All that Remains....

When they finished tearing down our house and finished hauling it all away we both felt kind of empty and yet also very relieved. It had been difficult to see our house in such a state of disrepair for well over a year.

But now we can finally begin to move on.

This is when they were beginning to fill in the former basement.

Our house is smaller but our front yard is bigger.

They left a big trench in front of the house so that Doug could do the parging and then apply the tar and plastic sheeting all the way down the front foundation wall. Then he added a drainage system. Thanks to all of this we should never have a wet basement.

This new, smaller version of our house does not look so good just yet. It is rather unattractive and a little sad without any windows in the front.
Maybe we should plant some grass now.

A Few More Videos

In case you just can't get enough of these, here are a few more. Certain people might find these entertaining, or even interesting. And if you don't watch them, you'll never know what you've missed!

Here's one taken from pretty close in:



Doesn't this look like a giant chicken?
Watch him pecking away at our house.

this one even has some inane dialog

Some Entertaining House Demolition Videos

These are fun to watch I guess, especially the second one.

PULLING DOWN THE BASEMENT WALL

THROWING CHUNKS OF CEMENT AROUND

VIDEOS!!! WATCH OUR HOUSE BEING DEMOLISHED

As we were watching our house being torn apart I suddenly decided that it was time to learn how to work the video thing on my camera. It wasn't that hard and I wish I'd checked it out sooner. It definitely made watching the permanent destruction of my house more "fun" as in: Well my house is being destroyed today but at least I 've learned how to make videos on my camera now. Great. After I made a few, Doug figured out how to do videos on his camera too, so I had a lot to choose from.

Loading Debris Into the Truck

Smashing Up the House Some More

House Demolition Photos

PHOTOS OF OUR HOUSE BEING BULLDOZED on AUGUST 14th

Here goes....


A small crowd gathered to watch.


Smashing up the front


Smashing up the roof


And that's all that's left of it for today

Another Sad Day....

Today is the day that our house is going away forever

I took some final pictures of our house in its current decrepit condition because it is our last chance to see the house we lived in for our entire marriage up until the fire. So this is it, I guess.

Goodbye House...


Goodbye Bedroom and Living Room.....


Goodbye Melted Kitchen....


Goodbye Green Bathroom.....


And this is the last bouquet that I'll
ever get from my beautiful snowball bush....




GOODBYE OLD HOUSE.........

Installing the Upstairs Wall

We finally installed the foam core panels into the remaining open front wall surface on the second floor. This was the trickiest thing we've had to do so far. The panels had to be cut and assembled with extreme accuracy and in a very definite order for it all to work. It did work, but it felt kind of like climbing a cliff - scary, and once you start you have to keep going no matter what. And those damn panels are HEAVY!

Here is the center top gable section just before it was pushed into place. This was taken on a cell phone and the lighting wasn't so great. We put in a lot of really late nights working on this - because it was cooler at night. The horizontal thing going across the middle of the picture is a collar tie.



Here I am exhibiting my Herculean strength, pushing that center panel into place. Besides the weight, there was the also the friction of the splines. But the wet glue made a nice lubricant, so pushing it up wasn't as hard as it might have been. hmmm.... Then I had to hold it in place while Doug nailed it with his big strong nail gun.


And now I am inserting the splines into the bottom piece, this time after it was installed because that was an easier way to assemble it on this piece. There is going to be a window in the middle part so we'll just leave that section open for now.

Okay, now I really need a vacation. Scotland here we come!

Preparing the Foam Core Panels for Installation

Here is the melting device that we use to remove the foam so that we can insert the panels over the awaiting 2x6s. It is a heating element that is sized to fit in the foam section between the two layers of OSB. The foam needs to be taken down to a certain level so that the 2x6s will fit exactly between the OSB layers. So instead of cutting the foam out, we are melting it out. The cross piece on the heating element adjusts to accomodate the exact depth of the 2x6.



Somebody commented that our house smells like a crystal meth lab after we've been melting foam. So I want to know how would they even know that? Notice the happy expression accompanying the lack of gas mask.
BRAIN DAMAGE ALERT!!!



The foam is cleaned out and we are ready for insertion.
oooh, that sounds dirty....

Almost Ready to Install the Front Wall

Doug is so happy about having finally finished sawing the house apart. He stands proudly by the light-emitting gap that he created with his mighty saw.



We've put in the 2x6s around the perimeter of the 2nd floor and attic. They are now ready to receive the panels.



Here is the collar tie system that Doug came up with back in 1995 for the roof structure. It's probably overkill, but it works and more importantly, the structural engineer passed it.



This is the final shot of the exterior wall of the old house, which thankfully kept the fire from spreading into the addition. We are putting up the new wall right next to it so soon it will no longer be visible. It's weird way of doing it but it's also the only way, and we are pretty sure it will work.

Cutting the House in Half

My former music room was completely filled with panels just a week ago. Now there are only a few left since most of them have been used to build the new front wall of the house.


Doug used a variety of saws to cut the old part of the house away from the new part so that the new part would not be damaged when we tore the old part down. He cut around the entire house, through all of the walls and the roof. He had to cut from the inside and from the outside to get all the way through the walls safely. He use a couple of different circular saws and I think at least one reciprocating saw died during this process.


It took close to a week to cut through everything but we ended up with a really nice one inch gap between the two sections of the house. Here is a close up shot of the gap. It's a rather scenic gap, as gaps go, don't you think? That basketball hoop is in our neighbors' front yard! I wish we'd been able to get Maggie into the shot.

THE BEST NEIGHBORS EVER!!!

When we lost our home because of the fire, Gerry and Larry, who live next door to us, took us in for an entire week until we found a place to rent. Now they are sharing their electricity with us while we work on our house. We are so lucky to have such kind and wonderful people as neighbors and I hope we will be able to do something really nice for them when we finally get through this mess.
They have a really nice dog too. I always enjoy visiting a little bit with Maggie whenever I go over to plug in our extension cord into the back of their house. Isn't she beautiful? I think she has such a pretty face.

Installing the Floors and Moving the Panels

During the month of July we removed the basement steps and installed the subfloor on the main level, which means that we can now only access the basement from the outside.

After we put in the floor, we installed the new front wall panels on the main level.

Then we used a pulley to lift the panels for the 2nd floor up through the floor joists.


We stored them in "hallway" of the main section of the upstairs, which already had a floor installed.

Once we got all of the panels we needed moved upstairs we put down the subfloor in the open areas that had originally been designated for the stairwell in the former design. We left a little opening around the wooden ladder that we've been using all this time to get to the 2nd floor.

PREPARING TO TEAR IT DOWN

In order to safely tear down the old part of our house we had to build a new front wall – from the inside. This involved removing the basement stairs, installing a new sub floor over all of the open stairwell areas on both floors, and then installing foam core panels on what was to become the new front surface of the house. All of these procedures were tricky and physically challenging. And it was hot as hell. We put in some really long hours because there was no way to tell how long it would actually take and it needed to be completely finished in time for the scheduled tear-down of the old part of the house.

After the front structure was complete, Doug used a few different types of saws to cut completely through the wall and roof of the old house at the intersection with the addition. The two sections needed to be completely separated before it would be safe to demolish the old house.

In other news, our building plans were approved by the county, but on July 13th we finally realized that we could not afford to have this builder build our house, so we bought the absolutely fantastic plans and paid the additional amount for ending the contract, and for a while we had no idea what we were going to be able to do about getting our house built. Scary times…..

Nevertheless, we took some time off and went to the International Trombone Festival in England and had a wonderful road trip afterwards through England, Wales, and Scotland. We needed the break, both physically and mentally.

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.

Finding Time - what time?

We really needed to spend a lot more time than we had available to us on the bus in order to go over the plans and make rather important decisions about our house. There were not only the many design details to fine-tune, but also a bunch of really involved and complicating technical details that Doug had wanted to incorporate into the plans, like radiant floor heating and individual water heaters on each floor instead of one big one like normal people have - things like that.

The architects were always waiting for information from us that we weren't ready to give them because we hadn't had a chance to sit down and talk about it. I had the feeling that these delays and lack of preparation were going to end up costing us a lot of money in the long run. It was difficult because it seemed like Doug's time was needed on the tour even more than it had been in the past and it was nearly impossible to get out the plans and start going over things without being interrupted.

So in spite of all of the faxes and conference calls with the builder we still get way behind in the planning of our house. It was extremely disappointing to have this be the situation after Doug had convinced me that we would have planty of time to get our house planned during our many long days on the bus.

When we finally got home at the end of May we were at last able to wrap up the final details with the architect so that he could complete the plans. As of right now, construction is set to begin "only" a year and a half after the fire , but we should be back in our house by this coming December if all goes well. I can't wait!

Gloomy Thoughts

We are out here on tour, spending most of what limited free time we have visiting kitchen and bathroom showrooms and Lowes and Home Depots all over the country.  Doug kept saying how we would have such a nice time planning our house and doing it OUR way, but we aren't really doing that at all.  It's just not possible and I tried to tell him that last summer.

I'm still not convinced we are doing the right thing, tearing down our 130 year old house that we've lived in for almost 25 years.  The insurance company had said they would restore it which means it would end up in far better condition than it was before the fire.  I don't need a fancy house - getting our current house brought up to brand-new condition would be like a dream come true for me.  But apparently I'm wrong, so off we go on this exciting new adventure.  At least I'm not going to have to do any of the work other than planning it and probably painting it.  I don't mind that.

But I have this awful sense of foreboding - that all of the planning with the design-build firm is just for show, to impress the people on the bus or something, and that Doug is ultimately not going to be able to let someone else do the work.  It seems like he is trying to make everything unnecessarily complicated.

I don't want to do any more work on the house.  I don't, I don't, I don't!   I know I'm going to end up helping Doug with some of the stuff he has signed on to do to in order to save money.  Why can't we have a more modest house instead?  The things I want are not ridiculous - they are mostly practical and designed to make the house easier to live in when we are old.

I'm not lazy - I painted the outside of our house by myself the summer before last.  I kept thinking that needed to be my last big home improvement project.  I hate to pull the woman card, but at what age do women typically stop being housepainters?  I'm sure there's a reason for whatever age that might be, the same way you don't see very many 50 year old carpenters.  SHEESH!

I sort of told our producer to leave us alone today which was not a very good thing to do.  We were looking at the blueprints because we have a big important conference call with the builder coming up that we MUST be ready for and he kept needing to ask Doug unnecessary questions about stuff that is happening two weeks from now that Doug has already finished planning for and has already briefed him on - several times.  I feel terrible about that - I'm not in the habit of snapping at people.

Doug has been extremely irritable as well, especially to me, since as his wife I should be more understanding about how frustrating it is for him to try to be all things to all people.  I completely understand that he is unable to say no to anyone except me because he has to keep his nice guy image going.  This tour manager gig has been extremely challenging for him because he is not naturally an organized person - at all.  Not one bit.

He's done an amazingly good job, but it's been extremely frustrating for him because so many people want to take advantage of him and his willingness to devote his time to their various self-serving needs.  It doesn't seem to occur to any of them that he might need a little time to do the other things that he needs to do.

The bus driver has made it her mission this year to make Doug's life as difficult as possible with all of her various complaints and arguments.  She constantly shirks her responsibilities and those of her bus company if she can get Doug to do the work for her.  She seems to crave his attention and does all kinds of manipulative things to get it.  At the end of each day she spends 30-40 minutes chewing Doug out about the hotel parking, or whining about the rude hotel clerk who disrespected her (probably because she's bossy and has bad grammar), or complaining about the producer or one of the actresses.  No wonder he comes back to the room in such a bad mood after I've been patiently waiting for 30-40 minutes for our "quality time" to start.  I understand completely what he's putting himself through.  I guess that makes it my fault because I was so easy going in my efforts to convince him that this tour was far less fun for both of us when he decided that he wanted to be the big important tour manager.

There's another guy on the tour who I know really wanted to be tour manager and he's insanely jealous that Bud for some reason or other chose Doug.  I guess since it wouldn't look good to go after Doug directly since Doug can apparently do no wrong in Bud's eyes, he's been acting kind of creepy to me this year instead.  It's completely out of the blue and has been very disconcerting because I'd actually been in favor of the idea of him being tour manager instead of Doug.  Couldn't he tell that?  I guess not.  There's a certain irony in me having to stick up for Doug's performance as tour manager to this guy.  Life is so weird sometimes, and not always in a good way.

This certainly has turned into quite a rant.  Well I have to do SOMETHING during the time that I'm not spending working on the house with Doug.  Hopefully we'll have some time tonight after the bus driver finishes HER nightly rant with him.  At least I'm not wasting anyone's time.

My biggest fear, before I got distracted by all of these other thoughts, is that the design/build company is going to start not wanting to deal with us and that they'll drop us and we'll be back to square one.  I don't know why I think this except that Doug keeps thinking he can add stuff and it won't cost more money.  They are going to have to wait for him to do his work before they can start and he is terrible at predicting how long something will take.  Unfortunately he is good at convincing people that something will take less time than it actually does.  I am worried about the consequences of everything - everything that I've mentioned.

Hopefully thoughts of our upcoming days in beautiful Hawaii and our trip to England and Scotland will distract me from all of this, but we still have to get this house stuff squared away.  There's absolutely no getting around that.

The March Meeting and the Spring Tour

The architect's three different versions had three different price categories, and at our meetings in March the builder apologized profusely for the fact that all of three of them them were out of our price range. We'd been waiting since December to receive this wonderful news.

Doug had been planning to add on to the front of the addition after the house was torn down, leaving the planned stairwell where it was. If we didn’t add a section for the music studio in the front, and instead put it in the much smaller stairwell area, and then moved the stairs back into the main section we would be able to afford it, they said. So we said okay, and they quickly came up with three alternate plans. We chose the one we liked the best and the nitty-gritty stage of the planning process began.

MORE TOURING, MORE DELAYS
Our month long break after the winter segment of the tour was now over, and the next stage involved a lot of planning and communication with the architect while we were on the road for two months. We spent nearly all of our free time wandering around various Lowes and Home Depots across the country trying to imagine what kind of countertops, cabinets, toilets, bathtubs, sinks, and lighting we would want to have in our new house. The reason we had to decide on all of these things so soon was so that the builder could continue with his pricing process. These details would significantly affect the final cost.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS
So there were numerous debates about toilets, bathtubs, flooring, kitchen cabinets, and countertops, etc,etc,etc. Here’s an example:

Cyndy initially thought that formica countertops would be perfectly acceptable, since she hadn’t ever had anything else and it was inexpensive and easy to maintain.

Although Doug has also never had anything but formica, he somehow thought that something a little more upscale was in order and he had the impression that Corian was the way to go. It definitely had certain advantages. But Cyndy didn’t like the extremely plasticized look of it and all of the sales reps were acting like Corian was sort of passé anyway. Who knew?

Granite was the same price and looked more natural and was supposedly more durable than Corian. But it also had some maintenance issues. Doug didn’t like the clattery sound that dishes make on granite.

Then Silestone came into the picture. It seems like the most durable option and is probably what we will use, if we can find a pattern that we both actually like.

Cyndy began to notice that all of the speckled granites that are used in hotel bathrooms these days had been starting to remind her of throw up. And most of the Silestone things were either very similar to the vomit patterns, or they had these silly looking sparkles in them, or they were totally boring. She's still not convinced that the countertops need to be fancier than good old tried and true formica.

It has been very difficult to decide on something just for the sake of pricing when so much unattractive stuff has had to be sifted through in our very limited time. It has been that way for toilets, bathtubs, sinks, and medicine cabinets so far - probably because we are so limited as to where we can go to look at things.

Our First Meeting with Our Builder

During the December break we met with the owner of a design-build company. He was very enthusiastic about our project, as we were about him. His company does very high quality work and he had previously been partners with our original architect. We wanted to make the addition, which was to be our new house, sort of in the spirit of the old one. He thought that what we had in mind would definitely be possible with our future budget, so we signed the contract and things got underway.

There was a whole team working on various aspects of the house plans. They had people out measuring the house, there was an architect, and a head carpenter, and all of their various assistants. They were going to design three different floor plans that were related to the sketches we gave them. The prospect of ending up with an even more well-designed floor plan than we had been able to come up with ourselves was thrilling, and to be able to choose from three different versions was amazing. We headed out on the January-February segment of the tour feeling excited and optimistic.

Delay Number Two: The Tour

We hadn’t completely arrived at the final decision regarding what to do about the house when the tour that we have been doing for the past three years began again in September. We desperately needed the paycheck from this gig because we had to make all kinds of purchases and had not been reimbursed by the insurance company for anything yet. Our credit cards were uncomfortably close to being maxed out for a while there. And doing the tour again seemed like a good way for us to prove to ourselves that we could keep the fire from upsetting other aspects of our existence. Boy were we wrong about that!

Doug convinced me that we would be able to use the long bus rides to plan whatever it was that we were going to do next with our house. There was no way to predict how other people would react, or not react, to our situation and eventually we both realized that we should have just stayed home to deal with everything. We could have easily earned the same amount of money from the mouthpiece business if we'd thrown ourselves into that. But we had previously gotten so much pleasure from doing this tour together and we just weren’t ready to quit. So we did what we could with the small amount of time that we had. There were many distractions and we didn't really get going on the plans until we returned home, just before Thanksgiving.

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.

1997 - 2004 Our Studio/Shop is no more

THE FINAL YEAR OF OUR ORIGINAL STUDIO AND SHOP
In February of 1997 I went out on my very first cruise ship gig for a 5 month contract. When I came back the studio smelled terrible. It seems that Maria, the feral cat, had now taken up residence in the attic of the studio, and wasn’t going outside to pee anymore because it was just too much trouble to climb all the way down the ladder that Doug had put up for her to get to the ground. So yuck! Fortunately by then I had pretty much decided to stop teaching piano and just be a bass player so I didn’t have students coming anymore. That certainly was an interesting and disgusting way to finalize my career change.

1998 - NO MORE OUTBUILDING
By the end of 1997, Doug had decided that it was just about time to tear down the studio and mouthpiece shop building, so while he was out on his holiday cruise, I painted the OSB in the designated music area of the addition a lovely shade of blue and put up curtains and then my parents helped me put down some wall-to-wall carpeting that had previously been in their living room. Then I had my pianos moved into the addition and I gradually brought in all of the other stuff. It ended up looking pretty nice, and about as cushy as a halfway finished space like this could be.

PATIENCE, PATIENCE
At this point I began to realize that this new set up was going to exist for much longer than what could accurately be called temporarily. I settled in for the long haul and Doug moved his shop into a work space about 5 miles away. The outbuilding was finally torn down during the spring of 1998.

IN A HOLDING PATTERN, 1998-2004
Somewhere in there we ran out of money and time for additional construction. We had both quit our “day jobs” to freelance and to spend more time on the mouthpiece business. It began to do pretty well, but there was not a lot of extra time to work on the house. The framing of the walls was in place, but that was it. I used the main floor of the addition in this unfinished condition for another seven years for practicing and rehearsals.

My new music space was big, and wide open, and stayed surprisingly warm in the winter. The entire addition was heated with one radiator on each floor which Doug had hooked up to the system in the main part of the house. It was warm enough that we only needed to supplement with space heaters on the very coldest days. There were all kinds of air leaks around the windows since they didn't have any finish trim and yet it still stayed relatively warm. And in the summer it didn’t get too hot either, especially after we installed a window air conditioner. These foam core panels really do insulate amazingly well!

Foam Core Fantasy: The Early Years

In the fall of 1992 my beloved maple tree was chopped down and the back porch room which served as our laundry room was torn down to clear the way for the new basement. The foundation was poured in November of 1992 and the cinderblock basement walls were built early in 1993. The basement walls are extremely solid - the cinderblocks were reinforced with rebar and then filled with concrete. The basement of the old part of the house has a separate wall, so the old basement and the new basement do not connect.

The rest of the early part of the process is somewhat of a blur to me. I was not very involved in the construction and most of my memories are related to being worried about the progress and also about Doug’s safety. Doug had hired a friend who was going to be doing most of the work. I believe that he and his crew assembled most of the floors and the walls and Doug put in the windows, with occasional help from me. I had so many students that I was not available to help him much.

WALKING TO WORK (1992-1996)
One of my main memories of the construction involved the changes that affected my daily trips out to the studio to teach. At first I had to go out the front door and walk through the mud all the way around to the back on our newly dug, but not yet paved, driveway.

When I got back from my “Meet Me In St. Louis” tour in 1993, the new basement walls were up and the quickest way to get out to the studio was to walk very carefully on top of the 8 foot high, 12 inch wide cinderblock walls to a 2x8 board that went over the trench between the addition and the remaining asphalt outside the studio. The trench was there so that Doug could do waterproofing work so that we would always have a dry basement. That trench did not get filled in until many years later.

It was super scary walking on the wall, partly because of the height, but mostly because there were a bunch of rebar spikes sticking up out of the cinderblock and it was very easy for a shoelace to get caught on the rebar. Fortunately that happened to me only once. Believe me, it hurt. Eventually I got used to it and became skilled at both balancing and avoiding the spikes.

A few months after that the main floor was installed and the trip became quick and easy and was no longer like a balance beam with spikes. Yay!

After the second floor went on I finally had a roof over my head as I went out to teach, but there weren’t any windows yet, so it was kind of like walking through a cold dark cave between the house and the studio.

Somewhere in there Doug started food out for a feral cat that had been hanging around and her health immediately improved and she then immediately became pregnant. She and her two young sons lived in our addition for that winter and well into 1995. I would say hello to them every day on my way out to teach. They would just look at me. They were not particularly friendly.

MARIA the CAT
Doug was very fond of Maria. He thought she was so cute and he really wanted to be her friend. She would let him come up to her, but would always quietly hiss when he extended his hand towards her or came too close. Doug said he named her Maria because she loved to sit outside listening to “The Sound of Music” (Bach, Beethoven, etc.) coming from my studio. Isn't that sweet. I said if I had named her Maria it would have been because of the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria”. Isn't that mean?

Anyway I thought it was a really bad idea to put out cat food for feral cats, racoons, and who knows what else, and I really did not enjoy dealing with the subsequent problems, including additional litters. I’m not going to mention everything that happened as a result of this except to say that I had to make a couple of very traumatic visits to the Humane Society. Eventually we used a Hav-a-Heart cage to capture Maria so that I could take her to the vet to have her tubes tied. She remained Doug's outdoor feral pet cat for about another five years or so after that. I think she lived much longer than most feral cats do.

BUILDING IT OURSELVES NOW
In 1994, right around the time that the roof structure needed to be built, Doug’s friend had a family situation arise that made it impossible for him to continue working on our house. So Doug had to come up with a way to assemble the roof himself, without a crew of helpers. The roof panels were 8 ¼” thick and 4’ by 16’. They weighed about 200 pounds each. It was pretty frightening watching him work with these panels. It was difficult to help because he was figuring it out as he went and most of the helping involved standing around watching him do scary and dangerous looking things. Occasionally someone else would come by to help him with the roof, like Doug’s brother and our friend Wade. But I think common sense kept most people away. The roof construction was definitely the most difficult and scary thing that Doug has ever done. It was a major accomplishment.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT ROOF
So how in the world did Doug manage to get all of these huge panels assembled into a roof way up there? It was really quite amazing. First he built all of the roof supports using a structure system made up of collar ties which he came up with all by himself. It was kind of unusual looking, but the structural engineer approved it. These collar ties are much more supportive than they need to be and it is comforting to know that we have such a sturdy roof.

Doug figured out a way to lift the 200 pound panels up to the top of the third floor using two very heavy duty chain hoists. For structural reasons the roof panels were attached to one another with 2 x 8s. Maybe at some point Doug will be able to provide more technical details as to exactly how he accomplished this dangerous mission, but at the time I was just relieved that he survived it.

THIS IS NOT FUNNY
My enthusiasm for this project was definitely tainted by the constant fear that Doug would eventually injure or kill himself. One day as we were headed out for sushi, he tripped over a circular saw that he had left lying on the ramp over the trench just outside of the back door of the addition. He fell into the trench and banged his chin on the way down. His tooth actually went into his lip on the inside. After it stopped bleeding he thought he was okay, so we continued on to the sushi place and had a nice meal.

By the time we were finished it was swelling up pretty badly and I told him that whether he liked it or not our next destination was going to be the emergency room. I think they said they would have put in a stitch or two if we had come sooner, but it had already begun to heal by the time he got there.

He wasn’t able to play for a couple of weeks, and he had a scar tissue lump in his lip for months after that. Of course Doug just simply made himself a special plastic mouthpiece rim to accommodate the lump and he was able to play just fine after that. Eventually the lump totally went away. And he still leaves his tools lying around all over the place.

ONE ROOF IS NOT ENOUGH - not for Doug anyway....
After Doug got all of the roof panels in place he put down a bunch of 2x4s and built an additional plywood layer on top of the original roof panel structure, creating what is known as a cold roof. He read about this in the Journal of Light Construction. The main purpose of a cold roof is to allow air flow under the shingles which will prevent ice dams from forming. Ice dams are the number one cause of roof leakage after it snows. The snow on our addition melts very evenly as a result of having this cold roof, so it will never leak as a result of an ice dam. Isn’t that great?

During 1995 and 1996 all of the windows were installed. The process of installing windows into foam core panels will be described later. Finally, in the fall of 1996 we got a permanent back door with a real lock. For a while we had a makeshift door that Doug had made out of an extra foam core panel. It didn’t lock, but it sort of kept out the weather.

Planning the Addition (1991)

PLANNING OUR NEW FOAM CORE ADDITION
By 1991 we had begun to outgrow the outbuilding. Doug needed more room for all of the lathes he had been acquiring, and he also wanted a music space that would be large enough to host big band rehearsals. Cyndy also needed a larger space for piano teaching and performance classes.

We met with a architect who helped us design a 24’ x 44’ three story addition connected to the house with a 12’ x 20’ section which would contain a centrally located new stairwell. The basement of this addition would contain Doug’s shop, the main floor would be a large open performance space with teaching areas for both Cyndy and Doug, and the top floor would contain a master bedroom area, a laundry room, and an addition bedroom and bathroom. Our old house was heated by radiators, but it had many deficiencies in the insulation department, starting with the wadded up newspapers in the walls.

Doug became interested in having the new addition be as energy efficient as possible and decided that building it with foam core panels would be the best way to accomplish that. People in the homebuilding business were not too familiar with it at the time, but Doug did the necessary research to enable the architect to design it and to get the plans approved.

Foam core panels consist of 6 ½ inches of EPS (expanded polystyrene) foam sandwiched between sheets of ½ inch OSB (oriented strand board). The standard panel size is 4 feet by 8 feet, but we got 10 foot panels so that we could have high ceilings. Each panel is solid foam except for two horizontal chases and one vertical chase per panel. These chases are hollowed out of the styrofoam by the manufacturer so that electric wires can be run through them. Most of the panels attach to each other with OSB splines and a bead of caulk to seal between the foam of each panel. The construction techniques result in a very solid house - probably more solid than it sounds – and it has an extremely high "R" value.

Life Before Foam Core (1985-1990)

About 20 years ago we bought a cute little old farmhouse with a finished outbuilding in the back. Our property was on a half acre lot on a two lane country road with two vacant lots next door. The front part of the house was built in the 1870s and the back half was added in 1946, which we are guessing because of the wadded-up newspapers that had been used for insulation in the walls. The couple that sold it to us had purchased it in the 1950s and raised seven children there. There were three bedrooms upstairs, one of which contained two sets of bunk beds for the four boys. The parents slept downstairs in a filled in room that used to be part of the wraparound front porch which later became our bedroom as well.

This house seemed perfect for us, because we liked the idea of living in an old house and because the outbuilding was just right for a piano teaching studio and Doug’s mouthpiece shop. We also loved the fact that there was a paved parking area right outside and only one step up into it the outbuilding. And Cyndy adored the beautiful old maple tree that grew between the building and the house.

We did a lot of work on the house for several years after we moved in. We added a wall and french doors between the living room and the hallway so that we could make it into a bedroom. We made the laundry room off of the kitchen into a bathroom and moved the washer and dryer into the mud room. We took down the pine paneling in the dining room and put up normal wallboard instead. We replaced all of the 1940s super-leaky windows with brand-new energy-efficient Anderson windows.

And then to truly make the house our own, we decided to paint it a new color. I wanted to paint it blue, but Doug thought pink would be more fun. I guess it reminded him of all the pink houses in Bermuda where we took our honeymoon. So we copied the deep dusty rose color from an old Victorian house in Rockville and I spent the entire fall painting. The following year I scraped and painted the trim. The previous paint was so old and thick that I had to take it down to bare wood with a heat gun. That was a lot of scraping and sanding! It took me the entire fall to get all of the trim scraped, sanded, primed, and painted, and the house looked great for about seven years. The surrounding area didn't look so great because they were widening the road in front of our house.