What Follows Is a Tale Based on No Foundation
What a rush of memories Carol Tice’s article (“Couples Transforms ‘Hovel’ Into ‘Great House” Remodeler’s Diary, Feb. 4) brought! We, too, turned a “hovel” into a “great house,” spending endless evenings and weekends struggling with multiple layers of wallpaper, pondering inexplicable holes in floors and ceilings, and little by little over the years, while raising three children, fixed and mended and repaired and despaired of ever finishing our 1902 handyman special.
But finish we did. At least we considered our work done. “We know the foundation still needs work,” Tice wrote. That’s what we said too. Well, someday, when we can afford it, when we can find a good contractor.
In the meantime, the house looks finished, and that’s what counts, isn’t it? Just listen to the compliments we’re getting. “Love the wallpaper,” “Beautiful woodwork!” “Who did your stenciling? You did? Wow!”
Never mind that under all this restored beauty, down under in the dark grubby depths where appearance doesn’t count, the house still sits on spindly-looking stilts with some kind of funny gray stuff stuck to them. What is that gray stuff anyway? Some kind of wood-eating fungus maybe? Or maybe it’s just clumps of dried-up cement or something. Surely it’s nothing to worry about.
And anyway, those stilts aren’t the real foundation. What will we call them . . . props? The real foundation is the perimeter wall of bricks. Well, sure, a lot of the mortar has crumbled away. OK, most of the mortar. But not one of those bricks is out of place. And besides, they’re pretty much covered by a neat skirt of that old tongue-and-groove beaded redwood stuff, freshly painted. Gives the whole place a really solid, substantial look.
We probably should have done something about the foundation, I guess. Have a structural engineer look at it, but what’s the rush? The house has been here for 85 years. That should tell you something. They really knew how to build ‘em back then. Aren’t those old bricks neat? And that tongue and groove! Neat-o!
And then October, 1987, rolled around. Literally. Rolled and rumbled and crashed. Oct. 1, 1987, the day of the 6.1. I know, I know, later they downgraded it to a 5.9, but they did so without my permission. That was my earthquake, and I say it was a 6.1. At least.
Chunks of our genuine plaster ceilings smashed onto our genuine plank floors. Old cast iron pipes shifted and broke. The whole house leapt off its foundation and landed an inch to the west. A corner of the living room dropped. Rafters twisted and snapped. The laundry room roof separated. In seconds, our great home went right back to being a hovel.
The city building inspector pronounced our house safe to occupy, sort of. Try to stay out of the back half, he said. That’s not very stable. And that’s also where the kitchen and bathroom are. But without water and gas, what good are a kitchen and bathroom?
No plumber would consider fixing the gas and water lines, not at any price. Not when it meant working under anything that looked as heavy and unstable as our house, “Gimme a call when you get the foundation fixed,” was the standard response to our pleas.
It was up to us, the seasoned do-it-yourselfers, to fix the plumbing. Either that or continue to trek to a nearby relative’s house to use the bathroom and watch as our bank account dwindled under the strain of eating out.
We donned our grubbies and put our affairs in order. Armed with flexible pipes, miles of duct tape and bits of plastic cut from old bleach bottles, we crawled under the house to do our own repairs, aware that at any moment some tiny unforeseen aftershock was all it would take to leave us crushed under tons of antique lumber.
But it didn’t, and our repairs worked. After two months of primitive living, we had gas and water again, at least temporarily. We took a moment to congratulate ourselves and then faced the fact that we had done all we could do. The rest was beyond us. The do-it-yourselfers needed help.
It took us five months just to get financing for the major repair work. No, we didn’t have quake insurance. And no, we didn’t qualify for FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) assistance. No one we know did. Seven months later, we had a contractor. Nine months later, the actual work started, and three months after that the major stuff--new foundation, new roof, new ceilings, new plumbing--was done. Our finances were exhausted and so were we.
Toward the end of the year, we welcomed the sight of our lawn and gardens disappearing under piles of building materials, and watched with no regret as the remains of the plaster ceilings were torn down and replaced with plasterboard, and gladly slept under the stars when the roof was off.
Almost exactly a year, a nightmare year, had passed. A year of fending off the army of “developers” who generously offered to buy our property for “land value,” of following complex government bureaucracy trails that said this way to the money and only led to dead ends, of dealing with mountains of paper in the form of building permits, loan applications, contracts and subcontracts, notices of this and waivers of that, and all the while hiding the true extent of the damage from the boys with the dreaded “Condemned--Unsafe to Occupy” stickers.
But at last, the house was finished. Really finished this time. Sort of.
Except for minor details. Like wall patching (again) and floor refinishing (again). We optimistically set ourselves a completion deadline of Christmas 1988, then revised it to August 1989, then decided to just forget about deadline. It is now two years and five months since our Big One.
Our next door neighbor wonders when, if ever, our house will be finished. So do we. It is our neighbor’s turn to be smug, but he refrains.
His is an old house too, yet his house survived the quake unscathed, without so much as a hairline crack in the walls. Why? Because unlike our house, his was solidly bolted to a reinforced cement foundation. Not nearly as pretty as our bricks and beading, but oh so solid!
The next house up the street, a mirror image of ours--same age, same foundation, same earthquake--is no more. The foundation crumbled, the house dropped to the ground with buckled floors, broken walls, a tilted roof. Damaged beyond repair. A bulldozer finished it off, and now a massive gray stucco “thing” with rooftop air-conditioning units sits in its place.
The lesson is clear. The fact that the house jiggles when the washer goes into its spin cycle, or a truck passes by, or anyone heavier than a breadbox runs through the living room may seem quaint, another aspect of an old home’s charm, but it’s not. It’s a serious warning.
A good foundation is not a trivial detail to be passed over lightly. We came very close to losing everything, and all because a foundation didn’t seem very important.
