The Gardens

All work around here either comes in a whirlwind of activity or a series of small pecks that make progress excruciatingly slow. With a week and a half off between the end of school and the beginning of our artists' residency in Utah, we've seized the opportunity to dive headlong into the landscaping, and the results have been fruitful. We are watching the weather closely and tomorrow we will decide whether to have a truckload of dirt delivered before we go. But rain looks likely, so we'll see.



Working around industrial design students for the past few years has made me see every problem as a design problem to be weighed out equally in terms of aesthetics and utility. As a result, our new compost bin is a marked improvement for the one at our last house. It was made from repurposed cedar spindles from a carpentry job that, due to a calculation error, yielded a couple hundred extra (it was a big job). This composter features removable front slats that individually slide out to allow access to the compost.



Gathering stones on mother's day from the pile up at the 20 acres in Iola, where my father is engaged in a massive landscaping project of his own. He is "weeding" the woods, attempting to eradicate them of two invasive species; buckthorn and bayberry(?). Its a daunting task, as these two species seem to make up about 80% of the underbrush. Looking around, the task seems almost futile, but we walked through the woods where he had cleared large areas and the progress was quite impressive. He hopes to reintroduce native species that will compete and hopefully keep the invasives at bay. Its interesting to see my father following in my grandfather's footsteps, spending his days up in the same woods. For grandpa it was chopping wood, planting trees, driving the tractor, and sipping on blackberry brandy. For dad it is clearing trails, planting more trees and planning the construction of a cabin/workshop which may begin to take shape this summer. Back at home I'm on knees trying to eradicate the ever-invasive dandelion, one by one because I refuse to use chemicals.



After a year, a housewarming gift from my parents finally sees soil. Three new trees have been planted along the south side of the house; a redbud in the front yard and two apples; a Courtland and a Jonathan, in the side yard. The drainage was not what we had hoped in the side yard, so we may have trouble with the apple trees, but we mounded them up and buried gravel underneath them and now we will keep our fingers crossed and hope that there is pie in our future.



Raised bed of white oak 2x10's with Greene and Greene inspired joinery.

testing

Hello? Is anybody out there? Whats this? Could it be? The Sun!

'What of miniature boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves, launched onto cold water clear as air? How many fleets were pushed out toward the middles of ponds or sent down autumn brooks, holding treasures of acorns, or black feathers or a puzzled mantis? Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from ocean siege or October breeze.'

- Paul Harding

Sweet Sabotage

Normally on Fridays, Shana and I meet with our intern, Calvin, at the studio. We set up this internship when we had planned to do a major hanging sculpture for the Overture Center in Madison. But scheduling conflicts meant that the sculpture would have had to be installed right around the time when we would be moving in to the house. And the approval process took longer than expected, pushing back our start date to the point where the window of time for fabrication was getting frighteningly narrow. Renovating the house and building this sculpture simultaneously would have been a recipe for a complete nervous breakdown. Something had to go, and the paperwork on the house was already signed, so we postponed the Overture project for a later date. But we kept the internship anyway, figuring that it would keep us from being completely absorbed in the house project and neglecting our art career. As I am seeing the renovation partially as research for our artwork, the internship allows us to maintain a running thread of continuity with our previous work and keep the renovation relevant to our art practice. The installation for the Overture Center, incidentally, depicted an old farmhouse with its bottom falling out. The sculpture we are currently building with our intern is the same house presented as a sculpture being flooded by its pedestal. I promise to get further into the content of these works and their relationship to the renovation in future posts.

After reading my last, somewhat pathetic blog post, Shana in her infinite wisdom decided that a bit of triage was in order and she hatched a plan to kidnap me and force me to take a break. Unbeknownst to me, she called up the intern and cancelled our Friday meeting. She decided that she would put the bikes in the van and on our way to the studio she'd just keep driving and we'd head up to the northern Kettle Moraine for a day of biking, swimming and hiking. But when I threatened to go to the house early to get some mudding done before we met with Calvin, she was forced to spill the beans. Fortunately, I did not protest and despite a hiccup with a broken inner tube valve which put an end to the biking plans, we spent a much needed leisurely day swimming and hiking at Mauthe Lake.

On returning to Milwaukee, we paid a visit to Maurice Grimes, one of the sage woodworkers in my life. He treated us to Shrimp and Asparagus pasta and made sure our glass was always full. Seeing the lush gardens, collections and endless woodworking projects that engulf his 1872 brick house brings his character together. This is a man who has truly made his home an extension of himself.

Today I go back to work, and despite a bit of a sunburn, I'm not feeling the burnout... I'm ready to get back into it. It helps also that we've reached a turning point in the project. All of the internal stuff is done... the plumbing, the electric and the insulation... which means we are hanging drywall. The destruction phase is over. Its time to begin putting this house back together again. And this feels good.

The Anatomy of the Wall

To ask somebody to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with breaks only for meals and sleep, brings to mind words like cruel and inhumane. I would never ask anyone to do this for me, and yet here I am working this schedule voluntarily. I suppose the difference is that I am working for myself, rather than toiling away for someone else's profit with no direct, tangible rewards other than the abstract notion of a paycheck. I will live with the results of my labor and eventually, the hope is that it will all be worth it. But there is no escaping the inevitable physical and psychological effects of working such a schedule. Eventually it catches up to you. I was at a family reunion this weekend, one of the first Sundays this summer that I have not spent working on the house. My aunt Lynn was recalling her experience of building a house and she described an image she had of the house going up while she crumbled to the ground. More than I'm happy to admit, I can relate.

When I set out to make this blog, I decided that I didn't want to treat it as a diary. I didn't want it to be a blog that put my heart on my sleeve for everyone and their mother (and mine) to hear about. I had read a few blogs that seemed like calls for attention, cries for help, and this is exactly what I wanted to try to avoid. I guess I envisioned this sort of romanticized notion of renovation as an intellectual exercise and I would use the blog to report all of the insights and inspiration I had gained through the process. You may have noticed that I have not posted in quite some time. This is because I hit a wall. There were too many posts, to many things that I wanted to write about and not enough time. Meanwhile the romance of the project was fading and being overshadowed by the immensity of the workload. And this wall is reinforced with events that don't fit my romantic notion of what the renovation should be; events like when I was pruning the neighbor's maple tree that was crowding out our cedars. It was shaping up to be a great blog post as I was climbing on top of the garage roof and it just happened to be the day of the air show and the Blue Angels were flying overhead. But when I cut the wrong branch and it came crashing down, taking out all of the limbs on one side of the cedar, it took the wind out of my sails. I loved that cedar. It had such a nice shape. It was one of the reasons why I wanted this house. Now it's lopsided and awkward and the pruner is retired to the garage. Meanwhile, streams of water continuously seep into the basement all along one side of the house. It's proving to be a much worse problem than the seller had made it out to be. All the while the move in date creeps closer and closer and I'm not sure that I can outrun it.

Once a week or so I try to take a little break. Going to Iola for the family reunion felt like my first true taste of summer... what people are supposed to do in summer; hang out, drink a few beers, enjoy the weather. Two weeks ago Shana and I went for a morning hike. This morning we went swimming and I stopped at the house and picked the black raspberries growing behind the garage. I keep waiting for these little breaks to fill me up and reenergize me, so that I can go back to work with renewed vigor and enthusiasm. But mostly, I'm just tired and anxious. What I really need is a week off, but I know I can't have it... not yet. Shana and I have scheduled a trip up to Madaline Island on Lake Superior for the week after we are supposed to move in. It will be a well deserved vacation, but depending on our progress, we may or may not be able to go. It's good incentive to keep pushing forward, but theres a limit to how much we can accomplish in a given period of time. We'll see.

Maybe what I am going through is something akin to the renovation itself. Something that necessarily begins with destruction, with violence, but clears the way for something improved, something stronger - a phoenix. But this phoenix has an attraction to the fire, and I wonder how many times it can be reborn. Sometimes I think that what we are doing here is absurd. All of our decisions about the house are these attempts to make a place that is comfortable, relaxing, a place of leisure. When the renovation is done, I tell myself, then I can relax and enjoy the fruits of my labor. But the reality is that when the renovation is done, I will dive headlong into the next big project. I can sit in my Morris chair, on my oriental rug, in front of my fireplace in the restored bungalow that I've always wanted, but will I really be able to appreciate it or will I be too deep in the anxiety of the next deadline? Dear reader, my heart is on my sleeve now, and I'm sorry you have to hear all of this, but the the fact is that the blog has stagnated because I have been dishonest... I've been holding back, and a true look at this project must acknowledge the fact that pain and suffering are two of its componets, and they are perhaps the price that must be paid for the fulfillment that will come with its completion.

Tapping the Reserves

As we get deep into the work of the house, the days are long and we're maxing out our energy reserves, getting up early and working until we can't work anymore. The blog becomes another item on the to do list, buried under rows of more urgent tasks. Coming back from L.A. I had hoped to spend a day or two decompressing and reflecting on our trip before diving back into the construction zone, but a call from Evan said that he and Hyo Jung were ready to come up and help finish the electric work, so we were right back in the thick of it. Now, on this Memorial Day, while the rest of the world is out camping, I've decided to go out for breakfast and start on the house a bit later. I'm peering across the street at the lumberyard trying to figure out whether or not they intend to take the day off. Somewhere there's a holiday bucket of drywall mud for me, even if it means going to the Dumb Hippo (that's code for Home Depot). I have a long post I want to write about L.A., and maybe I'll still get to it. But for now, here's a few pictures:

Shana with Cousin Jeff, who was our Pasadena host, on the back porch of the Gamble House

This picture basically sums up Mark and Shana's friendship

Hiding in the bougainvillea at the Schindler House

Mark in his Hollywood apartment giving his best bad guy look

A rare look at the bones of a perfect house surrounded by other perfect houses in a perfect neighborhood.

My dust mask awaits.

Pepperoni and Other Building Materials

The old house. The house that I grew up in - from age 5 to 14 - grade school to Jr. High. Everyone said that when I visited Canyon Country I would be astonished by how much it has been developed, but to me it didn't really seem like it had changed much. Sure there were some new houses, but the place was under development when I was living there and what I saw just seemed like a logical continuation of that process. There is a limit to the development possibilities in our old neighborhood because eventually you run into steep canyon walls that are essentially unbuildable. And over the hill in Crystal Springs, the roads had expanded to reach these natural limits. But in my immediate neighborhood, on my street, there were the same number of houses that were there when I lived there. Most had changed little. Our house, so I heard, had undergone a million dollar renovation. I was expecting to see an unrecognizable monstrosity, but really they had only added a small addition over the concrete patio where we used to hang the laundry. Other than that, the footprint was essentially the same. She had however undergone a major facelift. The pergola had been removed, it was painted white, and there was an apron of brick up to about waist height that ran around the perimeter of the house. Even with all of these changes, I stood for a moment nearly dumbstruck by the sight of the place. It seemed to vibrate with an intense energy of compressed memory. It was a sort of feeling of vertigo, a tingling in the chest. The owner was in the driveway, tending to his trailered speedboat, so we approached and introduced ourselves. He was kind enough to let us into the back yard and we reminisced about the history of the place. I looked up at the back hill and I remembered that I once buried a cat up there, where there was now a white vinyl fence. Apparently he had dug up a box while setting posts, but he assured me that he reburied it once he realized what it was. Seeing the backyard, my heart sank. The wonderland of trees and cacti that I knew as a child had been nearly stripped bare. What motivated them to cut down such glorious trees I can only guess, but he mentioned something about maintenance. I remember having to sweep the pool of pine needles, but this hassle never would have led me to the conclusion to cut them down. And probably the plum tree, and the pear tree, and the apricot tree were removed because of their "litter" as well.

Several years ago, when I first drove by my grandparents' house in Iola, Wisconsin after it was sold, and saw that they had painted it beige, I felt violated, like they had tampered with something sacred and gotten it all wrong. I wanted to go inside and tell the new owners that the house was supposed to be red, that they should put it back the way it was. It was enough that my grandfather had removed the light-up Haroldson Electric sign from out front when I was in grade school. It made no sense to me that it was no longer needed because he had retired. It was simply supposed to be there. I wanted it back. And now some stranger thinks that he can go and paint the house any color he wants, just because he bought the place. This was the house that my grandparents had bought with another relative and then split in half because they could not afford the whole thing. They literally cut it in half and had their side moved to the site. They lived in a renovated chicken coop on the property before they could afford to have the house brought in. And this was the place that I had gone every summer of my childhood from the time I was a toddler and built up a treasure trove of sweet memories. All of those memories are housed. They belong to that place. I can crawl up the carpeted stairs in my mind and I can tell you what is in each drawer of the dresser at the landing between the two upstairs bedrooms. I can see in intimate detail the star patterned holes in the acoustic tile ceiling, the light up painting hanging on the wall, and the plastic flower arrangements in the corner. I can see my grandpa fiddling with the receiver on his satellite TV and I can feel the texture of the rainbow striped carpet in the three season room. And when we bought the bungalow and I stepped into my very own garage, I smelled the odor of the gas lawnmower and grass clippings and instantly I was transported to Grandpa Leo's shop in his garage where we would search through innumerable tiny drawers of parts for things we did not understand and there would always be a Jolly Good Cola in the fridge. For a hundred some thousand dollars, my family relinquished all rights to this place and our memories are buried, one by one, under layers of paint and new carpet. Of course there would have been no sense in keeping it. There would have been no one to live there. But it is painful nonetheless.

I came to Canyon Country bracing myself for this sense of loss. But when I first set eyes on the place and felt that rush of energy, I knew that somehow its essence remained. And I drove through Canyon Country on instinct, searching out places that gave me that sense of warm nostalgia. I found it in the hill in front of my house that I used to skateboard down, and I found it in the old green utility box on the side of the road that served as our bus stop. It has often been noted that nothing can trigger memory like a smell or a taste, and I knew that the nostalgia jackpot was waiting for me in the crispy pepperoni on top of a Round Table pizza, a taste that I have been craving for twenty years. We pulled into the strip mall and there it was, where it had always been. I walked in and instinctively ordered a root beer. I took one bite of pizza and I knew, and was comforted that some things never change. Looking around the room, I saw that they had remodeled a bit, but the arcade was still there, and the same coat of arms, although it had been moved, was still hanging on the wall. It struck me that the world is a palimpsest, alternately being covered and revealed in layers, reconfigured, rearranged, but never really fundamentally changed. Space remains where it is, and seems to contain all that was ever there.

Before we returned to LA, we stopped at Vazquez Rocks, where my parents had taken us on a yearly excursion for Easter sunrise service. It is also the place where many films have been shot, usually portrayed as an alien landscape. Climbing on the rocks Shana turned to me and remarked, "Being here, I think I understand you a little better," because it is after all, a part of me.