Waiting for the estimate

If you look at the hard, cold numbers, it should be reassuring. We can build for about the price of constrution on a square meter basis, but I am riding the roller coaster, I'm on pins and needles, I am exhilarated, I am anxious. In short, I am not finding that particularly reassuring.

It's small. What can it cost? 

A lot. 

It was hard to go to sleep hyperventilating quietly on my side of the bed. I managed, though.

It's all relative, isn't it? Actually, maybe not. There is a logic in there that can't be so easily defeated. I want to say that if you have the money, this is simply not a problem. You book a table at your favorite restaurant and enjoy your aged malt scotch before, and after, dinner, returning home to tuck into bed with a satisfied soul. But, if you had that money, what would you be doing here, owning this wreck that you have watched tank on your very beautiful property, when someone has the time to care for it. Its ruin is now about complete. The builder looked up at the ceiling yesterday and pronounced that one more winter, one good wind, and that roof is coming down. I think he is exaggerating just a little bit. It's bad, but collapse is maybe a few more good soaks and a solid blow a couple seasons away. Or, I am overly optimistic about the mess.

"D'un autre côté," he mused, "ça fait moins de travail en dépose."

It falls on its own, and there's less demo to do.

There is always the bright side of things. Moins de travail equals an uptick, however subtle, in savings, but don't get ahead of yourself, because there is always the highly doubtful foundation, and you can't know about that until you get at the work.

That is a contingency. Typically, add 15% to the estimate and bank on spending it in a case like this.

That foundation occurs along this wall, which evokes something from industrial Newark or Rouen, not the charming villages of the Ile-de France. Can anyone, anybody at all explain to me how in God's name you build anything like this? For any purpose? I swear I am going to catalogue every blasphemy of construction before it is dismantled, and carted away; another fortune, unless I get a jump on it and start taking it, trailer load by trailer load to the dump. I have done just about as crazy stuff before. My husband is convinced that if something is built, and it has withstood at least three decades, that it must fundamentally be alright. We can keep that back wall, certainly, he says. What I want to know is why clients always understood what husbands don't. The only possible explanation is that clients go to architects and pay them, and so they respect what they are told. If my husband doesn't have to pay his wife, the architect, then he does not have to. She is wrong according to his comfort levels, or right according to the same.




A quick round-up of the structure should be enough, except, that would be to anyone who builds things. This is the wall. It is built in brick and 10 cm concrete block. It is cracked all the way through at 3 locations. This probably has to do with the insufficiency of 10 cm of concrete block and the roots of the tree I cut down on the neighbor's property, with his sanction and help. Of course he should have done it or had it done, since it was an issue for our building, but now, when we will need access from his property to carry out the work, we are much more likely to have his cooperation. The stump is not dead, it is massively complex, and I have to keep trying to kill it. Until I succeed, it will continue to disturb the structure.

I have never built anything out of 10 cm (4") concrete block. Just typing that, I cannot believe that I am. 20 cm of reinforced (vertically and horizontally) concrete block is the minimum. But, it's not carrying a lot of weight, I hear. It doesn't work that way. It is also subject to forces, carries its own weight, and supports the loads on the roof, plus the dead weight of that roof. But, it has stood up all this time, comes the response. That doesn't mean it's going to continue to. See the cracks. It is continuing to, the argument goes on. Yes, it is, but you do not build a proper, new roof on it. Nobody in their professional capacity and right mind would ever do that, and it's not because someone else did sometime before that they do. This place was built by God only knows who, and on the fly and the cheap.

I was not helped by some guy, who came here for something, and who said, when I showed him the wall on the other side of the garage part that is literally made of stacked bricks only, with some sort of grey stuff covering it on the inside. That sort of trowel-on stuff actually thickens the wall at the door and window framed to handle their depth.

I kid you not.

That guy said, "Oh, that can work." I wanted to strangle him. We didn't hire him for whatever job he was there for, so, why would we listen?

My husband looked at me and said, "See? That can work," and nodded at the guy with authority.

I judged better than to comment. There is no winning some arguements. The builder will have to sit him down and lay it out. There is another argument, and it goes that building is faster when you get rid of the old and build from scratch, foundations not counting. Faster equals less labor equals less costly. Concrete block is not expensive, and working around problems, finding solutions, reinforcing with pillars where needed, and so forth costs time and money. But, why replace concrete blocks with new ones that cost whatever they cost? We just went over that.

Never mind. I just keep plodding along the path I have to trod, knowing that he will follow.

For now, I wait for the estimate. We talked over the structural issues, and how to build it. A new slab will sit on the old one, and bring the level of the ground floor, and the mezzanine and roof with it, 25 cm, not 10 cm, as I had planned. He wants to bring it out an additional 20 cm into the garden side. These two things will have consequences for the ridge height and the roof pitches, which is fine, except that there is this existing window. We'll figure it out.

He is also pricing the same treatment for the building exactly as it is so we can compare the cost and decide if we go forward with the bigger project. It has two tremendous advantages. First, it connects the two structures, which permits us to count the three new rooms created with the existing rooms. That is a major factor in the appraisal of a home's value. Second, it could be adapted for us to live in when we are very old, wheelchairs excepted. It's too small. Beyond that, there is the aesthetic value: it creates interesting spaces and some of the good sort of drama.

That said, either would be a huge improvement in aesthetics over this.

The gutter decoration is cute, though.

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