Vision is what separates the pragmatists from the optimists. I am firmly in the latter category, or I would never have bought the townhouse at 1746 Kalorama Road. It was only a block from where we lived at the time, and even though the short sales listing advertised it as a residential property, I knew it was zoned for commercial use.
Since it was right around the corner, Helen and I took a tour of the property. The agent had just managed to get the last remaining renter to leave. Amatuerishly renovated into a four-unit “apartment”—if you counted the completely unbuilt basement as a unit—the dilapidated building was a disaster that could never have received an occupancy permit.
Right through the center of the first floor, mismatched plumbing parts ran from the second-floor bathroom to a bare-bones toilet in the basement. A rotted structural beam in the basement caused the house to slant down so much that a dropped ball would roll merrily to the rear of the house. Fresh paint hadn’t touched the walls, trim, and windows in at least two decades.
As we left the building, Helen rolled her eyes and sighed, “That was a disaster.” At almost the same time, I said, “It has possibilities.” If you had the vision to look past the decades of half-assed unprofessional renovations and a complete lack of upkeep, there were still the bones of a nice house, albeit one built in 1918 and abused for a half-century.
I could see what was originally a nice townhome for the upwardly mobile working-class at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. A mosaic vestibule led to a first floor with twelve-foot ceilings. Pocket doors separated the front parlor from a larger back room that might have been a dining room, as the kitchen was off to one side. The upstairs had three bedrooms, two separated by a wall of closets serving each one, and a small nursery just big enough for a crib and a chair. The walls were plaster and lath, the bathroom had a nice tile floor and wainscotting, and the bay windows at the front of both floors were mahogany-framed.
The price was ridiculously low even in 1980s dollars, but it obviously would need a ton of work. So, for $120,000, Helen and I became the owners of a diamond-in-the-rough. We imagined renovating and refurbishing the townhome, so, without using an architect, we drew up a simple plan for a construction firm to restore the home while upgrading the wiring and the plumbing.
We found a small construction firm that had only just begun to do projects of our size and had previously only done landscaping projects, but the owner insisted they could do it all for 60K. We were naïve, but so was he. Our job, his second actual construction job, drove him out of business.
It’s too bad we weren’t a candidate for This Old House because the nightmares that came next would have taxed the skills of Bob Vila and Norm Abram to the limit. To begin with, a structural engineer determined that the rotted load-bearing beams in the basement needed to be replaced, as well as the brick bases they rested on. It required jacking up the entire house to rebuild the support piers, replace the wooden beams with steel ones, and re-true the floors. As difficult as that was, the contractor had budgeted for it.
But the plaster and lath walls we hoped to keep had deteriorated beyond repair. All the walls had to be demoed and replaced with Sheetrock. Still, not too big a deal. Then, the bathroom floor turned out to be set into a giant pour of concrete suspended in ancient wire netting. With the walls removed, we could see the enormous mass, which looked like a huge, flat-topped boulder filled with rubble and entangled in the metal strands. It probably weighed 1000 pounds and needed to be broken up and removed lest it give way. So much for keeping the original bathroom tile work. Still, not so difficult, just messy and time-consuming.
Since I lived a block from the building, I would stop by every morning and see the progress. On one occasion, I came by to see the place swarming with Washington Gas Company technicians in hazmat suits. The electrical workers removing some old sconces had broken an original gas pipe, and the scent of the gas was the impetus for the emergency. But it was all a false alarm. It seemed that in 1918, the builders of the house were not certain that electricity wasn’t just a fad, so they had piped all the fixtures for gas too, and all that piping had been closed off 60 years ago, but there was still gas lingering in the abandoned pipes. Washington Gas ordered us to remove all the old pipes. Luckily, we were now redoing the walls, and they had to run new electrical wiring anyway.
The coup de grace happened near the end of the renovation. I got a call from the job manager urging me to come over right away. When I arrived, he was standing at the front door with his arms folded. He asked, “Do you want to hear the good news or the bad news first?” Never a good opening. I stuttered, “The good news, I guess.” And he replied, “Well, no one was hurt.” Then he took me into the house. Much to my astonishment and dismay, the back wall of the house was gone. There was just an open space from floor to ceiling, with the splintered floorboards limply dangling where they had met the back wall.
The plan was to build a deck off the back of the first floor and replace the windows with a sliding glass door. They had successfully opened the back wall and placed a steel header to hold up the wall around the door, but it was slightly out of true. So, pushing their luck, they attempted to adjust it. In the space of a few seconds, the entire wall of bricks dropped down in a curtain of dust. The 70-year-old mortar had disintegrated entirely and on the ground was a pile of bricks, which looked almost brand-new. The wall had taken about a half-foot of flooring from each level, but the eaves had held steady. Still, the contractor had to rebrick the entire back wall of the house. Luckily, the old bricks were in great condition.
The contractor was honest, admitted his mistake, rebuilt the wall, repaired the flooring, and added another sliding glass door on the second floor instead of rebuilding the original arched windows. That was just too much. It was only his third construction job, and it drove him out of business. Nearly finished, except for punch list items and almost fully paid, the contractor unilaterally decided to cut his losses and disappeared. Luckily his job foreman had greater integrity and offered to finish things up for the small remainder of the original quote. In a way, we had made a poor choice of a contractor, but it turned outthey made a good choice of subs.
