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Misadventures in Urban Rehabbing

Ed Zotti, the longtime editor of the Straight Dope, has a new book on the house he and his wife bought to rehab in 1993. They're almost finished. Here's an excerpt.

By Ed Zotti

August 28, 2008

“The house defeats people,” our friend Mike told us when we came to visit that frosty morning in 1993 following our first walk-through. As we eventually discovered, the house a few doors down from from his, near Irving Park and Ashland, lent itself to cheery pronouncements of this sort. But the vague sense of foreboding they prompted didn’t stop us from buying it. As we started in on the rehab we found a door with the paint half stripped off, a handful of fancy glass doorknobs in a box in the basement—tokens of projects bravely if a bit cluelessly begun (normally one took the door down first), then abandoned once the magnitude of the task sank in. The house’s history, to the extent we could piece it together, reinforced the impression of doomed struggle. We learned of great plans come to nothing, and hopes that had gone unfulfilled.

The people we bought the house from, an older couple, had gotten married shortly before buying the house. As a young man he’d been a trombonist with Gene Krupa, the legendary jazz drummer; when they bought the house he was employed by a printer. She had a job with an insurance company. They’d intended to renovate the house, but her company went bankrupt soon after they completed the purchase and his income didn’t permit any but emergency repairs—which began, moreover, even before they moved in, when the furnace failed and a radiator cracked during a bitterly cold December, filling the back of the house with three inches of ice. After they replaced the furnace and disconnected the radiator, they continued to entertain hopes of doing some of the simpler restoration work; at one point they’d had some balusters made to replace those missing from the elegant front staircase. But he’d never worked up the nerve to install them, and from what I could tell (I found them in a stack on the landing) they wouldn’t have fit anyway. No further progress had been made. My wife, Mary, glanced at the wife during a lull in the closing at the lawyer’s office. She was crying.

The owners prior to the older couple had been Carol and Paul Sills, among other things one of the founders of Second City. The Sillses had had some notion of fixing the house up too, a task made more urgent by the guy from whom they’d bought it, who’d pulled down the plaster in the living and dining rooms and gotten as far as hanging drywall, but not taping or painting it, before halting the project and selling the house in the wake of getting divorced. The Sillses had finished the job and in addition had undertaken numerous repairs—Carol told me the list ran to nine single-spaced pages. The house needed more than repairs, though; it needed to be rebuilt, which was beyond their means. After a few years they relocated to California and rented the house—the neighbors remembered those days as the time the hippies lived there. It was the Sillses, I learned, who’d removed the house’s fancy doorknobs in preparation for a never-completed refinishing project. The ones I found, plus a few others elsewhere on the premises, were apparently just the leftovers. Someone had stolen the rest.

Virtually everyone who purchases an old house is certain the previous occupants were idiots who performed critical repairs with duct tape, vandalized desirable features during harebrained remodelings, and generally let the place go to hell. I myself entertained such thoughts once or twice. At these times I reminded myself that my predecessors had done enough right to keep the place from getting torn down, which, judging from the condition of some Chicago neighborhoods, where you half expected to see tumbleweeds, was a notable achievement. Still, come on. When the Great Building Inspector called the ex-owners of the Barn House before the bar of judgment, his first question was going to be: So, guys. Whose bright idea was the beam?

The beam was the first thing you noticed when you walked into the kitchen at the rear of the house. It was a massive unfinished timber extending across the ceiling, perhaps 15 feet long and eight inches wide by a foot deep, with heavy wooden posts supporting it on either end. It gave the kitchen the appearance of a hunting lodge. To judge from the patch marks on the floor, someone had removed a load-bearing wall in the kitchen and replaced it with the beam.

Idiosyncratic construction methods always invited suspicion, however. A few weeks after taking possession we asked a structural engineer named Bob to inspect the house. Bob was a large, soft-spoken man with the unflappable air one prizes in an engineer. He regarded the beam with the expression of mild interest you see in a doctor who’s just found a suspicious lump. He made a few measurements and asked to be taken to the basement. The basement was divided into a warren of small, scrofulous rooms such as might have been used to torture prisoners in some ghastly Balkan republic. After some exploration Bob found the room he wanted, took more measurements, then waved his hands in midair.

“There’s nothing here,” he said.

He had me there. But I didn’t follow him—you could find nothing lots of places.

Bob pointed to a spot on the basement ceiling. One of the posts in the kitchen, he explained, came down immediately above. If it were to be of any use as a structural support, there needed to be a corresponding post in the basement to carry the weight of the building down to the ground. No such post had been provided. All that was keeping the top of the house from collapsing into the basement was the kitchen floor planking.

“Oh,” I said. It was always the way. A suburban design faux pas might mean that the previous owners had bequeathed you purple toilet fixtures; in a city house you had to solve the problem with structural steel. I added another item to what was already a long list: fix beam.

The house bore traces of many such dubious improvements. The owner prior to the Sills family, we learned, had been the proprietor of an auto repair shop. He’d poured a large concrete slab in the backyard to build a garage for his business. How he expected to get this venture past the zoning inspectors was unknown, but then again it was Chicago—with a few pesetas in the right pockets he could probably have gotten permission to build a rendering plant. Unfortunately for him, though no doubt to the relief of the neighbors, he’d had to sell the house before he could bring this scheme to fruition. But the slab was still there, with bolts still sticking up around the perimeter for walls that had never been built.

We decided, mainly because all the other owners we heard from denied responsibility, that the auto repair guy had also installed the second-floor deck that now hung off the back of the house. Whoever had done it had nailed the supports to the roof of the one-story addition immediately below without sealing up the holes. On the scale of inadvisable things to do in a house, this was one notch below checking for gas leaks with a match. By the time we saw it, water had been leaking in for the better part of 15 years. A corner of the ceiling had fallen in and the floor below was sagging—the framing had rotted. The back of the house stank of mildew.

Still, the auto repair man had done one other thing that, while it hardly redeemed him, at least inclined me to cut him some slack. One day, we learned, he’d noticed a brass memorial star for a fallen U.S. serviceman in a sidewalk that was being torn up some blocks away. Sgt. Carl T—, U.S. Marine, had died in Okinawa in 1945. The auto repair man must have felt it was his duty to preserve the sergeant’s memorial and had made it his business to do so, setting the star neatly into the concrete in his backyard—one of the odder sights in a house crammed with oddities. I thought I knew what the auto repair man had been up to. No doubt patriotism and so on had been part of it. But in the back of his mind I suspected he had nurtured the thought: Here is a link to the past, lost but for me.

Anyone who fixes up an old house understands that impulse. It wasn’t that some famous person had necessarily lived there. Mostly it was just the opposite: 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 Middle East: 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?   

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