foam core reality

I often feel like a hypocrite writing this mostly happy little blog about all of the wonderful experiences that we've had since we began building Doug's fantasy house. Now I know full well that I have been a participant in this venture, and in spite of the fact that I never ever thought it was realistic, it is as much my house as it is his and so it is as much my problem as it is his. It always has been.

I know that Doug believes with all of his heart that he wanted to do this for me and for us, or so he says, but the truth is I didn't want to do it this way for a number of really important and practical reasons. It has always made me feel uncomfortable. The fancy things in this house are inappropriate for our income level, especially considering the fact that Doug's insistence that we do it ourselves has enormously reduced both of our incomes. I've been absolutely miserable not being able to work the kinds of gigs I used to do. I loved my life before this house fiasco began. I feel like I've been sentenced to hard labor for three years - so far.

When we were deciding what to do way back in the fall of 2005, I wanted to have the insurance company do the normal thing, which would be to restore our house - that's what they were going to do. They said it would take six months. Our house was nearly completely paid for so we could have used a home equity loan to cover the additional costs of bringing the basement up to code and to get our addition finished in a minimal and affordable kind of way. And by hiring professionals to do the work, however sloppy that might have ended up being, as least we could get back on track as quickly as possible. It seemed to me to be the most reasonable way to deal with the aftermath of the fire.

We had a very nice life together before the fire. We both had gigs doing what we loved most - playing nearly every night and travelling. But we disagreed about what should be done about the house. I felt very uneasy about Doug's plan. I didn't want my old house to go away - I wanted it to be repaired, which the insurance company expected to do. His plan involved a lot of work for him, I mean us. I had just finished painting the exterior of our house a couple of months before the fire. It was not as much work as the first time I did it, but it was still pretty exhausting. I wasn't in the mood to do more, and why should I be? I'd rather live in an apartment than paint another house. I knew from years of experience how Doug's projects never seemed to get finished for one reason or another. And I knew that ultimately Doug would never be satisfied with anyone else's work.

I found myself not really trusting that it would work out with the two builders we attempted to use and I'm quite unhappy to say that I was right. I didn't enjoy thinking we were headed for financial disaster as we planned, well mostly I planned, this absurdly lavish house full of all kinds of ridiculous and amazing things that neither of us had ever had or needed before.

Doug, not surprisingly, was completely overwhelmed on a daily basis by all of the unnecessary complexities of being tour manager, a job we had mutually decided would be unwise for him to do again considering everything else we were suddenly having to deal with. It was impossible to talk sense into him when he made the decision after that, while I was away for several months, to be tour manager again after all.

So you can probably imagine how it went whenever I tried to suggest a more conservative plan for our house while we were out on the road that fall. He was so stressed out once again by all of his various duties that he wasn't able to seriously consider that it might be better in this particular situation to be practical and unambitious for once. He basically told me that what I wanted was not an option. "That's just how it is - we have no other choice." Nice.

So I gave up and went along with him and his fancy ideas. I hated myself for feeling so negative about "our" dream house. On the other hand I didn't feel like it was appropriate for us to have a dream house. Just a plain old house would have been fine with me. One that we could live in sooner rather than later.

I've always been completely happy living in a hotel or a cruise ship cabin. But since it seemed that I apparently had no idea that we could afford all this, or even how little time it would take, I decided that I would attempt to disguise my feelings of negativity as much as I possibly could and just devote myself to this lovely project known as Foam Core Fantasy until it drives itself into the ground. And I guess that is what this little blog is all about.

Photo of our burned out house

This is what our house has looked like for an entire year and a half after the fire. Pretty depressing, huh? Obviously we aren't living there since it is CONDEMNED. I feel really bad for the neighbors in addition to myself and I hope we can get it into a more reasonable looking condition as soon as possible.

Delay Number One: What Should We Do Now?

It took the insurance company forever to figure out whether our settlement would be based on tearing down the house and replacing it with a new one, or repairing what remained. Either of these options would have taken only about six months to complete, and the insurance company would have taken care of everything.

I will not elaborate on the discussions and planning processes that caused us to head in our current direction, but the insurance company's decision to restore our house is what led us (one more willingly than the other) to decide to do something a little different with the insurance settlement.

There would have been some complicated code issues with our old basement that had nothing to do with the fire settlement and they would need to be taken care of first (out of our own pockets) if we chose to go the normal route. It would have been expensive and not financially feasible for us at the time. I suggested a home equity loan, but Doug had other things in mind.

Doug decided that we should tear down the old house and make our addition into a smaller, nicer house and that we really had no other reasonable choice. Hmm. So okay..... I did actually like the idea of a smaller house. After living with the actual structure of the addition plus our house all of those years, I had begun to realize that the whole thing was really going to be much too big for us unless we opened up a boarding house or something.

But at the same time I also didn’t like the idea of tearing down a house that dates back to the 1870s. I think old houses are special and should be saved whenever possible. I really liked the idea of ending up with a fully restored version of my house. It was kind of crappy and run down before, so a refurbishment would have been great, and so much better than it had been. That would have been enough for me. They even said I could change the floor plan around a little bit. And it would be finished in about 6 months. ONLY SIX MONTHS. I really missed my old house and was so sad that it had burned down and I really just wanted to move back into it as soon as possible.

In spite of all this, I reluctantly agreed to go along with Doug’s crazy new idea. But I remained very unhappy about the circumstances which caused this decision to need to be made.

THE FIRE

THE TURNING POINT (THE BURNING POINT)

Our house was completely gutted by a very destructive fire on February 11, 2005. The inside of our house where we actually lived was declared a total loss. We were devastated. We lost all of our personal possessions, furniture, and clothing. Fortunately the fire did not go into the addition so our musical equipment survived.

Doug found the photo shown above online. According to the newspaper, it took 85 firefighters 40 minutes to get the fire under control. I don't think there were 85 firefighters there, but I was in no shape to do a head count. They were definitely there for at least an hour and probably closer to two.

This is what the inside of our house looked like. Everything was demolished. The plaster all came off of the walls. The bedroom area was completely gutted although the basic structure was still there. In the kitchen, dining room and bathroom everything was heat and smoke damaged. The whole house was completely soaked with water and the ashes were a foot and a half deep in places. The stuff that didn't burn all the way was lying in a mishmash on the floor in every room. There was a bunch of melted plastic all over the place too. It was disgusting.

This wooden dresser didn't burn all of the way through, but the clothes inside were still damaged beyond repair. Throughout the house, the wooden furniture remained structurally somewhat recognizeable, but all of the particle board cabinets and bookcases completely disintegrated and their contents were burned beyond recognition for the most part.

If you are truly dying to read about all of the gory details you may do so here.