Visiting the Rich Cousin

If Irving Gill houses are one big family, our house would be the wayward son, the one who disappeared only to show up years later, with a long gray beard, beleaguered, and in need of a bath.

We visited the relatives last week during an Elder Hostel event at the Marston House. First, I should say that I managed to get through the event without anyone asking for proof that I am at least sixty years old. I don’t look a day over forty, at least not when I’ve had some sleep, so last week I probably didn’t look a day over fifty.

It turns out that sometimes rich cousins don’t have the constitutions of their wayward relatives. As I listened to the work done on the Marston House, I just shook my head wondering what in the heck I am worried about with our house. We don’t have two trillion bricks to repoint. In fact, we don’t even have one thousand. We do have some structural issues, but they are not on the same scale. (May those not be famous last words.)

We have dry rot on the outlooker beams, still not taken care of. We also have a beam splice in the great room and there is some disagreement among those who have looked at it as to whether it’s “ingenious and well done” or “a temporary fix that was never complete.” It also has a bit of rot. So that beam may cause some excitement but I don’t expect it to land us upside down on a home loan. Its greatest potential is ending up as one of the many California Hot Springs stories such as the time the large boulder rolled onto the road and everyone brought picnic lunches to see it blasted into bits.

The single greatest expense on this house, I expect, will be the window restoration and that, as grandpa would have said, is “a high class problem.” The windows work. At least most of the windows work most of the time. We even have new-fangled dual-pane vinyl windows to fight the winter cold. My dad put those in the closed porches back in the 90s to replace the aluminum windows installed in the 70s. Now one seems to be convinced by my argument that the vinyl is historically significant and most people think we should do something about them. Again, this is a high class problem -- they are not actually rotting the house, just causing eye strain.

My big plan now is to create a big plan. What I would like to do is create a master design plan for the house and grounds and just get started. Even if my generation just keeps the house from falling down and passes on some of the fun projects to the next generation, at least there would be a plan.