Think Outside The Box

Let’s go to The Big Rock Candy Mountain today. Fantasyland. Through the looking glass. Soar on a flight of fancy. Blue-sky. Let’s lose our minds and pretend we’re building a house.

I know, near no one is building a house right about now. But I’d like to illustrate a concept by the only important economist in contemporary American life — a dead Frenchman, of all things –Frederic Bastiat.

When I was going to build my first house, I had no money. This seems to be a recurring theme in my life. I had attended architectural school for about ten minutes, until they’d explained to me that under no circumstances would anything to do with traditional residential housing be discussed, never mind taught. What I know I taught myself.

My head was as full of tapioca as the next guy, so I thought maybe there was another answer to the question: How should a single-family house be built? I looked into dozens of freaky-deaky approaches. I made piles of drawings, one bad idea after another, trying to get a free housing lunch. I was stupid, but not stupid enough to ignore the arithmetic each approach yielded. Ignoring arithmetic is for rich people, and seems to be enshrined in a Constitutional Amendment that got ratified while I was asleep, now. I ended up building a traditional, small, Cape Cod Style home.

So let’s do some of the arithmetic I did. You’re building a house (snicker) in the Northeast. How to frame it?

The standard platform framed (one story at a time) wood frame house has walls built from 2×4 “studs.” A 2×4 stud is 1-1/2″ thick and 3-1/2″ wide, and is 92-5/8″ long. It is made from spruce, pine, or fir, woods that are light, strong, easy to work, and easy to grow and harvest. Drywall and blueboard (for plaster) are sheets 4 feet wide, so two sheets laid sideways will leave about 1/2″ extra between the ceiling and the floor, and the seams will mostly be at waist level and easy to tape. That’s why a stud is 92-5/8″ long; there’s usually a good reason why things are traditional in these matters. Wood studs are placed on a single bottom plate, under a double top plate (plates made from 2x4s also) 16″ on center. You start your framing 15-1/4″ from the end so that exterior sheet goods (plywood or OSB, the ersatz plywood made from wood chips and glue) will break on the center of a stud. Sheet goods are 4′ by 8′. Four studs on 16″ centers equals four feet. Monkey-level adding and subtracting is enough to build a normal house.

In the “bays,” the interior area between the studs, you place fiberglass batt insulation before you enclose them. The insulation is sized to fit snugly in the bay, about 15″ wide, and comes in long rolls, usually. Batt insulation installation is one of the few things a dedicated homeowner can accomplish better than a trained professional.

Here comes the arithmetic. Energy worriers say a 2×4 wall isn’t thick enough for enough insulation to suit them. They want a 2×6 wall instead. Or more exotic insulation than inexpensive, safe, easy-to-use fiberglass. Or both, usually. Thicker insulation will allow less heat to escape, and save money over the life of the house. This seems to make sense. Like most things that seems to make sense to intellectuals  nowadays, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

2×4 walls don’t lose all that much heat in a house. Heat leaves mostly via your windows, and through air leaks and from opening and closing doors. Most heat leaves your house by going straight up, anyway –the reason why there’s a lot of insulation in your attic compared to your walls.

Framing your walls with thicker framing costs a lot of money. The lumber costs more. The resultant walls weigh a lot more and require more men or machinery to lift up into place, as it’s traditional to build them lying flat. The insulation costs more; it’s thicker. Your windows and doors will cost more because they need jamb extensions for the additional wall thickness. The painter will want a taste for more woodwork.

People that don’t care about anything but energy use will do the arithmetic for you, and they will lie about how much you’ll spend (it will be more) and how much you’ll save (it will be less). Even their rosy scenario will likely have you attending your unborn children’s college graduation, if he’s on the Blutarsky path, before you see a dime of savings. The truth is, it doesn’t make any sense, and likely never will.

But that stuff’s obvious. Obviously stupid things are written into law nowadays, never mind commonly tried. Let’s go further. A 2×6 wall is 2″ thicker than a 2×4 wall. Walls stand on your floors, not outside them. Your rooms are all smaller. No one considers this. The handwavers will ignore this calculation. I wouldn’t.

The perimeter of even a small house is pretty big. My house isn’t enormous, but its perimeter is 320 linear feet. Remember, two stories means you’re doing this twice. 320′ x 12″ x the 2″ you’ve given up is 7680 square inches, or 53 square feet of living space.

53 square feet of living space is a lot. It’s almost 3 percent of the total. It’s a half-bath’s worth of room. If you’re an energy loon, you’ll counter that my house is too big. Everyone’s house but the energy loon’s house is too big, if you ask them. But if my house is too big, why wouldn’t I just make it 53 square feet smaller and then frame it with 2x4s and save a pile of money that way? It costs 100-125 dollars per square foot to build a plebeian house. Saving 5300 to 6625 bucks by doing nothing is smarter than spending tens of thousands extra to try to save it over a half-century.

Spending enormous amounts of time, effort, and money to achieve vanishingly small, probably illusory returns while making the average citizen’s life less comfortable. It’s the New American Way.

[Update: Barnes and Noble and Amazon are having a price war over my book. Buy it now for only $8.60]

The Tell-Tale Lie

I need to be a little bit tedious here for a moment.

No, really; more than usual. It’s because you have to grasp the enormity of this foolishness first. So here goes:

I’ve worked every kind of construction there is. Commercial construction, residential construction. I’ve painted the inside of a doghouse, and I’ve built football stadiums. Rough arts? Check. I’ve painted murals and wallpapered, too, so it’s not just the barbarian arts I’m talking about. I’ve worked alongside many a homeowner, and at their direction in their occupied homes, as well as out in the field where no end user comes.

I’ve worked on single family homes a lot. Duplexes? Sure. Multi-family? Check. Condos? Absolutely. Big ol’ apartment buildings? Of course. Call them what you like –whip out your PUD. I’ve already seen it.

I’ve cleared the land. Dug the hole. Stacked the blocks. Poured the chowder. I’ve stuck a spud into the steel. Welded? Name your metal. Hell, I’ve paved the street. Put in the sewer and the drainage.

Office buildings? Yeah. Hotels? Yeah. Getaway cabins? Sure. Mansions? Absolutely. McMansions? I guess.

Exurb, suburb, city, village, town, township, outpost. Atlantic? Pacific? Great Lakes? Pah. Done.

I’ve screamed into the phone and the ear and the air alike. Worked alone. Directed hundreds.

I’ve drawn the plans. Applied for the permits. Put in Environmental Remediation. Sat in interminable meetings for the privilege of being yelled at before being denied and approved alike.

I’ve worked on houses where the owners showed me where their ancestors hid during King Phillip’s War. I’ve worked on houses that had graywater recovery and passive solar.

Railroad, Colonial, Adam, Georgian, Second Empire, Stick, Eastlake, Colonial Revival, Tudor, Queen Anne, Ranch, Prairie… this is getting tedious. If I can think of a kind of house I’ve had nothing to do with I’ll mention it. Ummm……

People? Black, white, brown — all the hues of the rainbow and the UN combined. Disfigured or whole, ancient or young, from every continent. Well, maybe not Antarctica. I’ve worked with every race, color, and creed. Gay, straight, and just plain strange. Men, women, boys, girls. Disabled people I couldn’t keep up with, and able-bodied lazy people. Everybody.

I’ve worked for customers so imperious that they wouldn’t allow us to drink from their garden hose while we were working. Outside. In August. In Massachusetts. Some people, conversely, would set a place for us at their table if we were in their house at dinnertime.

In short, I’ve done every single thing I can think of in construction at one time or another, by and for every sort of person– short of scouring other galaxies for odditities — in every sort of setting you could conjure up, and for every sort of customer you can imagine.

Okey dokey, with my bona fides out of the way, let me state for the record that I’ve seen most all the Do-It-Yourself kinds of TV shows now,  and I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, that in the hundreds of thousands of hours I’ve worked, and during the gazillion man-hours of other people’s work I have observed, not one, single, solitary human being in the real construction world has every given any other person a “high-five” before, during, or after the job. It has literally never happened in my presence.

I don’t know what you people are watching, but it ain’t work.

I Just Checked, And My Driveway Has Not Turned To Magma

Hmmm. “Horrid Heat” “100 percent hot.”

I live in Maine. Nothing in the US is more east than Maine. Nothing much in the US is more north than Maine, except Alaska, of course, and close to a tie with a little of Minnesota and Washington. Maine is the same size in area as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont combined. I’m looking at that picture, and I see Delaware, and Maryland, and Virginia, and even a little of West Virginia, not one of which is even in the Northeast, but no Maine.

But the headline gods must be obeyed, and the third stone from the sun must be nudged into Mercury’s orbit in the newspaper to get a rise out of people. Information and geography be damned. Here’s today’s weather report. It’s 69 degrees right now at 9:50 AM. That’s 69 Farenheit, not Celsius or Kelvin as you’ve been led to believe.

It was 20 below zero one morning here last winter. I’m perfectly sanguine with the weather right now, thank you very much.

One of the simplest ways to determine how intelligent your living arrangements are is to count how many months you can live comfortably in your house by simply opening and closing the windows and removing or adding a garment. According to people that make maps for the weather report, I live in: HERE BE MONSTERS, USA, and I’m perfectly happy 7 months out of 12 with no mechanical contrivance to adjust the temperature in my house but a box fan in a window now and then. Hell, we don’t even need a light fixture on during the day in any room in the house for 6 months a year. My workshop wouldn’t even need much artificial light in it if the previous denizens (stoned or insane, take your pick) hadn’t removed a dozen windows and boarded them up. You know, to “save energy.” I can’t help but notice that “saving energy” really means “relying on energy for everything at all times and in all places to reinforce a total war on nature, and then talking endlessly about rationing it for everyone else.”

Open a window in your life. It smells stale in there.

[Updated: Reader and commenter Robin wanted a hit of Coos Canyon. I’m fairly certain the snowbank is melted now, but don’t hold me to it]

[Uppity-Update, Sunday, 7-24-2011, 9:00 AM]

The Weather Channel doubles down on stupid:

Well, whaddya know, they finally show Maine, with a big, fat 92 over it. “Hot Steamy Northeast.” Ah, weather porn. But just like the women in real porn, the temperature is just not that into you when the camera’s off. 92? That’s an interesting number. 92F would be the record high temp for today. Well, it would be interesting — if I wasn’t wearing a long sleeve shirt right now with all the windows open.

Today’s forecast, from the same people but off the main page, is for temps three degrees below average for the date. Keep ****ing that chicken, fellas.

Here Comes The Honeydew

The usual suspects are staggering around the landscape discovering their backside regarding housing again. It’s amazing and amusing that people who claim to have a crystal ball can’t even figure out what’s already happened, never mind what’s going to happen.

Foreclosed houses might not be up to Martha Stewart’s standards? Who knew?

As huge numbers of foreclosed homes continue to work their way through the real estate pipeline, another problem is blossoming — mold. In most homes, as residents go in and out and the seasons change, natural ventilation sucks moisture up to the attic and out through the roof. It’s called the “stack effect.” And in many parts of the country, it’s driven by air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter. But no one is going in or out of most foreclosed homes — regardless of climate — and the effects can be devastating.

I see the local Punctuation Boutique was having a special on em dashes. Anyhow, the author has no idea what the stack effect is, or how it works in a house, open or closed up, and simply wrote whatever Wikipedia and the local Service Magic dude or energy efficiency loon they’ve got on speed-dial told him or her.

Let’s look at the picture they’ve supplied with the article:

Well, it’s mold, and it’s in a foreclosed house, I guess, so they’re not lying; they just don’t know what they’re talking about, and don’t know who to ask to find out anything, and don’t know what to do with any accurate information that comes their way anyway.

It’s only technically mold. More specifically, that’s mildew. That mildew has bleep-all to do with foreclosure and abandonment. It’s probably gotten better since the occupants moved out, because that mildew’s been there for years, caused by steamy showers in a room with no mechanical ventilation and the window painted shut.

You see, they used to make houses that relied on the occupants to have a little common sense, and to perform mundane physical activities to ensure their own comfort. They put a big window in the bathroom, but you had to open it and close it yourself. Notice the shower curtain on the left, none on the right. After years of soaking the window, they gave up on maintenance and painted it shut. It used to be a requirement that a bathroom have a window for ventilation, but after decades of people not using them, the building code devotees said you needed mechanical ventilation in your bathroom. That’s why you have a ceiling fixture with a fan in it that you refuse to turn on instead of a window you don’t open now. Half of the exhaust fans are worse than nothing and simply dump the moisture into the attic, the other half are disconnected or ignored by the occupants because they’re too noisy.

But they’re not wrong about mold in foreclosed houses, they’re just right for the wrong reasons. But I’m no 20/20 hindsight handyman. I’m more of an “I told you so” kind of guy:

Why won’t these numbers converge into one big, happy cheap housing fiesta? Regular people are waiting out the Great Recession, hoping to someday get a job, form a household, and then buy a house. They are being told that when they finally emerge, that all that empty inventory of houses will be waiting for them in fine condition at rock-bottom prices. No it won’t. Because a house needs occupants, and the contractors they hire to maintain them. Houses left alone by absentee banks are going to slowly disintegrate. Entropy doesn’t take years off while you try to scare up a down payment.

I kept going, ’cause that’s how I roll:

Time will pass. Pipes will freeze. Raccoons will get in. Persons who know a house is never worth nothing will break in and discover sweet, sweet, copper in them thar walls. Mice and squirrels will breathe their last in the attic, and you’ll be breathing their lasting perfume for a good, long time — if you can smell it over the mildew.

The only people that know how to renovate these places aren’t going to hang around in an industry with Dust Bowl unemployment numbers, waiting by the phone for years for you to pull yourself together. They’re going to leave the industry; the few that are left aren’t going to be interested in being your coolie labor. All you know how to do is download songs from iTunes and fill the copier when it says PC LOAD LETTER. They know what a house is worth, and how to fix it. They only need you to show up at the closing with a big, fat check. Just like old times.

A two-tier market for housing will develop. Regular houses, owned by regular persons, will be bought by other regular people with regular mortgages for regular prices. The “shadow” inventory – houses not occupied and in very uneven condition — will be purchased by speculators, renovated and flipped as rapaciously as before, and will be sold for about the same money as the regular houses. No amount of waiting around in mom’s basement and reading about housing bubbles on the Internet is going to change the fact that houses are expensive because they are valuable and always will be.

The interviewees in the NPR article are just organized handymen, and are capable of cosmetic repairs to mildewed surfaces at exorbitant rates. But they’re not prepared for real mold, and neither will the next occupants be. The eco-everybodies, the “remodelers,” the energy monomaniacs, and the code tinkerers have transformed the average contemporary house into a little sealed terrarium for humans, entirely dependent on mechanical contrivance to continue its existence, never mind be habitable. The fetish for airtightness, and vapor barriers, and ersatz materials masquerading as environmentally-friendly improvement, and endless codes in substitution for common sense have produced a house that will entirely self-destruct in half a century if you live in it and take good care of it, and about half a decade if you don’t.

There’s mold inside the walls of lots of foreclosed houses, don’t get me wrong. The real kind, not mildew; the kind with spores that’ll kill you if you breathe them. Nothing short of the demolition of the entire interior of the house, the removal of all the soaked insulation, the replacement of the OSB sheathing silently turning to damp shredded wheat beneath the immutable face of the vinyl siding will have to be addressed. Six grand to a glorified handyman won’t cut it. Hell, the vandals stealing all the copper pipes and wires are doing you a favor getting a head-start on all the demolition you’re going to need.

A house has been made so “energy-efficent” that it can’t go two weeks without dehumidification, humidification, heating, cooling, mechanical ventilation, sump-pumping, and ten other things I’m too weary to write.

We were all better off before we “fixed” houses, and housing.

[Update: Barnes and Noble and Amazon are having a price war over my book. Buy it now for only $8.60]