication: is there a moral mandate to build a small, poor house in a low-income neighborhood? Or, is there a moral mandate to build a home that is as small as possible, as modest as possible, to just meet one's need for shelter?

A legitimate case might be made for each of these. Obviously I disagree with them.

I see no intrinsic merit in a neighborhood like Bel Air which permits dream homes, versus some sort of curse overshadowing a neighborhood like Watts which requires all homes to be small, cheaply built and uninspiring. Bel Air homes are big and beautiful because such a home will sell well there. Watts housing tends to be small and plain because of those same market forces... and because those who know that neighborhood and can afford to build something different in Watts (or South Central or the Jungle or wherever) lack the inspiration to do so.

Instead they move to the Bel Airs of the world.

That second moral mandate actually appeals to me: it is a permaculture-ish Sarah Susanka mindset. I think Dan Price takes it to its logical extreme, and more power to him for doing so. Let's not spend our money building bigger houses & filling them with more stuff-- let's make the world a better place.

Soon we discover "the world" is awfully big. So big that it becomes an abstract concept. We can't do anything, individually, to improve "the world"-- we're too small, we don't have that kind of power. But we can do something to improve the part of the world where we choose to live.

For reasons I might explain later, my wife and I choose to live in South Central Los Angeles. And we do feel a moral mandate to use what we have and who we are as wisely and effectively as possible to make the world a better place, in the places where we connect with it.

** Who we are: We spent most of our first 15 years in the inner city hiding the fact that we are well-educated and relatively wealthy. (One of these qualities we work hard at, the other was a happy accident. You guess which is which.) We are no longer hiding these truths about ourselves. Sure enough, life in the 'hood is harder because of it. But at least we are being honest about who we are.

** What we have: An inheritance, one I tried to ignore for years. I didn't want to be "rich", to have one more thing (besides my skin color, culture, etc.) separating me from the folks in the 'hood I had come to know and love. Ignoring it was convenient, but bad stewardship. Far better to invest that inheritance in creating a home big enough to welcome guests, host events and parties, offer families a place to stay while they get back on their feet... you can't do that in a hobbit home. But you can do it in an ecologically wise way, another way we are doing our small part to make the world a better place.
(I am also hoping to use that inheritance to create a business that will serve needs and provide jobs at the same time, but after this house takes its share, there's not a whole lot left! But that's a topic for another day...)

If you were white, well-educated, and had a decent sum of money laid up for yourself, where would you live? In what would you invest your money, and your life? How would you raise your kids?

...and why?

Bob and I just found out today that 2 weekends ago, when it was still drizzly-wet, Matthew Berry discovered evidence of an attempted "campfire" at 37th Drive. Inside the house. On the loft-room bare-plywood floor, as a matter of fact!

(the soot-smudge unfortunately blends with the grey mold-blotches-- most of the dark patches you see is actually from being wet too long, not burn marks. Either way, no real damage... but sheesh, if it ain't water, it's fire! What next? No, never mind, I don't want there to be a "next".)

We have known for some time that folks were occasionally sheltering in our property at night. Sometimes curious explorers, sometimes homeless, sometimes drug addicts looking for a safe quiet place to come down off a high. (Sometimes all at once.) Since we began locking up all our tools in the shipping container we haven't had a problem with theft or vandalism, except for a bit of recent & relatively innocuous tagging. Until now I have shrugged and thought to myself, "No harm, no foul."

But when their foolishness threatens to burn my house down, my level of concern leaps from near-zero to maximum.

So I am returning to the tactic I employed back when the first steel was set but the slab not yet poured: urban camping. Honestly, I regret not doing it more often since then: it really is fun. Different. Opportunity to meet neighbors. But the busyness of the holiday season, then the cold weather/other work, then all the rain, discouraged any camping on the jobsite. I lacked the "must" to make me do it.

Well, now it's no longer an appealing option for someday. I must do it, soon and often.

Now accepting offers to join me at my post! Email me and we'll work out what day and time you could make it. I provide the tent, chairs, lighting, hot chocolate (ask anyone who has stayed with me or camped with me about my hot chocolate). I even have an extra sleeping bag. Just bring a warm jacket and a pillow (unless your jacket can be your pillow-- a true camper!). Serious inquiries only.

Here is how we imagined this house might look when we began the project:

Here is how it looks now:

...we are making progress!

Comparing these two views, you can really see some of the changes we have had to make as we went along. Some were required by our plan-checker, some by our structural engineer, some were in response to unpleasant surprises (like the setback switch at the very end of the plan-check process, when we had to shorten the length of the house by 9 feet... so we widened it by 6 feet and gave up the driveway). And some were the result of mistakes during construction, like the placement of two window openings in the block wall-- but we like the "accidental" locations of the windows better than the planned ones! (photos of that will come later)

The most obvious changes are the addition of the loft-room and the framing of the roof over the master bedroom. Here you can see the latter from inside the former:

Here is another outside view of the loft-room, from the upper roof at the rear of the house:

The inside ceiling of the loft-room is going to look a lot nicer than I had imagined, if this is anything to go by:

Speaking of roofs, the garage apartment is getting one too:

One change from the original model that I don't like is the much greater height of the parapet around the flat parts of our roof. But, that's what the plan-checker ordered, and we can live with it. Here's Bob examining it:

I had another bout of "Whoa, this is higher than I expected it would be" when I looked out the loft-room window down at the kids playing in the yard next door:

Oy vey. The metaphorical distance intimidates me more than the physical drop.

Hey, look at that! A roofline! Not a complete one by any means, but you can start to see how the top of this thing is going to look.

Dmitri the Steel Guy (whom I have not yet met): he appears without warning and vanishes like a phantom, leaving FEMA 2 steel in his wake.

Or making steel vanish.

On his last visit he cut away the now-unneeded diagonal crossbrace in the dining room, added pokey-out nose things to the roofline triangles (see top of black steel triangle over Joy's head, above), and finally installed the steel beam for the middle of the second floor.

...crossbrace used to go from here...

...to there...
...it has vanished as if by magic! (loud smoky shrieking powertool magic, I'm sure)

Here's that missing steel beam, now socked nicely into place, and the remaining section of roof joists already atop it:

...from this angle, you can see how it keeps the loft-room from squashing us as we sleep in the master bedroom (which is still in what is known as the pleine aire stage of construction).

Notice Kevin Piero grinning at me? I'm snapping photos left and right as if this was the first earthling habitat ever discovered.

Dmitri's crew should be back soonish to install the steel cross-beams for the unusually heavy sloping roof at the front of the house. Someday I hope to catch Phantom Dmitri on film...

Meanwhile, the framing is coming along better and better. Here's Matthew Berry and Matt Corsinita laying the sheeting for the roof and what will be the floor of the loft-room:

The garage apartment is moving more slowly, but the main roofbeam is now in place:

"Chocolate is the perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power... it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits."
-- Baron Justus von Liebig, German chemist (1803-1873)

You tell 'em, von Liebig. My chocolate stash in the kitchen is an indispensable tool for my freelance writing career. Laptop, printer, pen, paper, DSL, insomnia, lots of good chocolate: you just can't get anywhere in the writing world without them.

Kathryn's trip to Bremerton last week must have upset the cosmic weather destiny somehow. She had a beautiful "sunny" time in the Northwest, and now LA's perpetually sun-smoggy skies look like Seattle's. Northwest-style weather is supposed to carry on all this week and NEXT week as well.

This is worse than a mere inconvenience for Bob Sawyer's crew, or a continued delay in the steel delivery (which ought to come "soon" whatever that means). In the 24-to-36-hour gaps between downpours, we are seeing "efflorescence" in our block walls.

This means two things: possibly too much salt in the mortar mix (??), and the concrete walls, all 20 feet of them, are waterlogged. This might become a big problem. Big enough to delay the completion of the house... by months.

Sneak peek at a future construction detail:

The whole concept of high-thermal-mass construction is to even out the temperature swings between midday and midnight, and even from week to week and month to month, to eliminate as much as possible the need for air conditioning or heating. More on that later when we are actually hanging the styro and stucco.

The concrete block is our high-mass layer. The insulation-layer is OUTSIDE the exterior wall, protecting it from summer heat and winter chill. This means condensation (which is inevitable) forms on the backside of the insulation, and the Tyvek wrap is there to keep the moisture out of the block wall. The inner moisture barrier (painted onto the block) is redundant, to really ensure against mold etc. inside the house.

Mold is bad. Kathryn is allergic to mold, so even "normal" levels of mold are not acceptable for us.

Here's the problem: we are almost to the Tyvek-wrapping stage of construction (which ought to coincide with installing the windows and exterior doorframes). We have already done the inner moisture-barrier bit. But the concrete walls are holding water nearly equal to their own weight!

Concrete block, it turns out, is like a very rigid slow wick, drawing water up into its structure but evaporating it out the same way. The mortar with which we filled it behaves similarly. The sort of efflorescence we're seeing is a symptom that the concrete walls are so saturated with water it is seeping out from the inside, not running down the outside. And leaching out the mineral salts from the concrete at the same time.

If we wrap this soggy sponge in Tyvek and moisture-barrier-paint, it may take decades to dry out properly... in the meantime, the inner paint layer is the least impermeable barrier (though the slab-on-plastic beneath the walls will eventually become more water-permeable over time). That means serious interior mold problems for many many years.

Unless we let the walls dry out.

It took weeks of soaking to get the block so waterlogged.

It will take months of low-humidity wind and warm sunshine to dry them out.

Hmmm.

Hard to build when it's raining on you, but Kevin & crew are doing what they can. Here's a shot of our wet house just before the day's drizzle began:

As soon as the rain starts we pull everyone off the jobsite: can't risk a Workman's Comp claim. Insurance has turned out to be one of the most expensive line items of this venture. We are paying so much for something we hope will NOT happen! Crazy. (sounds like a mob racket, doesn't it?) The constant wet slows us down in other ways too, even when it's not raining and we get a few hours of work in.

Another thing that's delaying us is the steel guys. See how the ceiling joists butt firmly into thin air?

There is supposed to be a steel beam running from the moment frame at the front to a point near the center of the house, to serve as a "spine" for the upper story. It's a month late. We are building around it as much as possible, so that as soon as it arrives, we can put it in right in place.

We are also waiting on them to cut the bay-window supports to the correct size, and to trim away the "temporary" diagonal brace which they welded in place months ago. If they had bolted it on, we could have removed it ourselves... as it is, we'll have to patch the holes once it is gone.

Here's another, closer, glimpse of it:

All this rain can't be good for all this lumber. Though Kevin and Bob reassure me that it's exterior-grade and treated for this sort of abuse. Plywood doesn't cup so much when it's nailed down.

Why am I still concerned?

The second-floor lumber has arrived! Half of it has taken up residence in our kitchen.

The rest of it is outside in the front yard.

It's actually very cool to realize that our house HAS an "outside" now. A very little while ago, it provided no shelter at all.

At least some of our lumber will (I hope) be spared from the rains due soon.

The master bedroom is taking shape, but still quite the "open floor plan"...

Here's a view of our back door from the upstairs garage-apartment:

Turn from this view 180 degrees and stroll to the back of the apartment (er, about six steps) and you can see the Hollywood sign!

...it's that blurry thin white line almost lost in the grey Hollywood Hills in the background, just above the left slope of that gray roof there. It might look like two small smears next to each other, in this photo. But when it's really really clear (perhaps ten days per year), you can make it out pretty well.

This photo doesn't do it justice. Really. It's there, come see for yourself sometime. Right after a rainstorm or during a very strong Santa Ana blow...

The next big "completion" milestone since finishing the slab itself was reached this past week by Kevin Piero and his crew.
(Here's Kevin and Bob Sawyer discussing next steps.)
The exterior block walls are complete, absolutely plumb and level on top (and at the correct height), ready to plop a roof on this baby. When I took these photos on Wednesday morning, they were just finishing the moisture-sealing of the inside (that white paint).

Even the garage/apartment is done, in the same manner:

Now we're just waiting on more steel... as usual...