Gift Horses

A commentary, while I can't work on the house:

I don't have cable TV service. With renovations and everything else going on I don't have time to watch it. And even if I took the time I don't have anything to watch it on. My A.D. 2000 model is so fried it won't pick up a signal, and the last thing I'm going to do is buy a nice new flat screen TV and end up with wallpaper paste and Big Wally's plaster adhesive all over it.

So I figured my sojourn in the hospital a couple of weeks ago would be my chance to taste the sweets of cable-TV land. I didn't watch as much as I expected to: old habits die hard and as soon as I got a connection on my laptop-- when I wasn't being poked, prodded, blood-pressured, sampled, or stethoscoped-- I spent most of my time either online or happily looking out the window (nice river view).

But on the Sunday night, knowing I was going home the next day, I decided to take advantage. Thus I had my first look at a program called Holmes on Homes, a home reno reality show with a twist. On this series, Mike Holmes, the General Contractor with a Heart, comes to the rescue of homeowners who have been screwed around by previous builders and puts their dwellings right.

What's not to like? It doesn't hurt (let's get this out in the open right away, shall we?) that Mr. Holmes is built like a blond crewcut Greek demigod, with musculature that gives the impression he could hold up an entire house like Herakles if called on to do so.

He knows exactly what he's doing in the construction field and he's dedicated to doing it right. And if a little matter of bathroom leakage should lead to replacing a house's entire plumbing, electrical, and HVAC systems, with a new roof to top it all off, so be it. I like the way he explains what the previous contractors did wrong and presents how he's going to do it right-- if HGTV would post detail drawings on their website of the correct assemblies, somebody like me could earn architecture continuing ed credits just by watching this show.

Holmes on Homes is a home renovation series with meat and muscle to it (lol). So once I got home I went online to see if I could pick up other episodes. After some experimentation, I determined that HGTV has the best streaming, so while recovering from my surgery I've happily been watching Mike and his heroic crews work their virtuous construction magic.

Well, pretty happily, until the two-part episode I viewed yesterday. Ah, alas, it never fails-- the best of us do. Fail, I mean. Even paragons have their flaws. And Mike Holmes' flaw is that although he's great with construction and pretty darn good at contemporary domestic design, he has no feeling what.so.ever for historical work.

It was painful. The project centered on a Craftsman bungalow in Toronto or Ottawa or somewhere (Holmes on Homes is a Canadian production and 99% of the locations are north of the border). The homeowners had suffered a fire and subsequently from a dishonest and incompetent contractor hired by the insurance company (no reflection on the insurance company, Mr. Holmes is careful to say) and from the deaths of the grandmother and husband/father of the family. So in comes Mighty Mike Holmes, to undo what the previous wood butchers did and obliterate the fire damage and rectify any other problems the house might have.

And it had plenty. A sagging center support, a leaking old underground oil storage tank in the backyard, and raccoons that had had the run of the place for the eight months since the fire, thanks to the previous GC having failed to make the place tight. And that wasn't the end of it, either.

But this house had plenty going for it too. A lovely Craftsman box newel post and grillework at the main stairs. Graceful arches between the rooms. Leaded glass metal windows (Hope's brand, I'd guess) in the living room. A charming rustic stone fireplace. True divided light upper sashes on the second floor. Not to mention the room arrangement and flow that the remaining members of the family, mother and daughter, had been used to and had enjoyed for the previous eighteen years.

Never mind all that. Mike knows best. Mike was going to come in there and give them new, new, new. And damned if he didn't. Silly new ersatz-Colonial stair balusters with a volute newel for the stairs. Boring new single-light casement-and-picture units with white enameled hardware replaced all the windows. The fireplace stone (which he pronounced "ugly") was covered over with new one-color, unvariegated red brick with a new electric fire. And oh, now since the fireplace wasn't woodburning anymore, he had the roofers take down the chimneys. So much for the bungalow roofline! Most of the walls on the first floor he removed, so it acquired a very modern open plan. Upstairs, the bedrooms were totally reconfigured. Outside, the old porch railing (brick, I think it was, to match the brick of the house) was replaced by a totally incongruous 3/4 height unpainted wood railing all-but-impossible to see over or through.

To be fair, both mother and daughter were brought into the house during the work and Mike explained to them what he was planning to do. Somehow, I don't think they grasped the implications. Or they felt such a debt of gratitude they thought they had no room to object. But now that they've been back in for awhile, I have to wonder how they feel. At the "big reveal," they both agreed that it was "Beautiful, beautiful." And so it was, for what it was. But was what it was what it ought to have been? "It really doesn't seem like our house," they said, and they were absolutely right. It wasn't.

I imagine there's some sort of agreement people who go on shows like Holmes on Homes or Extreme Makeover: Home Edition sign saying they'll accept whatever plans and finishes the show's designers or contractors come up with, in return for not having to pay for the work being done. And of course, it's said you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. But if you need a sturdy nag to pull the plow and they land you with an expensive racehorse and tell you you can't sell it, what are you going to do?

Frankly, if I had a beloved Craftsman home and it was transmogrified into generic (but high-quality!) Modern, I would be utterly dismayed. The very mention of the word "gratitude" would make me want to spit. Forget the free reno, let's just sell up and move.

The Stroke of Doom

A few minutes ago, 12:26 AM, and my student AutoCAD program died for real. I was almost done doing up one last sketch elevation for my upstairs bathroom, when suddenly the command prompt froze and I couldn't get back to the layout to print it.

Fortunately, I had saved it to pdf in progress, but it's not as pretty as what I was working on.

Oddly, model space stayed with me for a few minutes more, and I got a screen shot of what I was doing.

Was going for a screenshot of something else I wanted to save, but I hit the zoom button the wrong way, and when I tried to zoom back in-- or was it out?-- everything in model space was gone.

. . . Just tried again. All the way out, all the way in. Nothing.

Well, with the pdfs and screenshot jpgs I've got my work in a form I can look at and hand-sketch over. But now that I've gotten used to this program, what are my options?

1. Buy the professional version, for $1,000 to $1,500 for the "lite" version; for up to $4,000 if I want all the 3D bells and whistles. Yeah, right.

2. Renew my student license, either through the tech school or a local retailer. That'd be a lot cheaper, but do I really want all my drawings to go on saying "PRODUCED BY AN AUTODESK EDUCATIONAL PRODUCT" for the next fourteen months?

3. Find work with an architect who has AutoCAD 2008 and who'll let me install a licensed copy on my home PC-- for the convenience of the firm, of course. At the moment, something might be happening along those lines . . . sorta . . . but the architect in question is running AutoCAD 2007. And I don't think I can convert files backwards.

4. Wait a year or two until AutoCAD 2008 is considered out of date and the price goes down. I mean, I won't be redoing my bathroom before then. And I have the pdfs in the meantime, if I want to dream . . .

Cranking

This past week I've been staring into the face of Doom. The expiration of my 14-month student AutoCAD 2008 license was looming up before me; yea and verily, an on-screen notice a couple days ago gave me to understand that at the stroke of the midnight just past my program would fold up like Cinderella's coach-and-four and I'd have no more access to the drawings I've been doing on my house.

So all day and all evening today-- yesterday the 16th-- I've been drawing and drawing and printing things out and saving things as pdfs and using this cute little app I have called FastStone Capture to get screenshots of all my plans and elevations.

So at 11:54 PM, I was thinking, Oh-oh, I never did a printable layout of my overall site plan-- I'll do it really quick. But first I had to go into model space and move all the drawings that were cluttering the site plan up [Brief explanation-- in AutoCAD, "model space" is the window where you do the actual drawing. It's like having a drafting board that goes off into infinity in all directions, and you draw on it full-size, as in 1" = 1". It's on the layout tabs that you scale things for printing.]

All right, I got my site plan decluttered. I created and named a new layout tab for it, but when I opened the viewport, nothing was there! I tried zooming in and out to find it, but all I had was white space and the X-Y axis marker! Huh?! Is this what happens when your license runs out while the program is open? Everything on your layouts disappears?

No fair! It's only 11:57!

Uh, no, checked the caller ID on the phone. 12:01 AM. Oh.

Nothing I can do about it now. So I opened my documents file and checked the pdfs and jpgs I'd stored. Pretty good job of getting them all filed away . . . then I switched back to AutoCAD.

Hmm, funny. I could still open model space. And draw in it. And look, some of the layout tabs were showing just what they ought to. Does the program close down piece by piece, bit by bit?

Short answer, no. Turns out it's my own fault I can't see most of my drawings-- they got disassociated from their layout pages when I moved all those plans and elevations in model space.

I was trying to get them back where they belonged when I suffered a Fatal Error and had to close the program.

Yes, it opened again. And the on-screen notice said my license expires tomorrow. Meaning today, but long enough for me to stop cranking and get some sleep. I'm not turning into a pumpkin quite yet.

Anything Rather Than Actually Work on the House

I've signed up for a computer drafting class at a local tech college.

It's primarily to enhance my professional chances, but I also think it will be fun to mess around on my computer and experiment with ideas for the Sow's Ear.

The interviewer told me that the CAD students draw a house for the final grade. Wonder if I can draw up my own house?

(If not, Mr. Teecher, sir, kin I do up the Craftsman house I've had lurking in my little hed since 19-bluddy-87 or so? Pleeze don't make me draw an ugly ranch box like the ones I saw postid at the kollidg, pleeeeezzz!?)

When I draw up digital ideas for my ugly foursquare box, I can post them on here. I'm sure you'll be waiting with anticipation and glee.

Someone Else's House

Please allow me a measure of non-house-restoration self-indulgence.

I mentioned earlier that I took my parents sight-seeing on Saturday. One of the sights we went to see was a church I worked on as project architect when I was full time with the big design firm. The program was to restore the tabernacle to the central axis, and to return the choir pews and organ, which were moved in the early 1980s to the chancel behind the altar, back to the rear balcony.

We came up with a scheme the parish priest and the donor liked, and eventually we convinced them to let us (that is, me) design the new reredos instead of shipping something over from Europe or letting an outside consultant do it.

So here it is. Very handsome, in my humble opinion!

I'm sorry I can't provide an overall view of the completed choir loft millwork and organ case. The house lights were off when we came. I had access to the light panel, but it's the fancy new one that's just been installed, and I've never seen it, I've never been shown how to use it, and I didn't want to risk messing up the settings just before Saturday evening Mass. So I let it alone.

Here's another shot of the reredos from the dedication last December. Not bad work for a Prot, eh?