Life with Iron Giants III: The Toad and Mrs. Caseres

Garbage is expensive.  When you get into home renovation you realize that you may have missed many opportunities to become wealthy, none of which have to do with office work or other similar white-collar professions.   And one of the quickest way to riches is to advertise or pick up work from Craig's List.  Itinerant handymen who drink on the job get $50.00 an hour, skilled tradesmen (and they are mostly men) command much more....even the guy who picked up the backyard full of trash in an old truck and took it to the city dump got $3,000.00 from us and he probably sold most of the metal to a scrap dealer in the bargain.  I don't think a college education and twenty years clawing my way up the corporate ladder ever netted that much in my take-home packet and even though, according to my sister, my income put me in the top 20% of professional women.

As you can see by the 'before' photos our house required a herculean effort to restore it to liveability.  And at every step we were confronted with the decision to go with the Craig's List guy who was cheaper (read less reliable) or pony up money we didn't have for licensed professionals (who also turned out to be unreliable).

All of which wouldn't have been half as bad if we hadn't had to deal with incompetent nincompoops in the building department of City Hall in the bargain. To be fair, building and safety department guys are a crap-shoot.  Some are awfully nice and some are awfully off-their-rocker insane with various versions of Napoleon complexes that they live out fully on unsuspecting innocents like us.  Give a guy authority and a rule book and something snaps in their brain.  I think it's that absolute power corrupts thing in action which tells you that we human beings aren't hard to figure out when it comes right down to it.

Meet the Homeowner-Builder, aka The Easy Mark

Those of us who do not have a contractor doing the work (long story) are called homeowner builders and employees of the building department who can't beat their wives or kick their dogs love us. We aren't like the hardened contractors who come in with their dirt-encrusted boots, meaty hands, and don't mess with me attitude.  We are polite, respectful, and they assume we are as dumb as cows.  So they wait until they see us sidle in the door with our plans and our clean fingernails and they get all the frustrations they've had dealing with ornery (and knowledgeable) professionals out on us.

Enter my nemisis, whom we shall call Toad of Toad Hall.

My husband, Bob, who is a lot more patient than I am, first encountered Toad, or Mr. Toad as he preferred to be called at our local planning department.  We were already frustrated and picking the lint out of our pockets after being cleaned out and defrauded by our contractor, who left the job site fully-paid but half done (much of it discovered later).  The only thing he left us besides shoddy work was his beat-up straw hat which I took great delight in stomping on and then letting the dog poop into.  

Rather than trust another professional we decided to supervise the work ourselves and off we went to the building and construction department to sort out our mess and to get moving again with (hopefully) more trustworthy subcontractors.  It became my job to supervise the work and dealing with the building & safety office was the first order of business.  We'd had a very nice senior building inspector come to our house and give us a list of things that needed to be done again (only better) and we needed some engineering amendments to our plans in order to proceed. Bob had gone over to the building department with our first attempt to address these concerns, met Mr. Toad and come away with another list of things to do before getting a sign-off. Try at any cost to get anyone to help you but the toad, my husband warned me, but sadly fate always seem to intervene.

Mr. Toad was the supervisor at this particular office and I call him this because in memory no other image comes up to supplant the more human version I'm sure he must be.   Though I had never been formally introduced, the moment I entered the office I knew without a doubt to against whom Bob had warned me about.  He was loud.  He was a bumpy grey mound in a blue checked shirt with a mop of Brillcreamed hair. He was officious, and he picked his nose.  

"Next!"

My number came up and I lost the who-get's-the-nice-guy-next-to-him lottery.

I spread the plans out before me, along with my well-prepared notes, engineering amendments, drawings, and the list prepared as requested.

Mr. Toad looked them over and started jabbing at various places.

"What's this?" he asked, peevishly.

"The engineer's amendments as you requested, along with his stamp."

"Oh, no, no, this will not work!"  He was pushing his glasses up his nose and getting ready to dismiss me.

"I'm sorry?" I asked, the blood draining from my face.

"You'll have to go back to the engineer," he said as if this were rather obvious.

Not the guy who was more elusive than Howard Hughes......it had taken two weeks just to get theses amendments signed, sealed and delivered.

"I don't understand..." I said in my friendliest voice.

"He didn't draw a cloud-shape around his call-outs."

"Huh?"  I was honestly confused.

"C-l-o-u-d" he repeated as if I were a six-year old.

"But he's drawn a circle around them," I offered, still not getting it.  

He pulled out a pencil and with it poised over the paper, asked me, "Shall I show you?" and before I could answer, he drew a little curly shaped sample over the circle the engineer had drawn.

Seeing I wasn't getting anywhere on this issue I pushed the list of neatly typed amendments he'd requested Bob put together as an addendum to the plans.  

"What about this?"

"That's not what I asked for either," he said, without further explanation.

"But....."

"Sorry," he said making it clear he was anything but. 

"But what do you want, then?" I suspect my voice was becoming a teeny bit less cooperative.

"I told your husband."

"But this is what you said you wanted...."

"I never said that."  Never mind he didn't offer up the correct instructions.  Just stared at me through his bottle glasses with pursed lips.

And that folks is when the wall finally hit me and to my acute embarrassment  a teeny bit of water begin to leak out of the corner of my eyes, unbidden, unwanted.   I should point out that in all the years I've dealt with difficult clients, bosses who yelled, or the occasional nasty co-workers I have never, never, ever cried in my professional life.  Now I was reduced to this show of shameful blubbering frustration and I could feel the eyes of the contractors sitting behind me boring into my head.  All became silent.

Mr. Toad stared at me for a second, pushed his chair back and said very,very, very loudly,

"Excuse me Mrs. Caseres, but if you can't control yourself this interview is terminated."  

"I....I'm sorry."  The leakage stopped immediately and disappeared as if in reverse-footage. Where it went is a mystery.  

I took a deep breath and collected myself.  

"It's just that we are trying to do everything you asked of us and I need to know what to do now," I said with respectful acquiescence even though part of me wanted to punch his lights out.

"Make the clouds," he said again.  And burped. 

"Okay," I said, "I will take care of this right away." 

Then he saw that I was sufficiently mollified, grovelling as I was in his presence, and then he became strangely jovial.

"You know, Mrs. Caseres, that we are here to make sure you do the work properly so that everything will turn out just right for your new house.  We wouldn't want it falling down in an earthquake, now.  Ha, Ha!"

"Of course, I understand perfectly," I said, and got up, bowing as I left.  

It's the clouds.  They made all the difference as I look back, so thankful that I spent another several days tracking down the engineer and driving across town to have him trace over the circles into cloud shapes while he grumbled about the absurdity of something that wasn't in the code book no matter how hard you looked.

Saved by the clouds.  It's all rather mystical.

 

The House Deferred

A Handyman's Dream.

Who falls for that these days, anyway?  

Us.

It all started with the 300 square foot cottage two doors down from Miss Josie's.  Miss Josie took care of Mimi for a few hours every day and she lived in Eagle Rock, an old  city neighborhood that had only a couple of years before been so  gang-riddled that even affordability wasn't an attractive enough incentive to move in.  

But by the time we started bringing Mimi to Miss Josie's comfortable house the neighborhood had changed dramatically because of the housing insanity that had gripped the city.  The little pre-war houses and woody Craftsman bungalows had been snapped up by flippers and angst-ridden buyers amidst the smell of fresh paint, sawdust and landscaping dirt and the prices they were paying bordered on ridiculous.  Bordered on that is until the falling-down cottage two doors down from Miss Josie went on sale.  The guy living in it had been there since he'd bought it in 1945 for $250.00 and the day the realtor visited was the day he took out his corncob pipe and blessed the amazing stupidity of city folks.   It wasn't much bigger than a garden shed and the porch sagged so much you didn't need any steps to get to the scruffy dirt patch that passed for a lawn.

The real estate company put a fancy-looking post up with a plastic box with a sheet listing the exciting 'details' of this wreck.  Two bedrooms (where?) bath (I was looking in the backyard) and cozy living room (for two standing up)  in a Craftsman cottage with lovely detailing (hmmm, I suppose the sagging porch was a miracle of nature).  Makes a great starter home! All yours for $700,000!  The exclamation mark was really there, I swear.

Whaaat?  I actually laughed out loud (and a bit maniacally) when I read this bit of realtor doo-doo.  I told Bob about it and later he took a look because he didn't believe me.  We swore up and down we'd never, never, never, never pay close to a million dollars for a wormy trailer with a foundation.  It seemed so out of wack.  It seemed very wrong.  But such were the conditions of the real estate market and we were getting restless.

Okay, the itty bitty cottage did sit on the market for this price but we were outgrowing our ancient but charming apartment in Los Feliz and with a young kid we were starting to lust after a backyard.  That plus the fact that I was tired of letting the dog out for 4:00 a.m.  pee and having to make sure he didn't run off down the street never to be seen again.  Since we had both lost our first houses in our respective (and distant) divorces we were basically starting off with virtually no equity, just what we had put away in our savings accounts and by the second year of our marriage we actually had socked away enough for a down payment on and up/down three bed 2 bath palace in a nice neighborhood.  But fate intervened and homeowner status was deferred when we chose to put all our savings into adopting our daughter, knowing full well that it wasn't really much of a choice.  House vs. extraordinary, beautiful, smart, loving human being we actually got to parent.  We'd really won the lottery on that one.

So we waited and as the market spiralled out of control we realized that we had to get creative.

Enter the house on 18th Street.

You already know I had fallen in love the neighborhood and the romance of the sea nearby.  So I was willing to overlook the fact that the house were about to take possession of was, well, a bit of a challenge.

I had heard of packrats but had never actually seen one up close.  Or to be more specific, their work.  Mercifully I was in denial during the final decision process, seeing only in my head the vision of what it could become.  The property was large enough for an addition, maybe up, maybe back, we got lost in the future, sketching out ideas and dreaming of the way things would one day be.  Which, by the way, was supposed to be in three months according to our contractor.

So we gave notice to the tenants (and a letter of recommendation so desperate we were to get them moved out in a timely fashion) and then the day came when we had the key and the house was empty.

Not quite.

The tenants, a whole family of packrats, were not very happy about having to vacate their little home and having gone through the moving process myself, I get now that they figured, screw them (meaning us) and basically took a couple of suitcases worth of clothes, their son's Army uniform, and left the rest for us to deal with.  Since it would be hard to believe what I'm about to tell you I have supplied photographic evidence below (more reliable than the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I promise).  Bob had taken a reconnaissance inspection before me and when we both arrived to 'clean up' he pulled out a box of things he'd bought on the sly so's not to scare the living daylights out of me.

1. 10 boxes of 24 count 100 gallon heavy-duty plastic lawn bags (not enough)

2. 10 pairs of industrial strength elbow length plastic work gloves (suitable for toxic materials)

3. 1 box (10 count) industrial face masks (oxygen tank optional)

4. 4 industrial size brooms

5. 2 pairs of rubber work boots

6. hairnets (?)

7. 4, 100 gallon trash containers (not nearly enough)

8. One case of handy-wipes

9. One case of Gatorade

Photographic evidence (only a small sampling) is below.  Having our own home, it seemed, was not going to be easy.

Work gloves on!

Mr. and Mrs. Caseres' Dream House

Life with Iron Giants: The San Pedro Diary

Welcome to San Pedro.

That's what the blue and white fishing-village style sign says when you reach the end of the 110 Freeway in the southern end of the suburban sprawl that is Los Angeles.  After this point there are no more fast ways to get anywhere unless you count the winding Pacific Coast Highway that snakes across bumpy landslide terrain at the south end of this isolated Peninsula, and even then if you don't slow down you run the risk of taking off like a runaway 747 if you hit one of the speed bumps nature has provided as the edge of the landmass slowly slips toward the ocean and tears the road apart.

Natural beauty is ever present here in sharp contrast to the sprawling commercial enterprise that is the combined Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.  But it's been a tough hoe: Until recently it was nature: 0, rustbelt enthusiasm for the almighty consumer dollar: 100.  The unspoiled preserves of open water, sandy beach and wetlands were as rare and as persevering as a weed pushing its way through the crack in cement.  We all notice the ornery, stubborn bit of green with the same primal respect we show for all things that survive our relentless assault on the land and yet we are rushing, rushing, somewhere so the glimpse is swift.

The moment I first saw the graceful lines of the first of two pale green bridges that span the port waterways I felt an immediate connection to this small city and the road that follows the water's edge, sharp and clean lines of demarcation between us and the giant freighters, fish markets, cruise ships gleaming like opals with their blue flags snapping in the breeze.  This was a place unlike any other in Los Angeles and it felt a million miles apart from  the giant sprawl of comfortable patchwork of housing tracts and convenient shopping malls that had been the map of my life since I'd arrived from Canada in the 80's.

Like most Angelenos I had a distant but proprietary relationship with the Pacific coast and the great ocean beyond its sandy shores. Visits to Santa Monica or the necklace of beach cities that dot the western coastline were always places of retreat and reflection for me.  They were also, for the most part, a cozy wrapping of affluent promise mixed with the bright air and breezy relief of marine layers bringing the sights, smells and sounds that kept me connected with the last elements of raw nature still clinging to the edge of our vast metropolis.  So vast, that in early days I thought nothing of boarding a bus in Silverlake and emerging into the bright sunshine of the Santa Monica Pier in more time that it might have taken me to fly from here to Canada.  And yet it still felt close since the boundaries were simply street names with no other break in the city landscape. There was something lemming-like in my predictable runs to the water, flip-flops, sunscreen, hat and beach bag in hand.

And like most Angelenos, I knew nothing of the small town at the bottom of the city map on a rare east-facing coast except that you could take a fast boat to Catalina from one of its ocean berths. I never ventured into the town, never saw the need.  But when I arrived as a tentative and perspective immigrant to San Pedro, I felt an unexpected rush of familiarity and the exhilarating knowledge that this place was very special.  And in my naivete, I was equally enchanted with the location of the house we were considering.  The street ended within sight of the front yard, dipping down into an open park with the marina and our slice of blue ocean shimmering beyond.  To the left was the tail end of the port, with one or two of the giant cranes lifted up and resting.  While we stood and watched the sun dip closer to the mountains across San Pedro Bay, a boat glided by in the distance, big, muscular, loaded with goods to feed, clothe and grow the nation.  It moved by in absolute silence, or so it seemed at the time, and then it was gone.

Because Vancouver is one of my favorite cities in the world, this vista with sea, snow-capped mountains, ships, sails, and arching bridges was the connection I felt I'd lost when I moved here to the arid desert and brown hills.   The house was a broken-down salt box on a patch of weedy land.  But the wooden fence running along the length of the shady alley was graffiti free, as was the neighborhood, and the solidly working-class homes mixed with a few older cottages and sea captain beauties, were all well tended and quiet.  A hanging garden of wisteria threaded its way along a neighbor's porch and the mauve blooms were reminiscent of another, slower time.

My strongest memory of that first day was the brightness of the light and the faint smell of fish on the air, a smell so subtle that now I cannot detect it anymore, except on foggy mornings. There was a constant breeze coming up off the water and it fought for dominance with the arid downdraft from Palos Verdes, a fog-shrouded rocky mound to the west that rose above the town in green splendor.

My time to leave a place I'd come to see as a vast wilderness of cool, chic, urbane, mysterious and aloof sensibility had finally arrived.  I knew at once that I didn't have to go home to Canada to finally put down roots again.

And in the distance, the iron giants loomed.  Our street, so bright and breezy, was bare of trees, a sea of concrete medians.  And we were about to chop down the very tree that kept our lane shady to make way for construction.

Next: Four Walls, a Roof and Political Bedfellows