JOURNEY MAN
A Carpenter’s Story
By Daniel Foster

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BILL AND SHARON

There is often a trail from one client to another.  It might be a result of working in a neighborhood, where a neighbor learns of me through the visibility of my presence, or it might be the result of a client recommending me to a friend.  It can go on for many ‘generations’.  In this case the deck job at Carol and Frank’s begat a kitchen remodel for them which begat a basement remodel for them which begat a skylight install for her brother Ken which begat a bath remodel for him which begat a cathedral ceiling rebuild for his neighbor and then an attic remodel for Ken’s law firm coworker Bill and his wife Sharon, which begat probably more work than I can remember.

Bill and Sharon Clinton were great clients.  I was with them for years, in fact.  Maybe it was because Bill and I had similar taste.  Certainly we were both concerned with quality.  I enjoyed building for them and they enjoyed what I built.  Over the course of our relationship Bill went from being a young lawyer working for one law firm to being a partner in a very prominent firm.  They went from a small Dutch colonial in Bethesda to a large home in Chevy Chase and then to a city home/country home combination in Alexandria and Middleburg.

Old homes were Bill’s hobby, in a way.  He had every issue ever published of The Old-House Journal, a magazine devoted to the caring renovation of old houses.  He also possessed a variety of other books on old homes, including a large series called the White Pine Monographs that contained detailed scale drawings of homes, outbuildings and details, such as entries, from all eras of this country’s architecture.

My first project for Bill was finishing the attic of their Bethesda Dutch Colonial, turning it into an office and a guest room.  Bill and I looked at it, talked about it and then I just moved ahead with it.  If I ran into a problem or issue we would discuss it, make a decision, and proceed, but in fact there were few problems.

The stairs to the attic were steep and wouldn’t be allowed by code in a new home, but it was allowable to rebuild them on the existing stringers – the structural elements that supported the treads and risers.  In the end the rebuilt stairs were perfectly safe and comfortable, just a little steep and narrow.  They were also elegant: strong, thick oak treads with painted risers, an oak handrail beginning at the top with a gooseneck drop from the top newel post.  This is a classic design incorporating a short horizontal handrail that then turns 90 degrees down before gracefully curving into the angle with which it proceeds in alignment with the stairs.  At the top of the stairs I finished a short landing with the oak handrail over classic newel posts and white balusters.

I insulated and sheetrocked the attic itself and refinished the wide, old wood flooring that was there, staining it dark.  Along both walls of the office I built oak bookcases and in the gable end of the office I installed a fan-lite window – a window in the shape of a half circle – which looked perfect.  All of it occurred just the way these things should occur.  Bill would describe what he wanted, we would converse on the details, and I would build it and it would be beautiful.  Simple.

I would go on to rebuild an exterior balustrade that was on the perimeter of a flat roof over the screen porch and do several items in the kitchen, and then I went on to other jobs.

A few years later I went to work for a contractor in Bethesda.  At the time it looked like a good opportunity.  I was getting tired of looking for the jobs.  I had done a number of jobs on which I had underbid and suffered the financial consequences and I had done a number of jobs that were just unpleasant, such as crawling in dark slimy crawlspaces to repair a bad foundation.  Working for Hupman Construction looked like a good thing.

I did one complete project for Hupman Construction, and it was satisfying in many ways, primarily because of the clients, who were wonderful.  They were Jody Powell and his wife, Nan.  Jody had been the very visible press secretary for President Carter and it was enjoyable to hear stories, primarily from Nan, of life in the White House. Jody’s office contained various memorabilia of his time there.  My favorite was a picture of Jody holding a dozen balloons, standing next to a clown in full clown regalia.  On it, President Carter had written, “I’ve always wondered what you do.  This helps.”

Following plans by Ron Hupman, I constructed a large addition for the Powells, containing a new kitchen, bathroom and living area on the first floor and a new guest room and master suite on the second floor.  We also rebuilt the garage, turning it into a summer kitchen and entertaining area.  Later I would build a number of furniture pieces for them, including an oxymoron for each: a Shaker vanity for Nan and a Shaker valet stand for Jody.

 

The Powell project was enjoyable because of the clients, but the structure of working for Hupman was unpleasant.  This was his only project and I was the only employee.  Hupman insisted that we hire temporary labor from the Manpower office as needed, so I would end up with various guys for short periods, some of whom would have skills, some of whom would have a work ethic, but none of whom had both and some of which had neither.  I finally persuaded him to hire a guy who had been working temporarily for one of our subcontractors, a small finish carpentry crew we brought in to help with the garage transformation, and this was a big improvement.

 

The Clintons contacted me again around this time and asked if I could help with more work on their house.  I told them I was working now for another contractor, but that I would love to do the work and that perhaps I could do it for them through Hupman.  I introduced them to Ron Hupman and they and Ron worked out a contract and Ron procured a permit while I completed the last details on the Powell job.

 

Hupman had the finish crew from the Powells do the first of the work on the Clinton job, which was enclosing the screen porch and installing an in-floor heating system.   I would see those guys occasionally and I got the distinct feeling that things were not going very well.  Hupman had screwed some stuff up.  The more I learned the less happy I was.  These were former clients of mine and it looked like they were not being treated well.  I also learned what Hupman’s mark-up was on materials, and I considered it excessive.

I was soon finished with the Powell job and on the Clinton job myself.  My helper, Steve, came with me to the Clintons.  We were installing eyebrow dormers and a new cedar shingle roof.

Eyebrow dormers are beautiful but also an unusual and somewhat difficult thing to build.  The entire front of the dormer is comprised of a curve which begins gradually and then steepens, flowing up from the roof and then over the top of the dormer and down and flattening out again.  From the curved front it rises back to meet the main roof, creating another curve where the two meet.  Unlike most other types of dormers, there are no “usual” ways to build eyebrow dormers, at least none that I knew.

I began by shaping a pattern out of plywood to a pleasing shape for the front of the dormer, at the same time locating it on the roof.  Once this was done we created a permanent front frame out of multiple layers of plywood and then proceeded to run rafters back to the main roof from this front member.  Then the entire dormer was covered with plywood sheathing, created from double layers of thinner plywood, which could be bent to follow the complex curves we had created.

A demo crew had stripped the old shingles off the roof before our work began, so we had begun with a clean slate.  Ron Hupman came by at least once a day.  He would basically tell us to hurry and he offered several ideas for ways we could speed things up, each of which would have resulted in an inferior job.  My relationship with him was deteriorating.  I was unhappy with the way he was treating my old client.  I simply continued doing things the way I saw fit.  Ron had become an impediment to doing good work.

One day Ron showed up and said I was no longer working for him.  I was fired.  He had a list of things I was supposed to do before I left.  I was supposed to take various tools back to his house and do several other things.  I told him that if I was fired he could do all that.  A lively discussion ensued.  Basically he wanted to be the big dog and I was supposed to roll on my back and do everything he wanted.  I wasn’t interested.

I told Sharon what was going on.  Shortly afterward she told me that she and Bill wanted me to stay on the job.  They fired Ron Hupman and Steve and I continued our work.  I don’t know the details, but I do believe that Bill could have eaten Ron for breakfast when it came to anything to do with law and that’s what happened.

So I was back on my own again.  Steve and I continued our work, completing the dormers and shingling the roof.  The weather was pleasant and life was good.

When the dormers and roof were complete Steve and I moved on to the basement.  Bill wanted us to completely finish the basement as a play area for the kids.  It was a difficult task because the ceiling was on the low side and we needed to both enclose a lot of mechanicals but also create an open and pleasant space.  I liked the finished product, but the solid knotty pine we used lent it an almost stereotypical period look.

After a few more small items, such as repairing a trellis in the back yard, there was really no more to do.  With fond farewells we left for other ventures.  Steve helped me with a few more jobs, but eventually he left to work closer to his home.

 

I got a call about a year later from Bill.  He was considering buying another house and he wondered if I would take a look at it.  I said I would.

The house was about a mile from their old house in Chevy Chase, Maryland.  It was much larger than their current house, with a great back yard and in a great neighborhood.  It was at heart a center hall colonial, though it was detailed on the exterior with elements from the 1920s.  I looked it over top to bottom and told them I thought it was a great house but that it would need considerable work in several areas.  These ranged from the need to rebuild the cornice – the heavily moulded edge of the roof – to work on the stairs and some shoring up of the first floor structurals in the basement.

Bill asked me if I would be interested in working on the house if they purchased it and I said I would, and so began another year together with the Clintons.

I rebuilt the Chevy Chase house from top to bottom, Bill and I together working out details to his satisfaction.  He had a very good eye for proportion and detail and a thorough knowledge of old house style, so it was very much a joint effort, as have been all of my most pleasurable jobs.  My most enjoyable work has always involved helping people achieve their visions, and this is easiest when the vision is clear.

We began with rebuilding the cornice work.

The cornice of a home is where the outside wall and the roof intersect.  It includes the moulding under the roof projection and the moulding or trim at the face of the projected eave.  You can think of moulding as all that fancy looking stuff: wood shaped into convex and concave curves, and sometimes ‘dentil’ – little rows of ‘toothed’ moulding.  The old roof had built-in gutters – troughs built into the roof itself.   These were lined with metal that had been allowed to corrode and leak over time. The water had seeped into the framing beneath and caused a lot of wood rot.  Many of the rafter tails – that portion of the rafters that extended beyond the wall line – needed to be replaced.

I developed a design to rebuild the cornice incorporating standard metal gutter material to simulate the trim at the edge of the roof face.  This was possible because one profile of standard gutter material is meant to simulate the profile of a standard wood moulding.  Incorporating this moulding into the front edge of the roof fascia allowed me to eliminate the costly and troublesome built-in gutters.  I removed the slate shingles at the bottom few feet of roof around the building as well as the boards beneath them and then installed new rafter tails.  The tails bridged the area that formerly was the trough for the gutters.  Then I installed new board sheathing in these areas and installed the gutters and accompanying moulding at the leading edge of the roof.

I was assisted in the roof rebuild by a carpenter named Alan, who had been recommended by my electrician friend, Meyer.  Alan was hard working and would arrive on time every day.  He had a good sense of humor and we worked well together.

We brought in a roofer I had worked with before to patch in the slates on the repaired areas.

A large part of the initial work was made up of tasks that were best repaired before the family moved into the new house.  These included the rebuilding of a bathroom on the second floor.  I had found an excellent plumber who worked with Alan and I on analyzing the plumbing problems and developing solutions.  The bathroom was in such bad shape that it needed to be gutted entirely, including most of the framing in the floor beneath it.  I had enough confidence in Alan to leave him with the reframing of this area while I worked on other areas.

At some point I got a message from the plumber that all was not well with the bathroom framing and that I needed to get involved.

I went to check on Alan’s work and discovered the framing to be significantly off.  Alan seemed to have a hard time seeing what I was talking about.  Literally.  I was pointing things out and Alan became vigorously defensive.  I couldn’t understand it.  Alan became more and more defensive and argumentative.  Finally he picked up his tools and walked to his truck, saying if I didn’t like his work he wasn’t going to stick around.

I was stumped.

I got a call a from Alan couple of days later.  He apologized.  He said he didn’t know why he acted the way he had. He told me he had an eye condition that had been getting severely worse.  In fact he was going blind, though he was hoping he would be able to have an operation that could help.  I was struck dumb.  There was little I could say but to wish him well.  I had liked Alan a lot and we had worked well together.

Several months later I heard through Meyer that Alan had gone to Florida and that he had been able to have the operation and that, while his sight would never be perfect, it appeared he would not go blind.

I hope you are well, Alan, wherever you are.

I rebuilt a portion of the stairs and the stair railings, installed a five-piece crown in the halls, and finished the attic into a combination office area, family room and playroom for the kids.  I turned a bathroom closet into a passageway from the master bedroom, complete with ornate trim and display shelves on one side.  As each job was finished, Bill would tell me what he had next in mind and we would work out the details.

The rear of the house had been severely remuddled during the 70’s.  The original kitchen windows had been replaced with totally inappropriate casement windows, much more modern in design and function and entirely out of synch with the character of the house.  We replaced these with windows that matched the older style double hung windows on the rest of the house.  By this time the family had moved into the house, but the projects continued.

 

At one point Bill told me he wanted to replace the kitchen cabinets.  I asked him in what wood he was thinking and he said “pine”.

“Pine’s too soft for cabinets”, I said, and I asked him what color he was thinking of.

He pointed to a small table near us.

“Oh”, I said, “that’s heart pine.  That’s a different story.”

Long-leaf heart pine is a wood that is no longer available commercially.  There are only a few stands left of first growth (never been cut) heart pine, and they are protected by law against harvesting.  It was heart pine that was used in the frames of great factories in the East and Midwest in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Beginning in the 1970’s a few people began buying up the old beams from these factories as they were being demolished and remanufacturing it, primarily as flooring.  It is a very dense, durable and beautiful wood.

Bill, with his love for the best of things of the past, loved the idea of heart pine for kitchen cabinets.

I introduced Bill to the world of English cabinetry, by way of some catalogs and English magazines I had which showcased the new renaissance of handcrafted English kitchen cabinetry.  It was a world beyond the existing choices in American cabinetry, and much more akin to the cabinetry I had recently produced in a walnut and pine paneled library in McLean, Virginia.

Bill and Sharon met with a kitchen designer who sketched out a revised plan for the kitchen.  She was a talented designer and produced drawings with several interesting features, including many that were reminiscent of colonial pieces.  Bill asked me to give him a price on producing the English style cabinets, following this design.  I put together a price, to which he agreed, and I was on my way to building my first kitchen.

A company named Mountain Lumber was one of the first to harvest the timbers of old factories and barns in the newly forming industry of reclaimed wood.  I had seen their advertisements for several years in the magazine Fine Homebuilding.  Mountain Lumber was located only an hour or so from my home in Leesburg, Virginia.  The Clinton kitchen was the first of several projects for which I would utilize their wood in the years to come.  Mountain Lumber made it a point to provide its customers with the provenance of the wood they supplied, and the story behind the wood for the Clinton’s kitchen was that it had been reclaimed from beams of a John Deere factory in Massachusetts.

The near extinction of heart pine was driven in part by its use in distilling turpentine, for which hundreds of millions of acres of fine forests were consumed.  The smell of turpentine is the smell of heart pine.  The wood fills a shop with its scent as it is processed from rough boards to cabinets, and though, as the days go by, one becomes used to the scent and no longer notices it, as I write now I can remember well my first exposure to that fine wood and its fragrance.

The quality of wood has been in decline for many years.  In some cases the decline is so drastic that the qualities of certain species are reduced or lost completely.  Redwood, which was once a wood prized for its ability to resist rot and insects, is no longer a wood I strongly recommend.  Similarly, both Douglas fir and southern yellow pine, once the strongest of framing woods, have recently been reclassified downward in their strength ratings.  All of this is a result of the push by the lumber companies for faster growth.

You can see the results of this fast growth in the wood’s growth rings.  I have taken redwood 2x4s out of 70-year-old houses I have worked on in Santa Cruz, California with over 20 growth rings per inch.  I could take you to the lumberyard in Santa Cruz today and show you redwood for sale that has only 2 rings per inch, thus lacking the strength, density and insect resistance of the slower-growing wood.

Most of the heart pine from Mountain Lumber had over 25 rings per inch.

My helper and I were several weeks in the shop working on the cabinets.  The work began with planing the wood to a smooth surface and finished thickness.  Pieces were joined together to create the panels for doors and end panels, which were turned into finished panels by creating the tapered edges on the router table.  And there was a lot of sanding.

Narrow pieces were assembled into face-frames, which were attached to cabinet carcasses of 3/4” birch plywood.  I created hundreds of feet of a fine molding on the table saw and router table that would cover the joints where the cabinets joined together.

We planed the maple for the drawers, then cut the pieces to length and width and sanded them before I cut the dovetail joints that would hold them together as finished pieces.

The completed cabinets were sprayed with a shellac sealer coat and topcoats of a clear water-based urethane finish.

With the cabinets completed, my helper and I tore out the old kitchen at the Clinton’s.  Cabinets, counters and flooring were removed, as well as some drywall that was concealing attractive brick.  In went the new cabinets, followed by a countertop in a granite that Sharon had selected.

It was at about this time that I applied for a position as assistant editor on the staff of Fine Homebuilding magazine.  Through a resume and a cover letter that succeeded in expressing my enthusiasm for the possibility of working with Fine Homebuilding I managed to merit a phone interview with Kevin Ireton, the editor.  He asked me if I had any writing samples.  I had none.  What was I working on at the moment, he asked, and I told him about the heart pine kitchen.  He asked me to write an article on the project and send it to him.

Fine Homebuilding had me come up to Connecticut and interview with Kevin and several others on the staff of the magazine, but the job went to someone else, a recent graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.

It turned out that Kevin had not read my submitted article until much later.  He called and said he wanted to publish it.  One of the staff came to Virginia and took pictures and some months later my article and kitchen appeared in the magazine.  To a degree I felt as if I had arrived.  It appeared I knew what I was doing.

The thread of work that had led to the Clintons ended there.  There were other threads that fed work to me in Virginia, with more kitchens to come, but the many months of commuting to Maryland, across ferries and back roads were over.

 

The children are grown now.  Billy, the youngest, who was not yet in elementary school when I first met him would be nearing thirty: not so different from Bill’s age when I first met him.  I wonder if he inherited his father’s love of fixing up old houses.