AUG-B-3

THE FORLORN RETURN TO THE GUTTED CAVE

OF WHAT HAD ONCE BEEN MY HOME IN DERWOOD,

WITH PROGRESS, NOW KICKED INTO RAPID GEAR,

BASED ON OVERCOMING GLITCHES IN PERMITS FOR THE

RECONSTRUCTION, NOW THAT THE DEMOLITION GUTTING IS NEARING COMPLETION

August 26, 2003

If not a complete shock, it was eerie returning to Derwood in the dark. I had left it completely packed away, but at least intact. Now when I cam up the drive there was just a lot of bark everywhere and more than the usual evidence of fallen branches, a standard greeting upon my return at any time. But, now I stumbled around the detritus of the trees—not only the usual fallen branches in storms, but the residual of the three big trees that had been sawed off at the base and literally sky craned up and out, with all the logs and firewood transported away within the first days of my absence.

I felt my way to the door and unlocked it and reached around to turn on the light switch—nothing happened. The power and water are turned off as well as the hot water heater disabled during my stay abroad. I went back to the Bronco and got out my headlight. I shined the light through the eerie cave—all the wall coverings have been stripped, and the ceiling acoustic tile is ripped out exposing the floor joists, with hanging coaxial cables dangling down form everywhere where the electrical and lighting system has been ripped out. All the kitchen cabinetry is gone, and the glass dining room pass through has been ripped out. The den or study is now open to the kitchen with the entire bathroom, and the steel pan, which had been under the shower, has been ripped away with a hole visible to the basement. The roughed in basement bathroom has also been torn out.

All that is left in the kitchen is the oven, since it is hooked to a 220 Volt electrical line and an electrician is coming to disconnect that before it, too, goes down the chutes connecting the blown open dining room window to the dumpster below. There had been one full dumpster load carted away last week. This one is nearly full, and it appears that what is in the dumpster is the doors, cabinets and all the formerly pristine partitions of the main floor rooms, like kitchen division form dining and living rooms.

I went up the stairs carefully, with the stairs covered in a protective cloth. The side molding and baseboards had been torn away so there are rough edges, but the upstairs is intact, with even the light working in the two rooms boarded up for storage.

I dropped my backpack and opened the laundry I had hoped to do form the backpack in which it had been put away wet form the stream in which it had last been washed. No luck on the laundry, since there is no water, hot or otherwise. There is no point in my trying to stay here on the floor or otherwise, since the bathrooms are not working.

By dawn’s early light, I saw a Dodge Ram V-8 pickup truck in the drive and wet a chunky young guy named Carl, who had pulled up and was watching diligently for deer. He was waiting for Glenn Murrell, newly hired, but after 20 years experience as a lead carpenter, one of the new managers at D. G. Liu, and very happy with his supervisory job. He had called to leave a message on my phone, saying he would like to meet me and go over a few of the plans, and now I had heard he was coming to supervise younger Carl who was ready to get to work on the “Demo” of the second floor. So, I quickly picked up the stuff I had just taken out of the Bronco and re-packed it away. I would have to do my showering and laundry elsewhere.

Glenn and I went over the plans, spread out on the couch before it makes its way down the chutes into the dumpster. He had a suggestion for increasing the size of the kitchen workspace by recessing the new refrigerator. He showed me the progress on the plans of the “Demo phase” and the hang up they had had, which turns out to be unnecessary, on the building permits to start the foundations and reconstruction work.

It seems that the survey “site map” for the plat on which the house stands was in the courthouse all along, and the survey I had just got a bill for to determine the housing site was unnecessary and a redundant map of the same information that Glenn had retrieved from the courthouse. But, there was a new matter of the septic system. It seems they needed to know about the septic tank’s location since there were rumors that an illegal septic system had been placed without a permit. I told them that Mister Bennett had always done things in oversize, and when he added a garbage disposal to the plans, he doubled the size of a septic system. Then Dave had added a second drainage filed, which turned out to have been unnecessary, since it was placed on the assumption that the septic tank had been emptied out. When it was again vacuumed, this time to below the level where it had the exit pipe leave the tank, the second field connected by a “Y-pipe” was redundant.

All of this was based on the ruling that if you increase the size of the house by over 25%, you have to get a new septic approval. After getting all the data and finding everything in order, Glenn then went back to them and noted that the increased space is largely the storage room under the library and the garage which do not count as living space and are not included in the 25 % expansion calculation, so that mooted the whole issue of the septic system in any case.

So, the building permits are going to be picked up on Tuesday or Wednesday by Kasha, the women in the DG Liu office who deals with permits, and then the footings can be laid out for the foundation on the addition out back, as soon as the demolition is completed and the big dumpster removed. That could be as soon as this weekend.

The start of construction triggers another payment, and the first payment which I had sent by mail in advance has been diverted or lost in the mails, so it is a good thing I am back home form my stranding in India, so that I could write them another payment check to replace, or follow the one in the mail which is still missing. The two projects are coming together this week—that is, the “start of work” which is the demolition phase, and the start of the construction and framing, which will happen when the demo phase is concluded and the big dumpster hauled out with its last load. I scramble d to find the checkbook and the folders all set aside for this purpose, which, like everything else I may need for the next half year or more, I had stored over at Diane’s house in her guest room.

As Glenn instructed Carl on getting started on the second floor and the demo of my bedroom—blowing away the closets and the walls between the Northeast and Northwest bedrooms for the expanded bathroom and walk-in closets on the plans, I took a last stroll around, and took a few pictures of hat the “housekeeping” has resulted in to this point. It looks like the aftermath of a fire and vandalism at the moment. They remarked on how solid and well built the house was, and a lot of those very solid well-built features are delaying the ease of tearing it all out, and it may be replaced with things that are veneered and a lot easier to do in a next stage of “demo.” Later Dale had called me and he had taken pictures of the remarkable operation of Ernie Sheflett and his crane operated tree removal and the heavy big logs that resulted form that early process before any of the inside “demo” work had got started. I will be called by Glenn and Dale who are both bird-dogging this large project, as Glenn coordinates the more than a dozen sub-contractors who will be streaming in as the windows are all torn out and the other replaceable parts are being juggled like the plumbing, electrical and HVAC folk coming and going.

I had come, and it was time for me to go. I went to the Post office and picked up the month’s mail, and dropped off the stop delivery order for my Alaskan out-of-town period. Dale will be leaving on Friday to go bow-hunting elk in Idaho as I am going to Alaska to hunt moose with the .340 Weatherby rifle which had arrived in shipping through the mails from the Vail, Colorado gun dealer that Reg had contacted to Chester Jones, my gun dealer on this end in Newark MD.

I went through all the mail that I had accumulated, which included the series of bills for redundant operations—like the two extra surveys done for site maps already in the courthouse, and the lawyer’s request for Ellen Bennet to sign off on the discharge of mortgage—a request that had been made in January before I found the documents in the attic, and only later did she sign something—over six months after the settlement on the Derwood property and the “quit claim.” So, it seems that things that were urgent and set in motion to repair defects in the process, were all set in slow motion, and each of them are coming around at some expense and very late—but each is coming back over half a year after the irrelevance of their extra services is apparent.

I opened a batch of pictures form the Ladakh trip, which had been sent in by prepaid mailers returned with Lee Dutton. It is odd that some of them came to me in large format, some in small format, and some in singles and some in duplicates, with one of them coming to me with the mailer and undeveloped roll of film with a note that the “instructions are unclear!” Since they are the ones who print the instructions on the pre-paid mailer, what can be unclear about that?

Today I pick up the slides and prints from the Lingshed-03 Trek, which I had dropped at GW Photography, and will inquire from them where Kodak has gone? I got a slide roll I had packaged in the pre-paid mailer and addressed it to the Choke Cherry Road address of Kodak, where I used to drop off and pick up the slides I had developed through mass purchases of their mailers. The lab at Choke Cherry Road I drove over to and found a hole in the ground for new construction, so it is likely that this is the reason for the return of that roll of film!

I sorted mail all day—never finding the missing check, which must still be in transit—and tried to pay a few of the leftover and late bills. I discovered that the heavy suit bags I had brought over on the morning of my departure with lee Dutton to Diane’s house had collapsed the bar on which they were hung in her closet, so Diane had bought all new hanging bags and a floor based hanging bar. While she was at it, she did the shirts all up in laundry and pressing and hung them all out in order, as well as even laundering my running t-shirts and shorts! I will see her after she has taken a long labor Day holiday with her kids who will all be going to the Outer Banks this week and staying through next week. Her son Scott and Suze and their two daughters are now almost done with their fund raising for their departure to Brussels, where they will do extra language training and then set out for their term as missionaries in Chad for which the Washington DC church is offering a token support. They have been touring the home churches in California and elsewhere where the bulk of their support will be forthcoming. It would be good if Diane could get out to Chad while they are there and do her kind of work while they are doing theirs.

I will be going out to the Eastern Shore to prepare with Craig for the moose hunt, which leaves on a flight from Dulles on Tuesday morning September 2. We either have to leave Trappe MD at 4:00 AM to make that, or he could come in this direction on labor Day night—a much better idea, but when this idea was proposed, I did not know the total gutting of the Derwood household and its unsuitability for a visit, or even bathroom use. But, that is the time when Diane is out in the Outer Banks, so perhaps we could both be her guests for the time on September 1 evening before taking off form Dulles to a long layover in Newark NJ airport before the flight to Anchorage and then an overnight sty there before the early morning commercial flight to Anyiok to connect with out two bush flights into the remote Alaskan Wilderness. I seem to have been in remote mountain wildernesses rather often, and the communications interruption they offer when other things are gong on is often more disquieting to others than it is to me.

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