Taking a break from the house

Dagny and I fishing for rockfish off the cost of Southern California. We took a boat out of Oxnard on a saturday, and caught 14 pounds of fish. Susan was in the cabin getting sicker as the day went on.

House of Concrete and Steel

So here is the bones of the house. Prior to the steel, we called it "Stonehenge Santa Monica".

Construction Status

So, jumping ahead. Electrical, plumbing, HVAC, fire sprinklers, is mostly in. We passed our structural and height inspection, so we can start roofing and putting on our skin. Windows are ordered, cabinets are to be ordered very soon, fireplaces are going in. We still have the framing crew in house putting in the soffits.

The Idaho House Concept

I have stopped trying to categorize this concept as people who haven’t seen it don’t know what I am talking about. When I say modern; they think stark and industrial, or the latest modern house they say in a magazine. Basically it is pretty cool, thank you plac-e architects ( http://www.plac-e.com/ ) for helping us along with this.

The Original 1929 Spanish House

1929 Spanish House

Lot: 5000 Square Feet. 50'w by 100'l
Living Space: 1100 square feet
Sketchup 6 model: Original Spanish Idaho House


Long, thick low-slung typical Spanish house. Two tiny bedrooms, 1 tiny bathroom. Tiny kitchen closed off from the rest of the house. Of course closet space was miniscule. It did have a dedicated small dining room and a nice large living room with hand-plastered walls and cathedral ceilings and big thick beams typical of the era. There was sloping triangular fireplace in the style of the day, and a simple but pretty arch leading to the dining room, but no tile work, or other important finishes or details.

The rooms were simple and sweet, but the house was a series of little boxes: if you were in the living room you could not see into any other room, etc. However the bathroom was positioned so that someone in there could see and talk to someone at the front door, in the kitchen, or the dining room. This came in handy for toilet-training a toddler, but was a little disconcerting the rest of the time. At parties everyone crowded, of course, into the tiny kitchen. Once while trapped next to the sink I counted 25 people in the 6 x 6 space.

The hardwood floors had endured valiantly for 75 years, as had the drafty wood windows (with the lovely old wavy hand0blown glass), but both were splitting, water-damaged, and on their last refinish cycles. No insulation anywhere, but it’s not that cold here, and the ancient gravity furnace kept you warm enough in winter if you wore a lot of clothes and stayed in the right rooms. Probably a good thing there weren’t many windows given this but it was a little dark in there, especially in the vast living room.

Still, it was a good house, built by hand, with integrity and earnest craftsmanship and old, first-growth lumber (which was absolutely impervious to termites). It was cramped and tiny, but we and the roof rats could have lived there for many more years if all we needed was shelter and a steady supply of oranges and avocados from the neighbors’ yards.

We’ve had a lot of questions regarding why we razed this lovely Spanish house. (And it was lovely—we painted and decorated beautifully and spent hours putting things away and re-arranging furniture so it looked as open and perfect as possible for guests.) And, truly, we bought the house thinking to remodel it eventually—add a bedroom/bathroom and expand the kitchen, open up the floor plan a bit. We worked on a remodel plan for this with our architects for half a year. But we found out a few things we didn’t know when we first bought it.

First, we watched our close friends and neighbors remodel a house extremely similar to ours (same year/builder), and we found out that new building codes required them to gut the remaining entire structure down to the framing. Their new house, although beautiful and in a similar Spanish style, looked and was nothing like the original. So, once you start to remodel, little of the original structure is preserved—not even the plaster.

The only reason to keep part of the old house is to preserve “legal non-conforming setbacks”—setbacks that are no longer in compliance with current ordinances but give you more buildable space (and no doubt annoy our neighbor who would continue to view our garage wall—the only wall whose preservation would have given us more space—4 feet from her dining room window). However, Santa Monica is wise to this loophole, and their criteria are that you must keep 50% of your exterior walls to qualify.

Which leads to problem number 3: our house sat exactly in the middle of the legal buildable area for the lot. So, we could have added a few feet to the living room in the front and a few feet to the kitchen in the back of the house, but could not have added an entire room on the ground floor. Yes, you can go up, but your top floor has to be smaller than your bottom floor, and anyway, once you add in a staircase you’ve lost a large chunk of a room on each floor. Then, because you want to expand living space by more than 50% (and yes, we did want more—a little more—than 1700 square feet of living space out of what was going to be a very expensive project), the city requires you to expand the one-car garage (even though there is ample parking on our street) and you’ve lost another room.

The urban myth of keeping a single wall keeps coming up in conversations. Keeping a wall is a setback issue; it is not because of property tax reasons. If you keep 5% of the existing walls, your property assessor reassess you on 95% of new structure. Your new house will not get reassessed to current property values; it will get assigned a dollar amount per square foot. For example, let’s assume you added 1000 square feet of new construction, at $100/sq your property assessment will increase by $100,000. You may have paid $300/sq in construction cost, but the county goes by their numbers. As in all things, there are negotiations with your assessor, and I will try to claim that the original 1100 square feet should be taken off of the table, and I should only be assessed on the stuff I added.

We could have sold the house, but we like the location and the neighborhood and could not afford to buy something bigger in the same area. Also, the person who bought it would likely have torn it down as well…and built who knows what in its place.
But beyond all that, in the end, we wanted something beautiful and light and flowing, something that enhanced family life and having friends over, instead of something cute and old and cramped and compartmentalized.

We were tearing down.