Kamikazee Preservation

Sometimes the most important thing is to just do it, don’t think too 
much, don’t hesitate, do anything but do something. A while back some 
guy wrote a book about snap intuitive judgments w/ the surmise that the 
gut feeling from long experience is right more often than not. It was 
kinda like that for me when I volunteered to be a long-distance 
estimator for Alice-Ann Krishnan who put out a call for help from us 
preservationeer folks able to provide $$ numbers for property owners, 
home owners in NOLA for a grant program for restoration of historic 
residential houses damaged by Katrina. Keep in mind this grant workshop 
was being held in December 2006, more than a year after Katrina.

It started out with phone calls. There was a lot of noise in the 
background. I was working with Phil and his Dad; Ed. Phil said his Dad 
is in construction but nothing historic. I did not catch the detail as 
to Ed’s experience. I told him that I was sitting on Long Island with my 
Means Building Construction Cost Data. Ed said he had left his Means 
home but that he had with him a Craftsman. It is like carpenters talking 
about the different brands of levels they use. An air bubble is like any 
other air bubble – it is all in the eye. The thing with the costs books 
is that they are not worth a diddly for historic work but if you have 
spent enough years looking at them you can get a feel for 1) local cost 
differentials (New Orleans masonry 75.8 NYC 102.8 – need to take into 
account if the New Orleans numbers are pre-post Katrina and/or were 
adjusted for the current market) and 2) the ‘historic’ fabric 
differential between standard work and historic.

As a preliminary Ed asked me some square foot costs, figuring that the 
requests from the homeowners would have a similarity to them. Repair or 
replace wood flooring, repair or replace siding, roofing in Spanish tile 
or slate, repair or replace, the cost to restore a double-hung wood 
window, the cost to restore a window shutter (I just recently had this 
done as a mock-up for a potential customer who has since, it seems, 
decided that she does not like the architect that brought us into the 
project to begin with). A quick answer as to what a ‘square’ of roofing 
amounts to and how many square per sf of floor (footprint). I was using 
Skype for my phone calls, nice and cheap long distance. At first Phil & 
Ed would ask the questions, I would hang up, scrunch some numbers then 
call them back. Along the way my headphone decided to fall apart... nice 
to have super gum glue and a rubber band handy.

How much to repoint 3’ high brick piers? At one point my computer, used 
for the Skype telephony and for e-mails (I was waiting for them to send 
me an e-mail) crashed. And it took me a while to get the wood stove to 
warm up the office-shed so I shivered. Ambient music in the background. 
Essentially what I did was look at the Means, think about it, look at 
the sky through my ceiling, then double the cost. There are a whole lot 
of unfathomable variables in there to deal with. Access, demo, hazardous 
conditions (debris & nails & black mold etc.) and availability of 
workforce. Availability of workforce.

My thinking is they need a number not too high to look unreasonable, 
then again I wonder who on the grant reception end will look to check if 
they will or will not know what they look at money wise (I’m used to 
insurance adjusters that have no clue other than that historic work 
might actually be more expensive than what they expect), and not too low 
that if the homeowner gets the grant that they can actually be in a 
position to pay to get someone to hire to do the work.

I envision that the grant writing workshop was held at some public 
location w/in the subject community (I got a photo afterwards - Phoenix 
- and it looked like a recently sorta fixed up house with folding chairs 
and folding tables), where it had been advertised and that folks walked 
in the door from wherever local and the volunteer crew of local 
preservation activists coached the homeowners through the process to 
fill out the forms… they were due in by December 15th. Paperwork. The 
grants are in $5,000 to $45,000 increments for a total program of $10 M. 
Seems like a lot of small grants are needed, problem is to get the word 
out to the folks who are eligible. A difficult communication problem 
when the whereabouts of absent property owners is not known. You drive 
around in NOLA, particularly Holy Cross in the Lower 9th Ward, and there 
is house after house not fixed up, or being fixed up, but obviously if 
anyone is living in any of them they are camping out in their own homes. 
I think that they hide at night. I would. It is a place of desperation 
for any sort of assistance available. On the phone calls there was a lot 
of noise of people in the background. Lunch from Mona’s was offered for 
the volunteers. I figured it would be a hassle to insist on my getting 
the best eatin’ take-out some 1,400 miles distant.

I was asked for a price to replace gingerbread millwork Eastlake Style. 
I said, “I have no clue what Eastlake style is.” It has spindles. That 
answers that. We are talking shotguns, double-shotguns, and one and two 
story wood structures with plaster interiors and some neat exterior 
detailing. The only time I have ever even seen these things is 3 days 
for the IPTW in October where we also worked with four homeowners. 
Before that what I saw of them was what was left of them a year ago 
December, a bit north in the 9^th Ward where the Industrial levee 
broke... it was a bit difficult to imagine the architecture from the 
slabs that were there... and the slabs are still there though it looks 
kinda cleaned up a bit. I need to visualize the architectural details in 
my head. It is not New England where the sense of carpentry and masonry 
comes almost as second nature for me. It is not northern Victorian, not 
even Greek Revival. I figure $600.00 per sf for spindly gingerbread. It 
may sound like a high cost but if it is done well to match to the 
existing someone could spend a whole lot of time to fabricate it, nearly 
no time install it. I think how I take too long to make things.

I was asked for a cost to replace gutters and I’m immediately wondering 
if they are like these mahogany boxes w/ the lead coated copper liners 
I’m working on, or are they like the carved out troughs at Historic 
Richmond town, no, they are half round metal, Oh, yes, that is $xx.00 
p/lf. How high up in the air do they have to go? If you need to install 
scaffold figure $xx.00 per sf. If the ETTERNITE contains asbestos, and I 
have no clue if it does or does not because I have never heard of it 
before in my life then include $xx.xx per sf.

After a bit the e-mail was established from their laptops and then they 
were able to scan the forms and photos that the homeowners brought in 
with them. The forms did me not much good but provided a baseline for me 
to ask questions. I got an idea where we were trying to get to. The 
photos tended to raise more questions than answers. Sometimes too much 
information is not helpful. A portion of a porch and a question such as, 
How much to restore and stabilize this porch? Hmmm… well, the last time 
I worked on a porch of about this size it cost $x,xxx.00. But that sure 
looks like 2 x 4 top-rail and stiles on the handrail to me. Just maybe 
it should not cost that much to replace, then again?

What I did get a sense of is how small of an amount of information we 
actually need in order to make a reasonable estimate of what work might 
cost. Also I can see where we get to a point that a wild ass guess is a 
good one… a building 25’ x 54’ has shifted – what will it cost to put it 
back and stabilize it then repair all of the plaster on the interior? 
Keep in mind changes in the typography. The earth has shifted while you 
have been thinking about this. Ummhhh… The chimney with the 6’ wide 
firebox on the fireplace leans out, two stories in height, how much to 
take it down and rebuild it? Gosh I remember that chimney 35 years ago 
that leaned out in the spring after we built it snowed in that winter 
week in the upstate back country and the extra-large girl with the 
chocolate chip cookies she made that would not leave me alone. The owner 
had cut down an elm tree a week before we started the work -- the roots 
rotted out beneath our foundation. In this case the big wind pushed the 
chimney not quite over. Geeze, how about $$... sounds good to me.

The problem, though, is not what it should or should not cost, the 
problem is going to be finding anyone that is able and willing to do 
historic conservation work as opposed to faking it. I am not talking 
museum quality here; I am talking anyone to do halfway reasonable 
historic oriented work at all – there is a shortage of contractors to do 
non-historic work as it is. Stories about architectural elements being 
stolen before homeowners even get to rebuild. Contractors that take 
deposits then move on to the next lucrative gig without returning. 
Homeowners paranoid to let anyone into their homes lest what they have 
left to them is scoped out then later stolen. If it is preservation that 
we want then we have to be open to let things slide well enough that 
almost anything is done to not lose this architectural heritage. I don’t 
think I was doing so much insofar as estimating goes, this idea that 
cost is an objective commodity does not float... I can only hope that I 
was adding grease to the wheels and to sustain a bit of hope for those 
on the front lines.

Phil gave me the term Kamikazee Preservation in a voice mail: reluctance 
to surrender in the face of insurmountable odds and with a lack of 
sufficient resources to prevail against the god of wind. An echo of the 
failed policy of a previous Emperor?

XXX

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