Will Remodel for Donuts
When calculating what it cost them to add onto their 1924 Azusa home, the Clark family tallied some unusual items:
Salvage yard roof tiles, $402.70.
Yard sale doors, $235.
Junk food, $158.20.
“We had to buy a lot of doughnuts,” explained Patrick Clark, who designed and built a new family room and master suite with his wife, Lynette, their three children, Patrick’s two brothers, three nephews, one niece, two neighbors and a friend from Boy Scouts--among others.
“When you’re feeding a lot of people,” Lynette added, “[food] becomes a part of your budget.”
The need for the addition to the two-bedroom, one-bathroom stone house grew after the couple started their family 16 years ago. Before that, Lynette said, “We had plenty of room.”
As the family grew, the couple eventually moved their bed into a patio that was built in the 1940s and later enclosed. From the beginning, the roof was trouble, having been built around a large tree that had died long before the Clarks bought the house, leaving a large patched area that never did keep out the rain.
“They had buckets in there all the time,” said daughter Michelle, 13.
“We put tar on the roof lots of times,” said son Tristan, also 13.
The Clarks could have muddled along in the home had not the 1994 Northridge earthquake shaken the patio roof beyond repair. They had to do something.
“We liked the house too much to move,” said Lynette, a teacher. Plus, the neighborhood was home. Patrick had grown up there, walking past the stone house on his way to school, and he has three brothers living nearby.
But adding onto the house was not a straightforward task. While in some houses exterior walls are removed without regret, the Clark family couldn’t bear the thought of losing any of their stone walls.
According to legend and the original building plans, the first owner, a Mr. Kim, worked in flood control and had hand-picked the stones from nearby rivers.
“Every rock is unique,” said Patrick, a systems analyst, noting the rows of tan, green and black-tinged rocks set vertically above windows, doors and the arch spanning the front porch.
Favorite Rocks
In the living room, Michelle pointed to her favorite rocks. “You know, you can see pictures in them. Like that one could be a president or something. There’s a snake. That one’s a panda.”
Gesturing toward a stone centered above a doorway, Michelle noted the human-like form in the rock’s minerals: “I sort of pretend it’s a guardian of the house or something.”
Also, adding a second story was prohibitive for the Clarks because the family’s budget was a slim $20,000, and second-story additions typically cost more per square foot than ground-floor rooms.
Finally, during a stint on jury duty, Patrick sketched out a design for the addition that placed it to the right of the house, roughly where the patio sat, attached to the house only by a doorway into the kitchen.
On a pad of graph paper, he drew the plot plan and the elevations from the four directions. Hiring an architect was never a serious consideration.
Next was a trip to the assessor’s office in Pasadena to see if the patio room had a permit. It did not, which meant that the family would need not only a permit for the addition but a special variance because of the proximity to the property line. Letters to neighbors unearthed no protests.
According to Patrick and Lynette, doing the addition themselves was a bit scary. “It’s a lot of money and it’ll completely change the way you live your life,” Patrick said. On the other hand, he felt confident he could do the job, having helped other people fix up their homes, as well as maintaining his own house.
The job started July 4, 1994, with demolition of the old, leaky patio. “The kids really liked that part,” Patrick recalled.
Throughout the process, they were helped by their neighbor, Lyle Moritz, a general contractor. And although they paid him nearly $5,000 for various services--including help with the demolition and new foundation--he served mostly as their “mentor.”
“If I had a problem, I’d flag him down in the middle of the street on his way to work,” Lynette said. “If we had a question. . . .”
” . . . he had an answer,” Patrick said.
Once the demolition was completed and the rubbish hauled away, the family and Moritz laid down the new foundation. Then the Clarks left on a scheduled three-week vacation, a welcome break from their labors and from the stresses of having Lynette and Patrick camped out in the living room.
Back from vacation and refreshed, Patrick was nevertheless daunted by the work that lay ahead. He recalled thinking, when he and his helpers were raising the first wall, “I don’t know if we can do this.”
But the walls went up and the roof went on. Son Tristan, who was 10 at the time, has fond memories of pounding plywood onto the roof with his cousin and brother. “Me, Jim and Brian were up there hammering as fast as they could cut ‘em.”
Unfortunately, that plywood had to be removed when a city building inspector pointed out that only full sheets of plywood on the roof would pass muster, not the cut-up patchwork of plywood the family had installed.
Lynette, who won’t pound a hammer (“I don’t do nails”), can nevertheless use one, as she proved while ripping out the “millions” of nails the kids had pounded in. When she was done, new plywood was installed properly.
In the Clarks’ experience, city building inspectors, which are the bane of some professional builders, turned out to be a rich source of helpful advice.
“The inspectors were great,” Patrick said. One told him how to install a sheer wall and another patiently explained how hot water for a bathroom must originate from the water heater and not be routed through the kitchen sink plumbing.
Used Materials
To fit the project into the budget, the family looked for used materials, including roof tiles for the addition to match those on the house. Although new tiles would have been $1.50 each, used tiles were 50 cents each. “We went to junk yards to pick up old tiles,” Patrick explained.
Lynette begged to differ. “Let’s not say ‘we’ on this one. I went to junk yards,” she said.
However, one yard sale “find”--a set of French doors--proved a waste of money when the couple discovered that it would cost more to have framing for the doors built than it would cost to purchase new doors, complete with framing, at Home Depot.
For the final touch, neighbor and mason Art Ramirez was hired to do the stonework, using stones that included ones the family hand-picked at a quarry. “The kids looked so cute with their little gloves,” Lynette recalled.
Bit by bit, creating memory after video-taped memory, the addition progressed until Thanksgiving of that year, when the couple were able to start sleeping in their new bedroom. By Christmas the new bathroom was complete.
In hindsight, the family would have done things differently. “Like have someone else do it,” Patrick kidded. “No, it was fun. Well, 80% of it was fun.”
Still, he would have added thick sills below the addition’s windows to match those of the house. “We just didn’t think of it.” And he would have left out the small window in the family room that faces back toward the driveway and bouncing basketballs.
And he would have hung the bathroom door on the opposite side of its frame so that he and Lynette could forego their remarkable view of the toilet from the bed. Some day, he’ll switch it around.
But in its current state, the addition is a winner. Tristan said there’s more room for cousins to spend the night. Michelle thinks the new glass shower “looks like something from outer space.” The couple count their blessing when they can’t hear the living room TV from the family room. And, of course, their bedroom is now quiet, warm and dry.
Said Patrick, “It’s made our life so much better.”
Kathy Price-Robinson is a freelance writer who has written about remodeling for eight years. She can be reached at: KathyPrice@aol.com
Project: Add 700-square-foot addition-family room, master bedroom and master bath onto 1924 vintage stone house in Azusa.
Designer-builder: Patrick and Lynette Clark, et al.
Building time: Six months
Cost: $24,243
