A dream dies hard, but toasty
Great moments in building history: It's time to start over
Twenty-four hours ago, I burned down my house. I’m still in a state of shock. And while I found the whole experience a bit traumatic, my neighbors were ecstatic. They are generally nice people; perhaps I should explain.
Six years ago, I invested in an inexpensive 20-acre piece of farmland on Prince Edward Island, prime Canadian vacation country. The hundred-year-old house on the property had none of the graces of stately old homes that make them endearing or valuable, but I thought that the old place had potential.
I had always planned to rebuild the house into a family cottage. At first, I told myself I’d get to it once my life straightened out; then I promised myself I’d get going on the project once my burgeoning construction business either got busy enough to support it or quiet enough to allow the time for it. Neither quite happened.
In six years, I managed only two visits to the property, and I never so much as took a hammer with me. I did, however, take measurements and make drawings. I consulted aerial photos of the land to see how I could best add a garage and a workshop. I clipped dozens of photos from hundreds of magazines to help formulate an idea for the interior, exterior, and gardens. But not much else happened.
Distance turned out to be my real enemy. Based at the time in Montreal, Quebec, a good 16 hours away, I needed four days each trip just to drive to the property and back. A week here or there wouldn’t add up to much done at the other end. Although this fact didn’t darken my vision, the lack of progress caused a big problem.
During my second visit, I realized something was amiss. Although I had a capable neighbor to watch over the place in my absence, it turned out to be impossible to convince local passersby that the place was not scheduled for demolition. They started to strip the building of any architectural item of merit or value. My neighbor found himself powerless to stop them. Every morning, he’d find something else gone from the house: a window here, a door there, the staircase. He constantly ran into people in the supermarket who commented that if the old house was being torn down, they’d like to get some of the windows. He constantly corrected them, to no avail.
By the time I made my third visit to the island, with a truck full of tools and supplies, it was too late. There was virtually nothing left but four walls and a roof. Remarkably, though, the deconstruction helped me to see my house clearly.
Like a lot of older stick-built homes, my little cottage-in-waiting was constructed poorly. The dirt-floor basement was really more of a crawlspace. The concrete-block walls could have been put together with a little more detail to at least two things: horizontal and vertical. The floor joists should have been much closer neighbors, and if not that, then at least equidistant from each other. Even my neighbor admitted that he thought the place couldn’t be rescued.
My dream suddenly looked undoable. This thought seldom hits builders, at least when it comes to their own projects, but there it was. I was a good 16 hours from home, with time on my hands, every tool imaginable in my truck, and years of ideas and experiences bubbling around in my head and in a now-weathered, bulging file folder marked PEI.
I looked over the sad, blown-through remains of my once-and-future dream, still largely covered by a light spring snowfall, and the only notion I had was to start fresh.With that thought, a good wind direction, and a half-gallon of chainsaw gas, I proceeded to do the right thing in the middle of my snow-covered field. In about 10 minutes, my face was being warmed by dying embers as the remains of my house fell into the foundation.
Now I’ll clear the site and start over. I’m going to redraw some plans and get busy on a new cottage. Before another six years roll by, I hope to be warming my toes by another kind of fire in PEI.
Drawing by: Jackie Rogers
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