Now I’d rather you do this on your skate board, bike, hybrid or the like, but I drive a F-350 (not much, really, honest — I use my wife’s car when ever I can get away with it), but however you do it, if you’re thinking of building or remodelling please do yourself a favour and go for a good drive in the country side. We’re going hunting for old buildings. Anything abandoned. And the older the better. Pre-World War II is a must. Rusted through metal roofing that reveals non-plywood sheathing is a good sign. Carved Victorian ginger bread is a very good sign.
Now the first catch. If you happen to find a building that appears to have a log or timber structure — quick, send me pictures; I’ll walk you through the salvage process.
The second catch, and I’m not trying to be offensive to anyone because that would be counter productive. Just remember this is a shared heritage. I’m white and of European descent so I take my share of the culpability. The catch is, that if you live anywhere on the planet this will work, except if you live west of the Mississippi in the States or west of Sault St. Marie in Canada — there are no good, old buildings in these two regions (I’m only being a little sarcastic, this is mostly true), sorry. Europe, Asia you’re fine. South America, you’re good. Africa and the Eastern half of North America, drive on and soak it up. Those in Australia will just have to take my word for it that there are such things as old buildings.
Our North American west, (and all of Australia by most accounts), was settled so fast that we obliterated the leave-no-trace, ephemeral settlements of the aboriginal folk and didn’t rest long enough to build anything that lasted. I’ve been to the sod huts of the badlands, I’ve seen the barns of Iowa (of which there might be the odd exception) and I’ve seen what passes for buildings in the shuttered towns of the Canadian plains on down to the trailer strewn shoulders of the highways in the south west. As we moved west the supply lines of known materials lengthened and ultimately failed. Sears-Roebuck could only ship so many precut stick built homes, and yes I’ve been in these also.
Now since I’m North American you’ll have to bear with me as this is my only frame of reference.
Driving in the countryside you have a chance to see buildings that have stood a long time. Closer to cities and large towns these buildings, when abandoned, are razed quickly. Out here in the country they usually sit as testaments. Most of these older buildings will appear grey — funny how natural paints wear away and yet the wood is preserved. That’s a future post, certainly. They are often abandoned; barns, sheds and homes alike.
When you see an old building, grey, unpainted, no car parked beside, maybe even no visible drive, is it not comforting and inviting — the sight of a home, even abandoned and decayed? Don‘t stop and go in, you would be trespassing.
If you do, don’t disturb anything — that way someone else has the chance to look back, see what was. And if you failed to heed my advice and you’ve chosen to trespass, please, if you get hurt while trespassing don’t for a minute think of finding someone to blame, besides yourself. Suck it up, go get a tetanus shot and don’t spoil it for the rest of us.
It’s been several years since I did this. Walked into an abandoned shelter or barn — without permission that is, my work has me in these places on a weekly basis. I’m often struck by the fact that most of these structures were not very well built to begin with, yet there they stand. Often longer than the suburban sprawl we’ve come to tolerate. I figured out, slowly at first and then like a flood, the difference between that run down farm house you’ve been ballsy enough to break into and the boxes we build today. I’m not talking about craft, or passionate building. I’m not even talking about method of construction, unless you’re really lucky and the house you’ve broken into is built using the same format as the boxes we live in. I’m willing to bet it’s stick built. Same process of lots of little pieces of wood assembled to make a large light shell, made rigid at the corners. If you found one that’s just old enough and this building is anything like the hundreds I’ve been in, it’s all natural. Ta Da! Now you know the difference too.
The foundation might be stone, or is at least locally manufactured and site mixed concrete. The wall studs and other frame elements are two by fours, (probably real 2 inchers), the sub floors are planks of wood, the sheeting is wood, the siding could be anything from brick to wood. The interior walls probably started as wood lath with lime plaster, there was no power grid to hook up to, hot water was something for wash and bath day. These articles are why this house is standing and the suburban boxes being built at this very instant won’t stand but half as long.
You and I have both grown up knowing plywood, fire treated stick walls, interior walls arriving smooth, taking what ever is sold to stuff into the walls. Virtually none of this stuff is recognizable as having come from a natural source. It all does — everything does. We create nothing, we can only reshape what is there. So, it is very odd to me that we have accepted inferior, highly manufactured, not exactly cheap, highly toxic, unsustainable, counter intuitive products, when the resources to build naturally were right there, being transformed into temporary housing. Being commoditized.
That’s it. The reason why that farm house is still standing is that pieces of nature, rather unrefined from their original state, were thrown together to make a box. Stone to walls, trees to boards. If you’ve ever seen a piece of plywood after it gets good and rained on you know that it will never be the same thing again, and by building code it’s no longer considered structurally reliable — comforting thought. Now imagine what a house made of manufactured products does when those asphalt shingles start to fail in half the time their warranty suggested they would last. It ain’t a pretty site.
On a closing note, a little vocabulary, straight from the Mac Dictionary, it’s much more succinct than I am:
- manufactured home, noun: (mainly in advertising) a mobile home.
- manufactured housing, noun: prefabricated houses that are constructed in a factory and then assembled at the building site in modular sections.
- quality control, noun: a system of maintaining standards in manufactured products by testing a sample of the output against the specification.
- natural, adjective: existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.
