Lots of construction in my neighborhood. Fences go up, small humble Monopoly houses come down, equipment arrives, and far larger edifices go up in their place. With two nearby projects, to my amazement, the owners of large, attractive new homes have bought the lot next door to theirs and built secondary additions as large as the original home. I'm tempted to knock on the door and demand, "Why....?" But haven't gathered the courage yet.
Anyway, I have an idea as to the answer: because there's a lot of money in the world.
At least the previous fashion — faux Norman mansion — seems to have fallen from favor. Now the style is American Gothic on steroids — someone's idea of a farmhouse, all vertical clapboard and metal roofs, but grown huge, perhaps due to exposure to radiation, like those ants in 1950s horror movies. How they resisted putting in a symbolic patch of real corn in front yard — I would — is a mystery. The corn would pull everything together.
Living in an actual 1905 farmhouse, one built when the surrounding area was an apple orchard, I sometimes envy the owners of these new places. How pristine they must be. How huge. How perfect. Our house has all sorts of idiosyncratic quirks — the bottom of the closet in one bedroom is three feet off the floor. They bedrooms range from modest in size to small. If I don't duck strategically while walking through the basement, I risk smacking my head into a beam. The garage, which once held horses, is not designed for our modern bloated SUVs. My car just fits. That kind of thing.
Thus I welcome reminders that the owners of these new homes have troubles of their own. I watched this particular neo-farm house go up a little south of my place. It seems aesthetic enough, if a little soulless. At least they left themselves a little bit of a front porch; a lot of places don't, I'll never understand why — well, actually, I do understand: because they are never going to sit out there, and if they did, there are no people walking by to greet.
At least the previous fashion — faux Norman mansion — seems to have fallen from favor. Now the style is American Gothic on steroids — someone's idea of a farmhouse, all vertical clapboard and metal roofs, but grown huge, perhaps due to exposure to radiation, like those ants in 1950s horror movies. How they resisted putting in a symbolic patch of real corn in front yard — I would — is a mystery. The corn would pull everything together.
Living in an actual 1905 farmhouse, one built when the surrounding area was an apple orchard, I sometimes envy the owners of these new places. How pristine they must be. How huge. How perfect. Our house has all sorts of idiosyncratic quirks — the bottom of the closet in one bedroom is three feet off the floor. They bedrooms range from modest in size to small. If I don't duck strategically while walking through the basement, I risk smacking my head into a beam. The garage, which once held horses, is not designed for our modern bloated SUVs. My car just fits. That kind of thing.
Thus I welcome reminders that the owners of these new homes have troubles of their own. I watched this particular neo-farm house go up a little south of my place. It seems aesthetic enough, if a little soulless. At least they left themselves a little bit of a front porch; a lot of places don't, I'll never understand why — well, actually, I do understand: because they are never going to sit out there, and if they did, there are no people walking by to greet.
Not quite. I was walking Kitty by there Tuesday night, and notice that the freshly laid steps had already lost a brick, smack in the middle. The construction couldn't have finished a month ago. Two, tops. And look.
This isn't schadenfreude. I hope. I'm not any better or smarter than the owner of this place. Probably a lot less. And when we bought our place, the front steps were also bricks. They also promptly began to fall away, so much that it was dangerous to go in through the front door. We ended up having to put on a new set of wooden steps which, 20 years on, are rotting in all sorts of alarming ways. I'll start to remove a rotten part, so I can patch and paint it, and the next thing I know a section a foot square is gone and I'm making custom molding in the basement. I should probably just rip the entire thing off and put on a new one. But that would be a big job, and if I can patch and delay another year, well, that works for me.
Anyway, I paused to snap a photo. I intended to blur the address of the place, so as not to cast derision on any specific individual. But when I took a look at it, I noticed that the pillar had been unintentionally lined up to block the address. As I always say, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.
I’m a mason. Those brick paver steps never last. Cheap looking too. I’d do bluestone there but of course, it costs more.
ReplyDeletePlumb
Blue stone is beautiful. I just had my front walk replaced, and so wanted to put in slate. But it was $5000 more than concrete, and I sighed and used that.
DeleteConcrete, now there is a monopolistic racket. I could write your next 2 or 3 EGD posts on the topic of home repair. I lament what is happening with housing. I love my old, beautiful, curvy, quirky, house, complete with multiple interior doors and rooms. Certain areas in the house were clearly not built for tall people. You can bash out your brains, if you don't duck a bit at the bottom of the stairs, when going into the basement. In the laundry room tall people must always be aware of the I-beams. The doorway into the kitchen, which sits beneath the staircase to the second floor, is inches shorter than the other interior doorways. No one has hit their head there yet; no chips in the plaster, in the shape of a forehead, there yet.
ReplyDeleteMy sister had a house with a brick front porch & every year I was there with a new tube of landscape cement to reglue a couple of those bricks.
ReplyDeleteThe guys who put in the brick, did a really crappy job, not enough mortar under the bricks at the edge.
We moved from a late 50s ranch to a big two story with a walk out basement over twenty years ago. It was our dream house. Now I am a widow living in this big house, most of which I don’t even use anymore. Driving around some of these suburban neighborhoods you see so many of these huge mansions. I wonder how many kids they have. My parents raised two of us in a small two bedroom ranch and we were happy enough. I still love my house but maybe sometimes smaller is better.
ReplyDeleteUntil recently, I had lived about 25 years in a "raised ranch" in West Lawn. I've noticed over the years that as the Hispanic population grew, fancy brick sidewalks and stairs proliferated along with wrought iron fences, which I attributed to the owners being in the trades or being related to someone in construction or home repair. In my mind, the neighborhood turning "Spanish" improved the the area and increased the value of homes in the neighborhood. And when I wanted to improve my own home, I sought the help of a Mexican neighbor who had worked in construction some years back, but now drove a truck for a living. He was canny enough to never give me a bill, knowing (I surmise) that I would pay him more as un amigo than he dare ask for. Nonetheless, when my sister needed new flooring, I sent him over to Oak Park and he did a great job and was paid commensurately. One thing that suffered during my stay in West Lawn, was my ability to speak Spanish. I hardly ever met any Hispanics there who didn't speak better English than I could ever hope to speak Spanish.
ReplyDeletejohn
Zooming in on the gap in those front steps shows that a number of other bricks look rather higgledy-piggledy as well. Scraping a snow shovel across them after the first snowfall is not going to go smoothly. (I also wonder where rainwater goes when it blows in through that visible gap along the base of the walls.)
ReplyDeleteI am a fellow Senior House owner. This year marks the 150th anniversary of our family home in east Wilmette, and the 50th anniversary of our moving in. Oddities and antiquities abound. We discovered that the house and its detached garage were positioned in 1873 more on the basis of squinting than measurement, with both rotated slightly clockwise relative to the lot, so that one front corner is a foot closer to the street than the other. Brick rather than concrete was the standard of the day for basements and support pillars. Plywood had not been invented yet. Electricity came later, in the form of rod and tube wiring (mostly replaced now); the concept of having grounded outlets would come even later. My mother bought 1920s-era home-repair books at estate sales to learn about some of its more baffling details.
Nevertheless, we have no intention of replacing it, but instead improving it so that no one else may want to replace it either. To date we have replaced three layers of old roof with one modern one (including its first-ever installation of plywood underlay), and given the outside a cheery, detailed color scheme, in place of the murky earth tones that my mother, bless her heart, had chosen several decades before, possibly inspired by old black-and-white photos of the era. Finally, in the early 2000s, a local company did a miraculously discreet job of snaking an air conditioning system through the interior walls, thus ensuring that the house's second century will continue a lot more comfortably than it began.
Our houses, like everything else, do need to evolve over the years for all kinds of reasons: new materials, new technology, changes in lifestyle, etc., and it's tempting to just wipe the slate clean and start over, but it can, if you're up to it, be more interesting and rewarding to live in an old house rather than a new one.
Many years ago now, the man living in a similarly vintage house at the end of our block wrote a comprehensive history of Wilmette in honor of the Bicentennial. More recently, the new owners tore down the house and built a new one.
Maybe it's the road, not your house, considering the age.
DeleteHmmm, that’s a pretty narrow door for a front door. Maybe it’s a filter??
ReplyDeleteA firefighter acquaintance have some alarming numbers regarding fires in newer houses vs those in "legacy" housing. I can't recall exactly but those newer homes get full involvement three times faster, I believe.
ReplyDeleteI rent a small house in Wilmette next to to the main house, which is one of the first built in my immediate area. Sadly, the family did not take the time to get the house onto the historic register. My 95 year old landlord died, and the family is selling the property in the near future. The sturdy brick main house with a stunning glass solarium of a back porch that was added on by family will be razed by developers. Two new multi million dollar homes will be built on the land, and the sweet little cottage I am lucky to call home will be just a memory. Progress!
ReplyDeleteA summer visit to my grandparents in Detroit in the 1970’s included a walk around the block after dinner, and sitting on the huge porch swing on a high porch and waving at neighbors all night. Just rockin’ back and forth, laughing and talking.
ReplyDelete