The Handmade House Read online

  Charlie ordered a skip. Even I could be persuaded that in the leaky shed or the area with the damp problem under the front steps, there might be a few things that could be relinquished. But no sooner had the first of these items landed in the skip than people started landing in it too, sorting through the rubbish like children on rubbish dumps in a favela. These, though, weren’t children, or poor.

  ‘There’s nothing valuable in there,’ I said mildly to a hippyish bloke.

  ‘Not to you, maybe,’ he said without looking up, which I found a bit offensive; I think I’d have known if I’d had a Monet stashed under the front steps. Charlie and I had inherited quite a few biscuit tins, but sadly no major works of Impressionism.

  It is obviously ecologically preferable to recycle the rubbish to people who actually want threadbare blankets and ancient stained pillows than it is to stick it in a hole in the ground. But I still felt unaccountably irritated. Charlie said he didn’t mind them taking things; he was more offended by what they left behind. Why, for example, had no one leapt on his book about the postwar history of the Japanese economy?

  It was the hottest day of the year, with a heat haze rising off the tarmac, Hackney listless with discomfort, our rubbish glinting malignly. Charlie and I worked all day and filled up the skip, probably twice, considering how much got taken out. (What did the hippyish bloke do with the black plastic flowerpots? Did the rusty tins ever come in handy? He should have met my grandmother.) By the evening we were exhausted. I looked around the house. We seemed to have made no impression at all.

  Just occasionally, now and then, when I visited the site, I felt the same little spurt of excitement that I used to have in design meetings. It was admittedly regrettable that the garage was the biggest room in the house, but at least the underfloor heating was in, a snake of tubing doubled back on itself concertina-like across the floor. Heating, unlike concrete, was a thing that real houses had. Every now and then, just occasionally, I believed I might live here; I had the slightly breathtaking sense that this was the house we’d designed.

  At the end of August, Varbud invoiced us for £25,000 and warned that they’d need a further £50,000 in a fortnight. We didn’t have any money to pay these bills; we hadn’t even had any money to pay a £60 bill for dinner the week before. (We’d offered up three dud cards before managing to produce one that was creditworthy, while the French waiter’s ‘Je suis desolé’ became progressively more ironic.)

  We knew that we would be able to draw down the next slug of the mortgage as soon as the glazing was completed. But even assuming that the glass was ordered, which I suspected it wasn’t, and that it wasn’t going to take sixteen weeks to arrive from Germany, which I suspected it was, Varbud wouldn’t be ready to fit it for weeks. We could draw down a further £90,000 beyond that, once everything was plastered, even though there was hardly any plastering to do.

  Charlie asked Joyce if there was any chance that she might sign off the next stage of work regardless of the fact that we were nowhere near having done it. Not unreasonably, she was affronted at being asked to lie. It would be utterly unprofessional, she said; and what would happen if Varbud went bankrupt?

  The trouble was, unless we got hold of some money soon, we’d all go bankrupt. Charlie didn’t like having to ask Joyce to lie, he didn’t like her pointing out that it was wrong, which he knew, and he didn’t like her refusing. So one way and another they had a very sticky conversation which ended with Joyce noting acidly that this (our not being able to pay) seemed to be happening more and more often. Which we also knew. Afterwards Charlie said he didn’t want to have another meeting with her for a while.

  He tried Steve, who was now back from his mystery illness. Charlie was all borrowed out, but Steve thought he might be able to raise a loan on my account. He said gloomily that he’d ‘have to see what security I can offer my risk people’.

  Charlie also asked for a meeting with Ramesh, which, luckily, turned into a sort of love-in. He came home saying dreamily that they’d agreed that they must look after each other. (I’d long thought the builders must be on drugs; maybe Ramesh had slipped him something.) Ramesh would accept payment in stages if necessary (if I did get a loan, it wouldn’t be for much), while Charlie promised that they would have a bonus – though I don’t know where we were supposed to get this from – if they could get us in by 7 December.

  Ramesh said he thought they’d have done the plastering in the next fortnight. So we agreed that we’d try to persuade the Woolwich to swap the payment stages, so we could have the plastering money first, then the glazing. (Joyce, who was still grumpy, said she doubted the Woolwich would release money for plastering before the building was dry, and if they wanted her to say it was dry, she still wouldn’t be able to sign it off.)

  House building, Charlie said at the end of this meeting, was a trade in lies. Ramesh said the glazing would be done by the end of September. (He insisted the glass was only taking three weeks to come from Germany, not sixteen, and that it took only a day to fit. You just needed to order the crane, he said breezily. I trusted he’d factored in a few days for forgetting it.) Charlie said we had the money to pay them. And Joyce said we’d have enough space.

  As Charlie pointed out miserably one morning after yet another sleepless night, building a house also made all the things that ought to be unimportant, like bricks and mortar and money, loom in the foreground. And all the things that really mattered, that should have been the substance of our lives – work, experience, the quality of relationships – got forced into the background. It was relentless and grinding, and at the end of it all, we couldn’t even have the fridge we wanted.

  We should, we agreed gloomily, have moved into a big old cheap house, done it up and gone on a lot of expensive holidays.

  11

  The people who’d wanted to buy our house the previous Christmas were still hanging on in there, despite the alarming elasticity of our plans. Believing our assurances that we would be ready by summer (which to be fair, we did too) they had put their house on the market in the spring. And, as is the way of housing chains when headed by someone who flatly refuses to move, by August both they and their buyers were in danger of having the deal fall through.

  Someone further along the chain volunteered to rent so that we could all link up eventually. In return, they wanted a contribution from everyone else along the line to their costs – £2,000 appeared to be the going rate – and a fixed completion date of 5 December.

  We went away for a week while these negotiations were taking place, during which the tense discussions on the mobile phone at least made a change from being refused money at the ATM machine. We managed to push the completion back to the 19th, although when I called Joyce to tell her (i.e. to make bloody sure Varbud were finished in time), she said unencouragingly, ‘Well, I certainly would hope …’

  Two days later a general purchasing revolt got the date pushed forward again to 12 December.

  As soon as I got home, I headed for the site to check on progress.

  ‘We’re about to do the scree,’ Mavji announced.

  ‘So then you’ll be able to get the limestone down?’

  ‘Well, yes, once it dries.’

  ‘Right. How long does that take?’

  ‘Five weeks.’

  According to Ramesh’s schedule, the limestone was supposed to go down two weeks after the scree. Which made me wonder how much of the rest of it was fictional. Mavji assured me there were other things they could be doing in the meantime, such as joinery, in the workshop.

  Soon after we got home, Tom Tasou sent us a letter pointing out that the extended deadline for reinstating his electronic gates had expired in February 2002, which, we might like to note, was now six months ago. Accordingly, he had decided that if the work was not completed to his satisfaction within twenty-one days, he would instruct the builders to put the gates back in their original position, revoke our agreement, and send us the bill.

  The m
ain reason why the gates hadn’t gone back up was that Varbud still had to pour the front wall of the house – actually the outer skin of a double wall, with insulation in the middle. This was a technically difficult operation a) because the wall was only 150 millimetres thick (not thick at all), and b) because what with the inner wall and insulation, you could only get at it from one side. Varbud had also decided not to use diagonal buttresses, which would have blocked the lane. It was bad enough for the tenants in The Glassworks not to have any gates; they’d have been even less enthusiastic about not being able to get past at all.

  When Varbud did get round to pouring this wall, the formwork wasn’t secure enough (no diagonal buttresses) and the concrete spilled out of the bottom. My brother-in-law Clive, who had gone down the lane for a look on Saturday afternoon, reported that there was an enormous amount of activity on site, which I couldn’t understand (Varbud never worked Saturday afternoons) until I realized they’d had to knock the wall down and start again. VM said next time he’d put up some diagonal buttresses ‘just for a few hours’.

  Meanwhile, Joyce and Ferhan called a meeting to warn us we’d already spent all the contingency. This had gone as follows.

  £3,500 on extra formwork (Varbud admitted they’d grossly underestimated this, and claimed they’d shouldered £10,000 of the overspend themselves).

  £500 on the hoarding to protect the roots of the ash tree (made of several sheets of chipboard, which looked like it cost, at a generous guess, £60).

  £2,000 on additional limestone (where?).

  £450 for a window in Hen’s room, which Joyce and Ferhan claimed had been required by the Planning Committee (except that we’d got planning permission in April 2001 and Varbud’s estimates on 25 July 2001, which had allowed them roughly three months to work out that it was there. The window was useless anyway, since it was too high to see out of.)

  The rest was on provisional items that cost more than anticipated (e.g. an extra £450 for the electronically operated rooflight over the stairs) and a few things that we’d decided to upgrade, such as towel rails.

  What it meant, though, was that we had to make some decisions. The shutters, which were supposed to go on all the upper windows, had turned out to be more of a feat of engineering than anyone had anticipated. Estimated at £6,700, they were actually going to cost £14,000.

  The fireplace had never been costed and had come in now, very expensively, at £3,000 (at this point I kicked Charlie under the table).

  Then there was the roof. We could, Joyce explained, have an asphalt roof at the price quoted, or a state-of-the-art roof, guaranteed for ten years.

  Actually, ten years didn’t sound that long to me. And if that was the better roof, what would happen with the other one?

  ‘Varbud would come back and fix it, obviously,’ Joyce said airily.

  At home, I fished out my copy of the spec, a fat, largely impenetrable document dense with letters and numbers, product codes and purchasing references – clotted details that if you got them wrong, could leave you with no windows.

  Joyce appeared to have specified something advertised as ‘the ultimate flat roof’, made of a material that sounded like a character from Star Trek, called Evalon C. I rang her and said that was good enough for us.

  It turned out that the ten-year roof and Evalon C were one and the same. Varbud had allegedly been told that it could be had for the same price as asphalt.

  ‘Then it’ll have to be asphalt,’ I said grumpily.

  A few days later, Joyce announced that an asphalt roof would require some kind of parapet around the top of the house, which would look funny. And she’d spoken to the Asphalt Council and it would have to be painted silver or white – something to do with heat and reflecting the light: maybe we should at least have the super-roof on the garage, since we’d be looking down on it? Oh, and she’d found £1,500 from insulation that we wouldn’t need if we had the expensive roof, because insulation was already included in the package.

  We gave in. I was aware that a major factor in not choosing the expensive roof had been that it wouldn’t be visible, and this was a bad reason. I also knew roofs were inherently risky. (When the owner of Fallingwater complained to Frank Lloyd Wright that the roof leaked, he is supposed to have said, ‘That’s how you know it’s a roof.’)

  Anti-modernist tracts made much of the absurdity of the flat roof, which they saw as the triumph of mad theory over common sense. (Tom Wolfe, in his brilliant polemic, From Bauhaus to Our House, notes that the Hartford Civic Center Coliseum had a flat roof in defiance of prevailing weather conditions; as soon as the snow came, this roof ‘collapsed piously, paying homage on the way down to the dictum that pitched roofs were bourgeois’.)

  Flat roofs, I had read in these books, are easily damaged by people walking on them, by flashings not properly installed; by erosion, sun oxidization, blisters from expanding moisture in the roof layers, splits, ridges, punctures and fish mouths (where the seams between the felts open up). When water comes in through a flat roof, you can’t always tell where it’s getting in, because water can travel considerable distances in the roof layers. And if you put a new membrane on top, it can weigh down the structure and make it concave. Which leads to ponding, which makes leaks inevitable and untreatable. I didn’t want to have to think about the roof. Not for ten years, anyway.

  So we capitulated over the roof. And then we capitulated over the limestone. The extra was for outside the house, Joyce explained, although we were already having £3,000 worth of limestone outside, and I couldn’t see how we could possibly need two-thirds as much again. She said that she and Ferhan had enlarged the terrace round the house – although we hadn’t seen any new drawings – and Varbud had mistakenly assumed the path through the slug garden would be concrete slabs, not limestone paving. (In fact, when the garden was finally designed, the path became gravel, and we had to pay for it all over again.)

  Joyce also continued to lobby over what she called the architectural importance of the shutters. Charlie met her to discuss the hanging of Tom Tasou’s gates while I was doing an interview in Berlin. Brian Eckersley, who joined them, expressed his amazement at how much we’d got for our money; he was astonished that Varbud hadn’t just said halfway through that concrete was too expensive and we’d have to have blockwork.

  Fundamentally, Charlie and I thought this, too. But from where I was sitting that afternoon, on a hard seat in a departures lounge with a streaming cold, knowing I wouldn’t be home for hours, the architectural importance of the shutters was just irritating.

  Joyce and Ferhan presented us with another of their difficult choices over the upstairs floor. They showed us an ugly veneer floor that fitted our budget (we had to have veneer rather than solid flooring, because of the underfloor heating), then a beautiful elm one at twice the price.

  Which is how, a couple of weeks later, I came to be up the Holloway Road meeting Robin Hodges, who was to make our floor and who wanted to make sure we realized what we were getting. Elm is very un-uniform, and he’d had clients complain in the past that it looked patchy.

  As Robin whisked me around the veneering process, explaining how fussy he was about moisture content and about fixing without nails or screws, he also told me he only uses fallen parkland timber (apart from oak, which comes from the biggest oak forest in Europe, first planted in Napoleonic times, and is cut at the rate of one-third of 1 per cent a year). All his elm comes from Scotland, although there are concerns that with global warming the beetle that carries Dutch Elm disease may move north. He likes the elm best, because it shows how it’s grown: you might get greenish mineral streaks in the grain. He refuses to use any tropical hardwoods.

  ‘So,’ I said carefully, ‘does that mean you can’t ever be sure any tropical hardwood’s OK?’

  ‘It’s all right if it’s plantation timber, and they’re planting two or three trees for every one they take down. But plantation timber looks the same as any other when it’s cut …
’

  ‘Then you can’t?’

  ‘It’s as corrupt as hell. You’d have to know the bloke, and the wood would have to arrive with his stamp on it, and even then …’ He shrugged.

  I drove home telling myself that it had been weeks before I could even remember the name of the iroko, and months before I knew how it was spelt. But these were lame excuses. I was a member of Friends of the Earth. Their magazines came through the letterbox from time to time and they had probably had articles about this – ‘iroko, the new teak’ – if I’d bothered to read them.

  Not long afterwards, we heard that the new European Parliament’s building in Strasbourg had had its otherwise impeccable green credentials demolished by a strip of iroko that somebody had decided to incorporate at the last minute.

  Meanwhile, what with the roof, the limestone and the shutters (they were architecturally important), Joyce and Ferhan informed us that we’d overspent our budget by £54,082.20, and they’d have to charge us 14 per cent of this, as per their contract.

  I was still trying to throw things away, telling myself now that disposability was a good thing because a world in which you had to hang on to things for several generations before they acquired any value would be a depressingly static place to live. Looked at this way, it was practically an act of radicalism to throw things away; an embracing of social mobility, of identity that was not determined by what you inherited or could pass on, but was yours to make. I busied myself subversively with black bags.

  It was an exhausting business though, and I began to wonder if I was going slightly mad. I lost the Cash’s name tapes that my mother, since I was so distracted, had ordered for Harry’s new school uniform. Probably they went into one of the black bags. I spent a whole week trying to remember the name of Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders (for some reason, I’d started to tell Freddie about them but then I’d got stuck because I couldn’t remember who they were) even though I have interviewed Chrissie Hynde and even been makeup shopping with her. Charlie said kindly that I was suffering from cognitive overload.