December 2014

I started keeping a notebook in early February 2014.  Nothing fancy, just a thing I found in the school/office supply aisle of IperCoop, the big supermarket: all recycled paper, outside a soft, tan pebbly-textured cover, inside lined pages of light green.  By the end of the project I had filled three of them.  These aren’t journals, more a diary of scribbled notes, records of meetings, payments due and payments made, to-do-lists.  On 26 November 2014 I listed all the bills we had to pay before 31 December and then wrote, “I do not know where we will find the money . . . Feeling absolutely paralyzed w/ fear and anxiety.”  Had I known what lay ahead I might have folded right there, unable to go on.  But of course I did, we did, and now I’m writing this from my peaceful, book-lined studio and those notebooks are a useful reference as I recount this story.

Weather continued wet in early December, and heavy fog gave me a stifled, claustrophobic feeling.  Jim was away, working somewhere in Africa (I made no note of his whereabouts), and my anxieties mounted without his steadying presence.  I worried over faint cracks in the new concrete subfloors on the first floor, cross-ventilation in the dining room, a pipe that seemed to be draining into the cantina. 

Work on the roof was delayed when the builder’s drawings came in two weeks late and didn’t meet specifications.  The architects couldn’t allow work to proceed until the disparities were corrected.  Lumber couldn’t be ordered from the sawmill without architect-approved drawings.  It was 5 December, and in just 14 days we could expect all activity to halt for the winter break from Christmas through Epiphany on 6 January. 

On 11 December scaffolding went up over the north wall; now the house stood in a cage of iron pipes, overlaid with planks to walk on.  On a cold, early morning we met the builder and the senior architect at the house, climbed the scaffold to roof level and looked down at the north wall.  It was fragile, they said; the builder asked permission to dismantle the upper half of the wall, rebuild in new, construction-grade brick and then re-face the exterior with original brick to preserve the appearance of the old house.  Two chimneys also had to go and would be replicated in original bricks.  We agreed to everything, knowing this work would cost more than estimated.

Six days later the men removed every tile from the roof, tossing them hand-to-hand, stacking them on pallets to be lowered into the cortile.  Then the crane began lifting away the wooden substructure, ribs and struts and massive beams.  Laid on a south-facing slope below the cortile, the old roof looked skeletal, like broken bones.  It seemed a shame to us, all that chestnut lumber discarded, but apparently it is unwise to re-use old wood that might harbor parasites or other undetectable damage.

On 22 December the men were still at work, contrary to my fears and expectations.  They took down both chimneys and the north and south walls from roof level to the top of the ground floor, all by hand.  Re-useable bricks were stacked neatly on pallets and lowered away to the cortile, where they were covered in plastic sheeting against winter weather to come.  Finally the men wrapped the roofless shell in heavy plastic.  They left the work site silent, secure, and orderly and went home to celebrate Christmas with their families.  The remains of our house looked like a little broken tooth, ragged and hollow.  I hated leaving it that way, but we all needed a break.