Many years ago I had a visit from my brother who had recently redone his kitchen. He had done most of the work himself (he also put a 2nd floor on his house) and I confess I had gotten pretty tired of his constant talking about the minutiae of all his adventures in home building. So to shut him up I drove him down to the Breakers in Rhode Island.
If you have never seen it, it is a mansion built in the era when the 1% had an even a bigger piece of the pie and were not afraid to spend it. On the tour, the guide took us to the library, which is an entire room built like a leather bound book. The guide said, “if this room were to be built today, it would cost well over $100,000.” My brother immediately said, “You couldn’t build this room today at any price. The craftspeople who built this room don’t exist any more.”
I think there is something to this. I occasionally get called to work on relatively new houses, often big ones, which I like to call “McMansions.” And what I have learned is, while they look great from the road, when you get into the house, the bits and pieces, like the toilet paper holders, the towel racks, the locks and latches . . . all seem to be lacking. The hardware in the doors and windows is just . . . chintzy. And the installations are often sub par as well.
Today I replaced a toilet paper holder and a couple of towel racks in a McMansion. The thing about towel racks and toilet paper holders is, they are destined to get stressed. So they can’t just be hung like a framed picture. They needed to be really solidly attached with proper achors in the drywall. But these items in this house were just attached with the bare minimum. One towel rack was attached with just a screw into drywall, not even a plastic anchor. It wasn’t even close to level either. You know, we’re talking a 2-3 million dollar house. And yet this is what you get sometimes.
I see other disasters in McMansions and new construction generally– one shower I saw, the grout had not been mixed properly and it was all eroding away, after just 3 years of use. (Proper grout lasts forever.) And don’t get me started on 3-year-old shower enclosures that are leaking here there and everywhere.
I have actually gotten to the point where I dread working on new construction homes. Old houses from 1920, they have real dignity and self respect. Most of the hardware still works. The wood is hard as steel. It feels like it’s worth fixing.
