Free The Barn House by Ed Zotti

away or after two weeks the place will look like it was overrun by rabid ferrets.
    Â 
    â–  Speaking of hardwood flooring, make sure the carpenters attach the plywood subflooring to the joists with screws—fewer squeaks. For that matter, if you’ve got an old house and the subflooring consists of six-inch-wide pine planks, never mind the plywood—just have the planks secured with screws, with the finished flooring nailed over that. Shrinkage due to winter dryness will be spread over the whole floor rather than concentrated at the plywood joints and you won’t have big gaps.
    Â 
    â–  If you’ve got the basement floor torn up, and the drainpipes beneath consist of hundred-year-old tile, replace them now or regret later that you didn’t.
    Â 
    â–  The family room should adjoin the kitchen. Okay, everybody knows this. However, do they know to put a pass-through between the two rooms so that it opens over the kitchen sink, with windows in the far wall of the family room so whoever is at the sink can look out in the backyard and watch the kids play? They would if they talked to me.
    Â 
    â–  If you’re putting in porch steps, and you live in a climate where water falls periodically from the sky, don’t make the bottom step wood—it’ll rot. Concrete is the thing. I speak from experience.
    Notwithstanding these minor matters, planning the work on the house, from an architectural standpoint at least, presented no great difficulty. The real challenge was coming up with the money to pay for it.

4
    P eriodically in life one encounters things that are far more complicated than by rights they ought to be. Childbirth is one. I’m surely not the first person to think during the climactic moments of this supposedly joyous event: This is the most idiotic way to reproduce a species I’ve ever heard of. It is, after all, a basic biological process. It’s had billions of years to evolve. You’d think by now we’d have worked up something involving ziplock bags, foam peanuts, and piped-in Mozart. But no. Instead we have buckets of blood, excruciating pain, and moronic medical residents, not to mention a non-negligible chance of deformity and death, all in an effort to squeeze an eight-pound sack through an aperture that can comfortably accommodate a jumbo frank.
    I’m not claiming that financing the renovation of an old city house is in the same league with childbirth, agony-wise. But there are definite points of similarity. The pointless aggravation. (If you flunk the medical-resident admissions test, rest assured there’s a place for you in the bank department in charge of dreaming up loan documentation requirements.) The endless waiting. The constant threat that all will end in disaster.
    The thing was, at the time we acquired the Barn House, we were doing something normal people didn’t do—we were taking a decrepit house in a declining city and fixing it up, in contrast to the usual American practice of moving to the edge of settlement and starting from scratch. Confronted with such an eccentric act, those in the business of lending money were taking no chances. Don’t misunderstand; it’s not that no one had ever requested a loan to rehabilitate an old city house. Indeed, so many had gone before us that at financial institutions specializing in home improvement loans for city houses a well-defined process had evolved. Up to a point it made sense.
    Here’s how it worked. One started with the house. It perhaps was in need of repairs, but it was more or less intact; a price had been struck for it, and a mortgage loan obtained. Very well; that was the bedrock upon which all else relied. One then needed to obtain a construction loan to pay for the renovation, and upon completion of the work, a final mortgage that paid off both the original mortgage and the construction loan and provided long-term financing for the finished house. It seemed