Melinda Lewis and her eight children are passengers on what her husband, Dale, calls a “five-year voyage into the realms of where man should not go.” Lewis, a prison guard when he is not pounding nails, is renovating the family’s Marissa, Ill., house.
“What does my kitchen look like?” Dale Lewis yells into the phone, over the sounds of screaming toddlers. “Bare studs. Bare ceiling joists. I’ve got insulation in, but that’s about it.”
Jayne Hawk’s husband has already spent six years remodeling their place in Shawnee, Okla. Her clothes have been in cardboard boxes so long they’ve got brown stains on them. For two years, she had to do without an indoor toilet.
“One day I said, `Wayne, that’s it–stop building,’ ” says Hawk. “He said, `I just need to build some kind of porch protection for the back kitchen door.’ The next thing I knew, it was a 16-foot-by-16-foot room … . Sometimes I think I’m going to die before we ever finish.”
The Baby Boom generation is in its householding prime, and more people than ever are rehabilitating their homes. Sales of Sheetrock, lumber and other renovation goods rose 9.5 percent, to about $162.9 billion, last year, according to the Home Improvement Research Institute, of Tampa, Fla. Each year for a decade, the do-it-yourself crowd has taken a bigger share of the goods, and it now outbuys carpenters and other professionals three-to-one.
But drowned out in the hammering din are the cries of wives doing dishes in the bathtub and children dragooned into helping pour concrete. The downside of the do-it-yourself boom is that some housing rehabs never end.
Amateurs’ mistakes are also on the rise. In the modus operandi of Renovation Man, one project inevitably leads to another.
In New Berlin, Wis., Wayne Racinowski was redoing the kitchen wallpaper when he decided the sink splashboards were ugly and the countertops were too long. While ripping out the splashboards and trimming the tops, he was inspired to install a new sink.
Now he is thinking about a new kitchen floor and a few fixes in the master bathroom. He has wanted to get back there since putting in the new toilet last year. “I hope we don’t get carried away and install a whirlpool tub like we’ve been talking about for a while,” says Racinowski, an engineering supervisor.
Joyce Krizanac, a bill collector in St. Paul, Minn., says her husband, Michael, installed a new stainless-steel kitchen sink–then replumbed the whole house while “he was at it.” When Krizanac asked her husband, a carpenter, to build shelves for the back porch, she came home to find the porch door flung open and him yelling, “Don’t come in here!”
She stuck her head in anyway. “There was no floor, no more walls, no ceiling, no nothing and he was digging out the foundation,” she reports. The list of projects at the Krizanac house goes on and on: a 15-by-38 attic bedroom, new den, patio plus landscaping, laundry room, kitchen. When she asked for an outdoor outlet to plug in her 4,000 Christmas bulbs, he rewired the house.
Many do-it-yourselfers are not pros like Krizanac. In suburban Boxford, Mass., plastic surgeon William Moore was digging with his rented backhoe, sprucing up the yard, when he hit the gas line. In the middle of his urgent cell-phone call to the gas company, the house blew up. The explosion, which hurled debris 200 feet into the air, destroyed the house and was heard two miles away. Moore had evacuated his family before the blast, so nobody was injured.
Homeowners who remodel “are a nightmare, a continuous nightmare,” says Grant Tolbert, development director in Hernando County, Fla. He says the average do-it-yourself renovation has between 30 and 50 building-code violations, compared with three or four in a professional job done by a contractor. The county, an hour north of Tampa, was so fed up with dawdling on the do-it-yourself front that it passed an ordinance in 1998 requiring work involving building permits to be completed within two years. Even so, about 10 percent ask for extensions.
“They think we’re picking on them, so then they call their elected official and want to know why they have to tear out all this work that has been done,” Tolbert says. In part, he blames home-improvement stores, with their “all-day seminars about how to put on your own roof.”
Robert Reid, a lawyer in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, has been remodeling for 20 years. His discovery last year of a leaky third-floor shower gave him carte blanche to redo the entire bathroom. But when the project was nearly finished, Reid had to leave town on a short trip–before he could address his wife’s dismay about the hot water steaming up in the toilet after every flush.
His wife did the “unthinkable”–she called a plumber, who observed that her husband had accidentally created an open loop between the hot- and cold-water valves. But Reid takes some pleasure from what the plumber told his wife: “Most people wouldn’t have even attempted this.”
Sometimes, mistakes take more time to surface. Marylou Noll was recently remodeling the kitchen in her childhood home when she discovered that her late father, a confirmed do-it-yourselfer, had boarded up a walk-in pantry–without bothering to remove foodstuffs. Noll, of Lebanon, Pa., found 15-year-old boxes of Frosted Flakes on the shelves, plus tins of Hershey’s cocoa, dusty boxes of elbow macaroni, even her mother’s missing muffin pans.
David Pointec didn’t help his relations with neighbors when he undertook to rebuild his 3,000-square-foot house in a Hernando Beach, Fla., subdivision in 1987. Pointec, who builds sea walls for a living, was still at it five years later, and neighbors sued, alleging building-code violations. “It had reinforcing rods sticking out of the thing,” recalls neighbor Ronald Hoffer, a marina owner. “And there was always piles of junk around it–old trucks, piles of dirt.”
A mediated settlement was reached in 1998, giving Pointec 210 days to finish, and he did, too, in mid-1999, more than a decade after he started the project.
“It still doesn’t look the best,” says Hoffer. But Pointec is thrilled with the poured-concrete edifice, which he considers a “monument to my children.” He finally is done, he thinks. “I remodeled it twice before,” he says.
