He finished his work yesterday, and I’m overall satisfied with how it turned out. He re-did a few things and got the important parts more or less correct.
He was recommended by people I trust, and his price was very low. But when this self-styled jack of all trades attempted to do rough carpentry it became clear he was out of his element.
The front facade of my office is supposed to be a showpiece, and I showed him the rendering I’d done and some very detailed and thoroughly dimensioned drawings for how to frame it. The drawings went far beyond anything I do for clients, since this project is a bit unusual and difficult to visualize. Yet all my efforts at clarity were for nothing. He seemed to take my drawings as mere suggestions and went off on his own.
Further, it was clear he’d never framed a window before in his life, or if he had, he’d never framed one correctly. The existing brick window openings merely needed 2×4 stud blocking around the inside. The wood is non-load bearing. There are standard ways to do this. Yet he cut a 2×6 header and placed it above the 2×4 header member, and left an air gap above the 2×6. What was the 2×6 doing there, then? Nothing.
Then, the side should have been one jack stud and one king stud on either side of the opening. You can see in the photo what he did. I don’t know what was going through his mind when he did this.
I hadn’t caught that until he’d left, but just before he finished up for the day I notice the door header seemed a little low. “Is that 6′-8″?” I asked. He put a tape measure on it and it was fairly close to a proper door rough opening so I let it go. But later I still had a feeling something wasn’t right, so I picked up the old door and frame assembly from the trash pile and tried to set it in the rough opening. It didn’t fit. That’s when I noticed the header was not level. Not even close. Plumbers have to put a slope in drain lines, but do they have to put a slope in door headers?
And then I started noticing more errors. One of the walls he was framing was not in the right place. He didn’t leave any space around the door for trim. He didn’t follow the drawing where the electrical panel is going, and there’s no room for it now.
I spent all morning today assessing his mistakes, seeing if any could be salvaged. I decided I could live with the window openings, but the entire front wall would have to be re-done.
He’s scheduled to return Monday, and we’re going to have a talk…
One of the perks of being an architect is you get to see buildings at times in their lives when no one else does. Today I got to tour the old Jacksonville Art Museum, which has been abandoned since about 2006 after the museum moved to a new place downtown.
I’ve had a long, if fleeting, relationship with the museum, starting in grade school when we took field trips there. I still remember one gallery were we were gathered, and the teacher asked us what we felt when we looked at a particular white porcelain piece in the room, and my friend John Cole answered with the word, “hungry” to a room full of giggles. The teacher took it as a legitimate art critique, though in retrospect he was probably just signalling his desire to eat lunch.
Later on my parents took me to the series of art films they showed every month. Though I don’t recall any of the movies, I do recall the black-painted room and the uncomfortable chairs.
After college I saw an exhibition by a Southern artist who made an impression on me, one of whose works was a video of him talking about “high octaning” himself. In it, he talked about how, “If you could dream it, you could do it in 1962,” and, “You people today got your Toyota Tercel and you think you got something,” and went on to extol the virtues of the true high octane burning muscle cars of the sixties. I’ll have to dig up his name and google him.
I also volunteered as a docent at the Andrew Wyeth exhibit in around 1990, handing out cassette players in shoulder straps for guests to listen to on self-guided tours.
My wife modeled in a fashion show there in the mid-1990s, at an event my mom had something to do with. My mom did a lot of volunteer work at the museum, getting to know its director well and participating in many events.
The building has sat unoccupied since the museum moved out, but it has the appearance of having been abandoned in a hurry. There are still paintings on the walls.
A series of paintings of royalty hangs amidst the derelict walls and ceilings, as time, the elements, and work crews take their toll. The ironic juxtaposition of an obsolete form of governance with an obsolete art gallery perhaps indicates how obsolete art itself may be in today’s world.
We also inspected the roof, which was like an abandoned graveyard of air conditioner compressors. One after another sat askew on rotting curbs, some resting at absurd angles in their penultimate state before a trip to the recycler. Others quietly rusted in solemn dignity. The picture below shows a large electrical sub-panel that reminded me of the black obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or is it the shroud of Turin?
One memorable work of art from the museum’s operational days was a moving message board of red LED lights, programmed to have random characters and shapes scroll across it. The anticipation of the unknown message was what drew me to stand there and watch it. In a similar way, this actual sign from the loading dock outside caused me to stand in amusement and just stare at it, defiantly trying to figure out what it meant:
The conundrum lies in the fact that elevators are not to be used in emergencies. Was that the reason for calling the police? We will never know.
The building’s fate rests in the hands of a community development agency who’s plans are to turn the museum into an office building.
Having eight projects going on at once, I haven’t had time to update this website lately. The projects range from residential alterations to government projects to a church. More later…
Regency Baptist Temple’s new sanctuary was formally dedicated Sunday, October 16, 2011 in a beautiful ceremony. Pastor Ralph Flowers, Contractor Richard Cheatwood, and I have been working to make this come to fruition and it’s finally complete.
The new sanctuary space, Regency Baptist Temple
The facility was originally a warehouse and bicycle shop. Most recently, the warehouse portion was a garage for a limousine service. Before I got involved, the church had two steel columns removed from the middle of the space, replaced by beams and new columns along the perimeter wall, freeing up the entire five thousand square feet. The project consisted of a new 250 seat sanctuary, baptismal font, fellowship space, and restrooms.
I am now registered to practice in Texas, in addition to Florida. This is to produce a small retail job in the Dallas area.
Bring me some Texas work!
Not a lot going on, to be honest. July was dead, we might as well have been in Nicaragua this summer like we were last year. August brought a few very small projects, just crumbs. Now September is almost over and it was another month of crumbs. Oh, there were a few decent prospects that have a slight chance of happening, but nothing very encouraging.
Which brings me to an email and news story from today. In my July, 2011 blog post I mentioned how few building permits were being issued here these days. The city has been struggling with revenue shortfalls as most places have, and the new mayor finally played his hand on how he was going to cut spending. I received an email from the city’s Chief of the Building Inspection Division (I subscribe to their emails for bulletins and information) and he announced that “the Mayor has decided to replace me as building official for the City of Jacksonville, effective immediately.” Further, he said he didn’t know who would be taking his place.
This was part of a large city-wide layoff reported in the news. http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2011-09-28/story/jacksonville-city-hall-cuts-directors-lays-staff
There are perhaps fifty architectural firms in Jacksonville. I wondered if there was enough work to keep us all busy, so I checked the City of Jacksonville’s Building Permit statistics for July, 2011 and found the following data for permits issued during July. There were other permits besides those here, but these are the ones most likely to have required the services of a registered architect.
July, 2011 Permits issued by the City of Jacksonville
Type – Quantity – Average construction cost per project
Residential:
Single Family Homes – 88 – 178k
Townhouse – 24 – 151k
Accessory building – 58 – 7258
Addition – 34 – 22k
Alterations & Repairs – 93 – 22k
Commercial:
Church – 1 – 12m
Hotel – 1 – 11m
Restaurants – 1 – 2,950k
School, Library, Other – 1 – 240k
Service Station, Repair – 1 – 980k
Stores, Mercantile – 1 – 325k
Accessory Building – 3 – 7k
Addition – 10 – 9k
Alterations/Repairs – 54 – 118k
Shell Building – 1 – 209k
Tenant Build-out – 27 – 150k
The total number of projects is about 400, which seems like a lot for one month, but this is significantly down from the boom years leading up to the economic slump. Plus, this is a city of almost a million people.
The construction cost listed adds up to about $62.6m, but that is likely underreported because owners and contractors often put absurdly low construction cost figures on the permit application just to save on permit fees.
I haven’t decided yet what this data means, other than marketing needs to be focused on commercial tenant build-outs and alterations, and residential work.
Old buildings fascinate me. It’s not just the history or the design, it’s that they give us a glimpse of the past in more ways than most people would imagine. They’re like a puzzle with pieces missing, and you get to imagine what the missing pieces are. Today I visited a pair of old buildings with a colleague who was performing a sort of pre-buy inspection to give the potential owner a heads-up of what challenges they would face if they wanted to occupy the place.
The buildings in question sit side by side downtown like two brothers. One was built in 1902, the other three years later. The older one contained a bar as its last tenant, a nicely appointed place with wood paneling and a raised stage for live music. It appears to have ceased operation only a few years ago, but all the equipment was left behind. Barstools, icemakers, reach-in coolers. My colleague and I each took home a martini glass as a souvenir.
Where the bar got interesting was toward the back. Behind the stage was a stairway leading up to a mezzanine. It’s possible this was where the band took breaks, but the decor led me to believe it was used for another purpose. There were curtains of deep maroon velour where it overlooked the bar, and farther back were a pair of plush lounge chairs and a red velvet upholstered couch along the entire rear wall. The walls were decorated with jaguar print velour. It screamed out VIP Lounge.
Sadly, the mezzanine failed to comply with several aspects of the building code, and would likely have to be demolished if any significant work was done to the place. Sure, a bar owner could move in and start serving ‘em up without making the space code compliant, but as an architect I don’t recommend it.
As a 109 year old building, erected before the Wright Brothers achieved powered flight, it had most of the elements of its era – brick load bearing walls, tall slender arched windows (many of which were bricked in), tall ceiling, and modestly detailed precast concrete at the entrance. The roof structure was all wood, and not in the best condition.
Where it got interesting was the back. Fronting on the rear street, more of an alleyway, was a wide opening (possibly once a loading dock, it was filled in with concrete block). Immediately, you step up three feet and immediately on your left is an abandoned elevator hoistway. The pit was filled in or covered over, and one wall opened up as if it were a serving counter. The whole space was tight, you couldn’t fit ten people in it, much less the deli the owner was considering. You simply cannot have a restaurant where the floor is three feet above the sidewalk outside, with no room for the required handicapped ramp.
But that was just the beginning. This portion of the building was four stories, each story being just under a thousand square feet. Beyond the elevator hoistway, tucked in the corner almost like an afterthought, was a very narrow winding concrete stairway. For some unknown reason, the elevator hoistway was open on the stair side, and only a rusty steel pipe handrail separated the stair from the shaft. Climbing it was like exploring the ruins of an ancient civilization.
When the stair let out at the floor above, the door itself was fascinating. It had the appearance of a medieval dungeon, with massive hinges of unusual design and a latch like nothing I’ve seen. Then the elevator door was a sliding barn door with very interesting hardware. We shook our heads wondering why the concrete floor sloped and rolled so much, and why there was a floor drain.
In one corner was a tiny room walled with faded green bead board and a century-old door, inside of which was an equally old toilet. No sink, only a toilet. And a window. With a wooden shutter that swung into the room, held with the sort of latch you see on old doors, where you place a heavy wood beam in the two iron brackets to keep it shut. Someone had placed a brick in the brackets.
Proceeding up to the other floors, they were all alike – inexplicable bumps in the floors, the same corner privy, the same dungeon stair door. The arched-top windows pleasantly lit the space, but being such a small floor area we couldn’t imagine who would have ever thought it a good idea to build such a building. There was no evidence of any interior walls, or that there had ever been any wall finishes on the bare brick. I suppose it could have been a warehouse originally, though a very awkward one.
More to the point, who in their right mind would want to make it over into a modern facility? As my colleague said, there’s a reason the building has sat undeveloped for all these years. It’s not practical. The stair is dangerous, the floors are strange and the rebars are showing through on the underside of the floor slabs, and the place is just creepy. Buildings like this are why we have most of the building codes today.
Is it possible to make it code-compliant? Probably not. Even if it was, the cost of doing that would not be worth spending. Yes, it has that a little of that old turn of the century charm, but the lack of practical use has to overrule the charm. My suggestion was to pay us to design a whole new building for their purposes, one that meets code, and we’ll design in that charm.
I won’t hold my breath.
The lumber arrived, I have seven bags of Quikrete, and the framer is on notice to work me into his schedule. First, the floor holes will be filled in with the concrete, then I assume the ceiling joists will go first, then the walls will be framed.
Looking ahead, the electrical service and wiring will be next. I have some unique light switches picked out and of course I have all the lighting bought and stacked up in the corner of my current office.