Hooked on home improvement
BOOK REVIEW
In 'All the Way Home,' author David Giffels tackles window caulking, plumbing and rodents with gusto. He calls his addiction 'a disease.'
AS A lover of both homes and words, I am personally grateful that a certain 1913 Tudor mansion in Akron, Ohio, was allowed to slide into crumbling, moldy decay.
The sad state of this once-grand home gave hyperactive journalist David Giffels something to do with his energy -- restore the home over a period of 10-plus years (it's still not done) -- and provided him with the material to pen this truly wonderful book, "All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House."
Giffels, an award-winning columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal, and his wife, Gina, were expecting their second child in the mid-1990s when they began searching for a larger home. Like most of us, they wanted more home than they could afford, and they found themselves looking in higher-end neighborhoods with estate-like residences, then creeping back to their own "semi-remarkable" house and the reality of their financial limitations.
They decided a grand fixer-upper was the way to go. The two-story pre-World War I house they bought for less than $70,000 was all but overtaken by trash, critters and decomposition. The previous owner had covered the floor of the master bedroom with 55 baking pans to catch leaks. Ceilings had fallen, and the smell of cat permeated the place.
Imagining what could be
What caught the couple's imagination, though, were the home's six fireplaces, the tiled solarium, French windows, thick moldings and the butler's pantry, which would eventually become Giffels' office and where he would write this book.
This was not to be a simple case of a homeowner in a shirt and tie juggling hired craftsmen and subcontractors. The house's troubles did provide wages for plenty of workers, but the property also proved a battleground for Giffels as he faced rodents, collapsing plaster, cracked window caulking and his fears of parenthood and encroaching middle age.
With warrior-like intensity, he tackled floorboards and plumbing, bats and raccoons, brick and tile and drywall and scrolled woodwork. And he relates each adventure with such exquisitely detailed thoughts, fears, smells, sights and sounds that readers might look up after a spell and wonder why, after vicariously living through all this, their own projects aren't further along.
But, as with any war, there was a price to pay in time spent away from family, missed holidays and vacations, resentment from the spouse. It doesn't take a math major to figure out that removing, cleaning and caulking the home's 733 windowpanes took time away from other things.
