If You Build It

I passed the truck on my walk. It said “Throne King” in bright red metallic paint on the side of a cylindrical body. I appreciate a clever business name. This one was for septic or some other kind of indoor plumbing services that we all need, but never want to admit. A half hour later when I had just about reached my driveway I watched the Throne King pull slowly onto our street. It stopped two houses down. The house I’ve come to think of as Joan Rivers: in a constant state of remodeling.

We didn’t know the couple who lived there very well or at all, really. Their kids had grown and moved out. The husband, Gerry, was retired. Every now and then we’d wave to each other from the ends of our driveways, putting out the trash or leaf barrels. Some neighbors are always at a distance. That’s perfectly fine. In some instances, that’s the preferred dynamic, especially in New England—known for accusing a neighbor of witch craft just because you were bored and it was a really long winter. We learned from Tracy, our neighbor right next door, that Gerry had a number of health issues. A few times I saw a medical van parked out front. He was receiving dialysis at home.

Gerry passed away in the fall of 2021. His wife put the house on the market in the spring of 2022 and it sold in what seemed like .29 seconds. Our neighborhood is leafy and quiet; it was built up in the late-1800s with many of the homes retaining their Victorian and Georgian styles. It’s close to an elementary school (if that kind of thing matters to you. For us it did not) and to the commuter rail that runs into Boston (if that kind of thing matters to you. For us it did). The people who own here tend to be in it for the long haul. They raise families. They winter in Florida. They leave reluctantly and late in life.

Gerry’s house is a modest three-story Classic Colonial-style built in the early-1900s. Judging from the exterior, it was probably not updated very much after the kids had grown and left. We believed Gerry and his wife to be about the same age as our own parents. This is a generation that wants to spend their money being taken care of at all-inclusive resorts or on senior cruise excursions and not turning Jennifer’s old bedroom into a meditation/quilting room. Fair enough. If the planet is still habitable by the time I reach my seventies, I’m going to want to be out doing things in it and not dicking around over an estimate for a tiled backsplash in the kitchen.

Within a week of the “SOLD” sign coming off the lawn trucks began arriving. We suspected that there was a fair amount of things to attend to inside: new wiring, new floors, probably a gutted bathroom or two. There were a couple of weeks where it appeared the cellar was in play. Piles of bricks lay scattered on the front lawn along with big mounds of dirt. The first visible thing that took shape was, of course, a low wooden fence.

“When we bought our house Gerry asked us if we were going to put up a fence,” said Tracy. She and I were chatting by our cars, gossiping about the new owners whom I had yet to meet. Tracy and her husband had found out were a young couple with two boys in grade school.

“I told Gerry of course not,” continued Tracy. “He said, ‘we’ll be friends for life.’” She shook her head. I wasn’t necessarily sold on the whole “good fences make good neighbors” philosophy, either. Maybe I give you the benefit of the doubt that you won’t be a trash bag human and you do the same and we can both handle this level of civility without a pre-fabricated barricade between us?

By the middle of the summer they began work on the exterior. The entire lot is less than one-eighth of an acre. A driveway runs alongside and behind the house to a small garage. There was a little bit of lawn on the west side of the house. In a couple of days that turned into approximately no lawn. Everything that was not “house” was ripped up and removed. They took out a pair of lovely tall shrubs before they did anything else. I felt the way Tracy did looking over at the pointless wooden fence—a sour mixture of disappointment and mild disgust.

“The new people hate nature,” I said. My partner sighed.

“Maybe they are getting it ready to plant more things, did you think of that?”

“No and doubtful. I can tell.”

“What are you, the Lorax?”

“Aren’t you late for a Zoom?”

Once the yard had been laid to waste, the true and horrible scope of their renovation plans came to light. A masonry company arrived. For the next two months, sometimes six days a week, the neighborhood was filled with the jaw-grinding-ear-splitting-brain-bleeding sounds of cutting stone. First the driveway went in, followed by wide stone steps leading to a side door, and then there was edging and finishing work on those areas. But the biggest undertaking was saved for most of the back yard: a large, wide, two-tiered patio with a curved wall at one end, and, the crowning jewel, a built-in BBQ. It was a backyard feature more appropriate for a home in the Hollywood hills or at a Colorado ski resort than for the sliver of precious land in a drowsy neighborhood of a Boston suburb. Read the room, new owners. Where do you think you are?

“That thing is a blight,” I said. I was standing at our kitchen window looking across Tracy’s yard into the barren stonescape of what used to be a sweet bit of green.

“You’re obsessed,” replied my partner.

“Someone should be! It’s an abomination. The kids are supposed to play on that?”

“Maybe they’re not into yardwork,” he shrugged.

Sometimes I would catch Gerry out mowing when he felt well enough to do yard work. My father did the below the bare minimum of house upkeep, but mowing was one thing he never shirked. I suspected it was more about the performance of suburban home ownership than it was about actually enjoying the labor. Gerry struck me as someone who appreciated the bit of nature he called his own; he mowed with relish and pride. I struggled to come up with the same sentiments about the patio. I was already cheering on the inevitable moss and weeds that would find their way into its cracks.  

Gradually the stone masons packed up their trucks and left. Blissful serenity returned to the street, which lasted about 48 hours. Giant trucks with hoses rolled up to blast in fresh insulation. Another crew arrived to strip the exterior and reside it; while they worked others set up shop to put on a new roof. A landscaping company pulled up. They rolled out thick pallets of sod on the landing strip of side lawn as well as in the squat patches of dirt in the front.

Fall came and went. We expected to see a moving company or an SUV packed with boxes, carry over type items. Surely the family would want to spend the holidays in their new home? The trucks and vans parked out front most days were marked with general contractor logos. Even with finishing work going on, you could still live in the space, right?

It’s the end of January. Every day there is at least some kind of utility-looking vehicle parked in front of the house. My the window of my study I can see guys going in and out with hand-held tools, carrying ladders, running extension cords. There is still no sign of anyone taking up residence.

“What can there be possibly left to do in that house?” I said the other day. “Heated bathroom floors? A high-tech pizza oven? Maybe they’re building a state of the art panic room.”

“Only you would go from pizza oven to panic room.”

And then I remembered the Winchester Mystery House. It’s a mansion in San Jose, California. I toured it decades ago with my friend Julie who lives not far from there. The house belonged to Sarah Winchester, the widow of the firearms magnate William Winchester. The couple lived in Connecticut until William’s death in 1881. Sarah moved west and purchased an eight room farmhouse in San Jose. From 1886 until her death in 1922, Sarah worked nearly continuously renovating, building, and expanding the house. The mansion ballooned to 24,000 square feet and included 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, and 160 rooms. Part of the lore surrounding the house is that Sarah was told by a psychic that she must build continuously to appease the souls of those murdered by her husband’s firearm dealings. As such, the house is a treasure trove of gorgeous materials—glass from Germany and Austria, furnishings from Asia, art from France--and is overrun with beautiful oddities such as a fireplace framed by two windows that feature Shakespearean quotes, doors that lead to nowhere, a staircase built exclusively to accommodate Sarah’s tiny stature with 44 steps that rose only ten feet.

Sarah Winchester had the resources and stamina and motivation (whether it came from supernatural forces or as a result of white privilege, we’ll never know) to keep renovating. Her life-long devotion to remodeling, redesigning, reworking is my personal eleventh circle of hell. I prefer to settle in and stave off change as long as possible. Maybe these new owners are similarly obsessed with their build—revising their dream home in real time. Maybe they dread the day there will be no more contractor vans and the electrical symphony of power tools will finally come to an end. Maybe it’s a mystery.

---

Lens Zen!

In keeping with the architectural theme of this piece, I’m sharing this photo from my trip to Chicago in the fall. There are a few different types of architectural tours—walking, “hidden” architecture of the Loop (downtown area), boat cruise on the river. You should take all of them. But if you can’t just walk up and down Michigan Avenue for a while and you’ll see plenty.

A century of design, style, and history marches along Michigan Avenue. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography