Stucco, Wood and Steel Give Form to a Dream : Dwellings: Soaring costs and a shaky economy stack the deck against custom-building a home. Meet one couple who just might beat the odds.

Jim and Jane Gerochi will soon be eating lunch in their new dining room in Camarillo. And when they do, they will look out to the street through their extra-large dining room window.

The Gerochis like the feeling of space and light, and so adding 2.5 feet of width to the window was important in the dining room design. What they didn’t know was that without special reinforcement the weight of the upstairs of the house threatened to buckle the windowed wall--the span of glass pushed the wooden vertical beams too far apart to support all that weight.

So the Gerochis’ architect and the contractor did the right thing: buried into the wall is a massive, 4-inch-by-4-inch tubular steel arch support that surrounds the window and stands strong against the upstairs weight.

The window, as a result, is a veritable bridge span against gravity. And its slightly enlarged area does give the room a bit more light.

But the cost was anything but slight. The beam added an unforeseen $3,000 to the construction bill.

“We kind of let that one get by,” says a mildly amused Jim Gerochi. “Had we known, we would have done something else.”

Then there was the little matter of the foundation.

The core sample of soil taken from the Gerochis’ building site revealed the presence, unexpectedly, of clay (adjacent home sites are far sandier in composition). Since soil with a high clay content can only withstand weight exerting up to 4,000 pounds per square inch--sandy soil, by comparison, can take up to 7,000 pounds per square inch--the Gerochis’ foundation would need bolstering. What was to have been a plain old poured concrete slab would instead need a matrix of steel reinforcement rods embedded within it.

Add another thousand to the tab.

“But at least we know things are secure,” notes Gerochi, running his shoe along a fine crack already evident in the floor of the dining-room-in-progress. “These cracks are normal. They won’t spread because of the re-bars.”

A COMMANDING VIEW

Welcome to The American Dream Home, this one halfway up a craggy hillside commanding an unbroken view eastward across the steamy Santa Rosa Valley. It is situated on a half acre of treeless property on a winding street that demarcates the outer edge of what’s left to develop in the city of Camarillo.

If you tiptoe across the street, you can see clear across the Oxnard Plain to the ocean and the Channel Islands--but sticker shock on the few available lots here, a mere 50 yards from the Gerochi dining room, may make you run back. The Gerochi lot, occluded from ocean views, was a “mere” $180,000--down from about $300,000 just a few years ago.

Jim and Jane Gerochi, first-generation Americans from the Philippines, stand in a long line of Americans who carry the dream of designing, situating and building their own home. But today--as construction costs soar, employment dwindles and trounced real estate values fail to show improvement let alone stability, they are at the front of a very short line of those willing to forge ahead on such a trying project.

“I think you must take risks,” says Jim Gerochi. “Otherwise you stand still.”

Jim Higgins, of Remax in Camarillo, is a bit more taciturn on the subject.

“It’s something out there,” he says. “Hardly anyone is building, because things are so uncertain. The price of lumber, for example, has doubled in the last six months. That’ll stop you right there.” (More on the Gerochis’ lumber problem later.)

Lumber cost is one of the factors that did stop Mike Potts, a Camarillo dentist, from commencing construction upon a lot he recently purchased “for repo price” in the exclusive Spanish Hills development in Camarillo. “There are just enough things to make me hold back for a while,” he says. “I’m hoping that my current house value is on the upswing, meanwhile, and that’ll help me when it comes time to build. You hold a lot of things in the balance.”

Both Higgins and Potts, however, end their remarks by invoking perhaps the greatest peril in seeking The American Dream Home--whether you do it in good economic times or bad.

“If you can hold onto your marriage while building a house, you’re doing great,” says Potts, laughing.

“If you have any cracks in your marriage,” says Higgins, “building a home will widen them, forever.”

Well, not for Jim and Jane Gerochi.

The dining room window didn’t bring them down; neither did the re-bars; neither did a $6,000 jump in their lumber bill, split with the builder. And now, in a problem still being negotiated, neither are the special roofing tiles, whose flat rectilinear shape doesn’t come close to fitting the architect’s conical roof structure.

Plainly, with little more than two months to go before moving in, the Gerochis have so far managed to avoid turning The Dream into The Nightmare.

HUMOR PREVAILS

There is hardly more compelling evidence than this: these hard-working people--Jim, an electronics engineer at Hughes Aircraft; Jane, a full-time registered nurse at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard--still manage to summon a nervous humor over the fact that they are roughly $50,000 over budget on a project they had hoped to complete for $500,000.

When Jane puts her hand on Jim’s shoulder and says, “He’ll kill himself if we hit $600,000,” they crack up.

But it is also clear: The project must not, under any circumstance, stretch much farther over budget. It would be disastrous. While Jim and Jane make a good living and have reaped profit from a previous home sale, they don’t have deep pockets.

The past year has been an odyssey for the Gerochis.

It has elicited from them all that it takes to seek out this ambitious piece of The Dream: tenacity, creativity, planning, compromise, humor, commitment. For nothing less will do when you are spending all your resources on a project that, square foot for square foot, costs far more than any home already standing and languishing on the market and threatens, at any time, to spin wildly out of control.

GIVING VISITORS SPACE

The Gerochis have three daughters, the youngest only 2 1/2. But it is Jim and Jane’s appetite for frequent family visitors that made “necessary” a house such as this: five bedrooms, 4 1/2 baths, a family room with a fireplace and views of the valley, formal dining room, three-car garage and large open kitchen, all adding up to more than 4,000 square feet of living space.

“We have a lot of relatives right in this area,” says Jim, “and always having people in is the way we and our children enjoy life. The kids, in particular, just love having cousins around. Space is important to our lifestyle.”

The Gerochis came to this task with practice. They built their first house in Camarillo some years ago but sold it, serendipitously, very close to the peak of the market, two years ago. They loved that first custom house, felt proud about its smart one-story, trussed-roof design with movable walls. But it was smaller than they wanted (2,740 square feet) and situated on a huge chunk of land (a full acre that was, as Jim says, “too much to maintain”).

They wanted to reverse the ratio: more house, for relatives and socializing; less property, and thus less maintenance, for more free time.

They bought a spacious three-bedroom tract home in the Mission Oaks section of Camarillo. It worked out fine. But Jane held out the hope that they would still pull together the resources and energy to build one more time, this time their Dream Home.

In fact, she admits to not agreeing to sell their first home without a commitment from Jim that he would be willing at some point to start the process all over again. “I had an option from him,” she quips, smiling.

Shrugging his shoulders, Jim smiles and says: “I think we knew all along that this is what we’d do. In fact, we were looking at this parcel of land off and on for a long time.”

(The couple had a second incentive, too. Much of the profit from their first custom-home sale would be lost to capital gains tax if it were not reinvested in a primary residence of equivalent value within two years. That two-year mark dovetails with the completion of their new house, in September. And it coincides exactly with the end of the lease on their current home, a rental they took in Mission Oaks--having promptly sold the less-expensive tract home upon deciding to build again.)

Things heated up in March of 1992, when they plunked down the money to buy the lot for their dream house. While the actual building of the house is no slam-dunk, it is the easier part of the process. It’s the upfront work--nine months of planning and design and myriad regulatory approvals--that is by far the toughest.

The search for an architect starts things, and is key. “It’s like looking for a doctor,” Jim says. “We needed someone who showed an interest. It’s critical that the guy you get understand your needs.”

Jim, ever the systems-minded engineer, balked at Jane’s desire to hook up with an artistic sort who had successfully designed houses in Ventura County but was not a trained architect. They went instead with Jim’s choice, a licensed architect who would also conduct the engineering work, such as that involving load estimates on the windowed dining room wall.

Engineering would turn out to be critical, too, as Jane’s vision for the interior of the two-story house was clear: open spaces. Fewer walls within would open things up; but fewer walls also meant fewer supports to the second-floor of the house, requiring expensive steel reinforcement of the few walls that did end up in the plans.

And those plans were hard to come by.

The architect, while listening carefully to his clients, drew a house in which the rooms seemed private and separate from one another--too conventional a treatment for Jane.

“I wanted to walk into the house and see right through it, to the mountain out back,” says Jane. “But in the original plans, there was a wall in the way.” The architect stood his ground, ostensibly on design principle.

So Jane brought in an independent designer to work with her on the layout and “relationship” of the rooms. Her ideas were passed along to the architect. The architect at one point called Jim at work to say: “I’m worried that Jane isn’t happy,” Jim recalls.

That turned out to be a critical moment in which Jim set the architect, who would earn a $12,000 fee, on track. “I told him we needed his opinions, and he had them, and that he should always speak up or give a warning on something he felt was bad. But that in the end the decision has to come from us.”

Jim would come home from work at night and review first- and second-floor layouts with Jane. They would eat, play with the kids, put them to bed for the night and resume design talks. Jane would then turn in. And then, at the dining table after midnight, Jim would lay tracing paper over the architect’s drawings and make further changes.

“It got to the point that I was getting up and telling Jane first thing in the morning--’Look, we can put this room over here. It doesn’t need to be here,’ ” Jim says.

It got more complicated.

In these first few months of the design phase, Jim also engaged the help of a builder who would be one of four contractors to bid the job of actually constructing the house according to the architect’s plans. Jim’s builder friend, like Jane’s designer friend, had ideas about how the interior layout was translating to paper and offered up advice that finally would get back to the architect.

“The layout was key,” says Jim. “It’s the critical hump to get over. It’s the space you’ll live in. You have to be careful. Something may look nice on paper, but if you can’t build it, it’s worthless.”

This conceptual phase of configuring the house’s space took nearly four months. Not a single drawing of the outside of the house had yet been made; not a plan was submitted to Camarillo for approval; not a spade of dirt moved on the lot. And yet only five months remained before ground would be broken. And after that, only nine months remained until making the capital gains “deadline” of a September 1993, move-in to the completed house.

Jim chose not to worry about his own job security or the state of his own beleaguered industry, aerospace. And Jane, as part of the deal in undertaking a new house project, returned to nursing work full-time. Things were full-steam ahead, don’t look back.

GIVE AND TAKE

Jim bent to Jane’s wishes on many of the interior problems. That’s because he was prepared to stand his ground, so to speak, on the exterior.

Plainly, Jane wanted an exterior that would be highly individual, spare, even severely modern, so as to set it apart from the crowd. Fearing that it would be aesthetically anomalous and perhaps less dependable on the market should they ever try to sell it, Jim pressed for a more familiar Mediterranean treatment outside.

That’s what the house will be: aggressively modern and airy, in a contemporary casual way, inside, a la Jane; and loosely modern, with Mediterranean flourishes, among them stucco walls and a tile roof, outside, a la Jim.

On this count, Jim is ever the pragmatist--both on house and marriage.

“If you both feel strongly about something,” he says “one has to give. So we set up some division, I would say, on these things.”

Jane makes it even simpler: “I had the interior. He had the exterior. And the landscaping. And the contracting. All that stuff.”

To which Jim quips, laughing: “I didn’t want to spend energy on something I’ll get overruled on anyway.”

But their collaboration would only solidify during the three-month conceptual design phase.

Then, during Months Four and Five, full exterior drawings--called elevations--and roofing plans were configured for the house. These plans, along with interior plans, were then submitted to the city for approval, the first of dozens of regulatory stops along the way.

During this phase, substantial costs having nothing to do with the actual house are incurred--costs that are not present in existing houses up for sale.

An arresting one-time fee assessed to the Gerochis is a per-square-foot charge that is a tribute to the Camarillo public schools: nearly $10,000. This fee overwhelms others that still add up tidily, among them $940 to the Calleguas Municipal Water District, $220 to fire protection facilities, and $560 in flood control acreage assessment fees. And this is to say nothing of the cost of preparing multiple reports required by the city, among them a soils test that typically starts at $1,000.

Joe Martinez, a building and safety inspector for Ventura County who works out of Camarillo City Hall, says wryly: “People sometimes don’t know the can of worms they’re opening when they go decide to build.”

Can of worms or not, the Gerochis sailed through City Hall, obtained financing for construction, and carefully examined the bids of five contractors before deciding to go with the one who had established the relationship early on as free consultant during the design phase.

But even this collaborative builder would have problems, most notably in misreading the architect’s drawings of the two-tiered roof’s support structure.

Simply, he got it wrong and, after building it wrong, insisted it was right. To Jim Gerochi, who was showing up nightly after work to check on the progress of the house, it was looking quite wrong. So the architect built a scale model to show, in 3-D, how the builder had missed the plan’s instruction and, in so doing, created a structural flaw.

The result was bad blood between architect and builder. And, to Jim Gerochi’s consternation, a messed up roof that needed undoing.

Ever the pragmatist, though, Gerochi knew that construction could not be halted because a recalcitrant, prideful builder had committed himself to believing he was right. So he simply asked the builder to redo it. The builder said he would do it “for cost,” or $1,500. Case closed. Tab higher. And the project is kept on schedule.

“Hey, he made an honest mistake,” says Gerochi. “He should have consulted a civil engineer, but didn’t. I really couldn’t allow things to stop.”

Jane, a slight smile opening up, says of her husband: “He’s pretty mellow these days.”

IN THE HOME STRETCH

T-minus 10 weeks and counting until move-in. The roof-tile problem is being debated and may cost the Gerochis an extra $500 or so, which is small change compared to some of the overruns so far.

What started out as a $500,000 project as of last week penciled out at $560,000, possibly $570,000.

Neither Jim nor Jane Gerochi, however, will be thwarted in these final weeks, the home stretch. With luck, the $600,000 barrier won’t even be grazed.

Now, 15 months into the project and rushing to his own deadline, Jim is philosophical about having courted all the risk. “You get burned here, you get burned a little there, but you act,” he says. “The beauty of this country is you can set goals and do it.”

It is 7 p.m. on a Monday night, after work, after supper, before playtime with the kids, at the site of Jim and Jane’s new American Dream Home on Los Coyotes Place, Camarillo, California.

Jim and Jane show palpable pleasure upon walking through the studded rooms, which, in this splintery bare state, already show the openness that will surround their many visitors. Moreover, it is clear that this home, with its hidden steel supports and “missing” interior walls that give way to extensive valley views, will clearly fit the bill Jim Gerochi stated from the outset: “We didn’t want just any house.”

Getting ready

If you plan to build, plan to plan, and plan to have patience.

Here is a basic listing of permits that you’ll need and fees that you’ll pay. The list is by no means complete and, while following Camarillo’s requirements, is a reasonable guide of what to expect in most Ventura County cities (fees vary the most):

* Zoning clearance from Planning Department.

* Fire Department clearance.

* Soil report (two sets).

* Site grading permit.

* Plot plan, with topography and surface draining plan.

* Construction plans (three sets).

* Plans for carports, retaining walls, other structures.

* State energy conservation report, with calculations (two sets).

* Structural calculations (two sets).

* Plumbing, electrical, mechanical plans (two sets).

* Will-serve letter from water purveyor.

* Will-serve letter from public sewer/sanitation agency.

* Encroachment permit from traffic section, Public Works Department.

* State Industrial Safety permit for excavations five feet deep or more.

* Owner-building verification form.

* Certificate of workers’ compensation insurance.

* Architect/engineer’s license numbers and signatures.

* Name and address of construction lending agency.

* Flood control assessment fee ($560).

* School district facilities fee ($2.65 per square foot of house area).

* Fire protection facilities fee ($220).

* Calleguas Municipal Water District confirmation fee ($940).

* Final building and safety fees (variable).