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My Oregon swimming pool
comments (0) September 25th, 2008 in Blogs
Kevin Ireton, editor-at-large
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One of the things that editing a magazine has in common with renovating an old house is that the ability to get something done depends absolutely on your ability to ignore all the other things that also need to be done. Broadening one’s view to take in the big picture is to risk being overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. And so it is that when I moved into my house, I focused on each of the things that needed to be done to make the place comfortable for my wife and me. And for 20 years, I absolutely ignored the old barn out back (except for filling it with every leftover scrap of 2x4, plywood, or quarter-round, to the point of it overflowing, like Dagwood’s closet, any time I opened the door).
But with the staircase done, the last of the big projects on
the house is behind me. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty to do: Add
more shelves and a stone floor in the pantry, tile the shower upstairs, outfit
the closet in the new bedroom. Of course, there’s also the next addition and
the garage to plan and build. But I knew that the barn would not wait forever
for me to save it, so I decided that it was at least time to put a tarp on the
roof.
I got out a ladder and went up with a rake to clear any leaves or branches
before spreading out the tarp. The front half of the roof, the one I can see
from the house and the yard, was fine. No problem. But when I got around to the
back half, the first thing I noticed were several small trees growing out of
the asphalt shingles. Mind you, I knew enough not to risk walking on the roof,
so I worked from the ladder and hooked one of the trees with my rake. When I
pulled it toward me, shingles started popping off as the 4-ft. root system came
along with the tree. I looked down at what had once been roof sheathing, and my
first thought was that I had been wrong to feel guilty over the years about my
failure to compost. Turns out I’d been composting all along, turning
200-year-old chestnut boards into a pretty rich growing medium. My second
thought was that maybe I had waited a little too long to save the barn. We’ll
see.
In the meantime, I’m gratified that anybody viewing my property from an airplane might actually be impressed. Larry Haun once told me that if you fly over Oregon in an airplane, it looks as though nearly everyone has a swimming pool because of all the blue tarps covering roofs. Now I’m sure this amounts to some sort of politically incorrect geographic slur. And I’m equally sure the same could be said of Maine or Kentucky or a lot of other states. But Larry said it about Oregon, so that’s how I think of it. My Oregon swimming pool.
posted in: Blogs
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About this blog
As the editor of Fine Homebuilding, I spend my weekdays trying to produce a magazine that will satisfy 300,000 of the most demanding builders, both professional and amateur. As the owner of a 200-year old Cape in Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, I spend weekends working on my house.
Each activity invariably informs, and complicates, the other. In this blog, I’ll offer observations from both worlds -- publishing and building -- with the hope of providing some useful or at least entertaining insights.
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