Occam's Razor

There’s siding on our house now. The plumbing is mostly in place, but no water is running and nothing like a sink is connected to the plumbing yet. A skeletal electrical system runs through the house, but also is not connected to any actual electricity. The floor of the garage is now concrete instead of sand. A gas fireplace is in its spot in our future living room. The gas line now comes up to the house but that’s as far as it goes. Two shower inserts are also in place. The rooms in the upstairs are sealed off from the attic. Most of the ducting is in place. But that’s pretty much all that the developers have done to our house over the last three months. No drywall is up. No insulation installed. Sawdust and debris litter the floors. Construction crews can’t be bothered to sweep or pick up stuff. Old soda bottles sit in the corners of our rooms to be.

It helps to be patient while we cool our heels eight miles away in a tiny and uncomfortable apartment in Easthampton, Massachusetts. The house was supposed to be done in about two weeks. The new estimated completion date is September 15. While we wait in an apartment with one window air conditioner and a few fans trying to keep us cool, our developers are busy working mostly on other houses. It’s pretty clear that we are not that important to them. Weeks go by sometimes without anything happening to our house. Sometimes there is a day or two burst of activity and then people and trucks disappear until some ambiguous future time when more return.

I’m not sure how this house construction business is supposed to go, but I doubt it’s supposed to go like this. The developer has his excuses, of course. It was an exceptionally cold and snowy winter and yet they were able to pour a foundation in February. In March when we visited a frame was up, along with a roof. By the time we arrived three months ago, Tyvek was covering the outside and the windows were in. Then weeks went by and absolutely nothing happened. They can’t say it was because there was still snow on the ground.

The real reason for these delays seems to be twofold. The developer has another project twenty miles south of us. There they can concentrate forces and work on many units at once. Whereas we are a single unit in a development that is already three quarters complete and with only forty houses altogether. So it’s more efficient and profitable to do those houses and keep us in suspended animation. In addition, their subcontractors are busy doing work elsewhere. I guess the housing sector is doing quite well. My guess is that they use low bidder contractors to eke out more profit on their projects, and they do the stuff that pays better first, so what slips must be our schedule.

Our new neighbors already know us by name. We attend their clubs, dinners and wine tasting events. Apparently our experience is common in this development, as most of their delivery schedules slipped too. So we are stuck in a tiny apartment in Easthampton with 80% of our stuff in storage. All we can do is cool our heels because getting angry doesn’t change the dynamics.

I guess this is the price you pay when a having a house built. The upside is that you can have the house built your way. The kitchen will be just the way my wife wants it because she designed it. The walls will have the uniform color of the walls in our last house: peach. And everything will be new and unlikely to need repair or replacement for many years. We just got to hang in there about two more months.

Meanwhile, there is all this free time. Much of it is spent sliding past each other in the hallway. In our tiny kitchen, it’s best for only one person to be standing at a time. Sound from the television can’t help but leak into my little study, because it is only a few feet away. So I keep the headphones on and hope to drown out the drone of my wife’s eclectic taste in TV shows. She watches stuff I would never watch in a million years, like pretty much anything on truTV, an absolute nadir of television “entertainment”.

Outside the kitchen window, the next-door neighbors offer something that is best considered entertainment. The guy works on his car endlessly, and has been tinkering with loud bass speakers in them since we got here. He does stupid and dangerous stuff. The other day I observed him trying to prime a small motorcyle engine by pouring gasoline into its carburetor then turning on the ignition switch. Some of the gasoline spilled onto the concrete and caught fire. Mental note: call the Easthampton Fire Department next time I observe this behavior. They shuffle off to work early. Around four a.m. they are outside our window conversing, car engines revving loudly. Once around two a.m. the husband and wife were on their back porch arguing loudly, presumably so they aren’t arguing in front of their kid. The neighbor above us got sick of it before us, opened his window and yelled at them to shut the fuck up.

At least I have time to thoroughly examine Easthampton. At one time I wanted to live here. Now that I am here: well, not so much. Florence (when we actually take up residence) will be a much better choice for us. In general roads are bad in western Massachusetts, but in Easthampton they are bad even by the standards of this part of the state. Only a major road will get an occasional resurfacing. Some of these other thoroughfares like Parsons Street and Ferry Street are full of potholes that have been filled in numerous times, making driving down the street teeth rattling. There are also lots of potholes the city can’t be bothered to fill in, and blocks where traffic cones block the axle-crushing ones. Months later they are still not filled in. I guess the residents like to keep property taxes down. In part to handle all the bumpy roads, I had my struts replaced.

Still, there is Mount Tom nearby. It’s not too hard to ascend the mountain in part because it’s not too high. The views of the Pioneer Valley up there are worth the climb. I’ve done it many times on my bike, with the best part the brisk ride downhill. There is plenty of time for biking in general, mostly to and from Florence where our house is. My excuse for biking there is to get the mail, but it’s also good exercise and gives me an opportunity to verify that little is being done on our house.

And there is my consulting, which amounts to about twenty hours a week. It ebbs and flows but keeps me connected to my profession. I take plenty of walks around the nearby Lower Mill Pond and amble through Easthampton’s modest downtown. Easthampton is a faint shadow of the showier and more successful nearby city of Northampton. The curious thing is that despite all the ruin porn, it’s definitely on the upswing. Businesses are moving back into some of it, principally to the old buildings along Pleasant Street. Others of these old brick buildings are scheduled for redevelopment. What you can’t find here in Easthampton is a really good restaurant, or a salad bar except in the Big E, its sole supermarket (and it’s a tiny but nice one). Except for downtown, most of the sidewalks and curbs are crumbling or have crumbled. If real prosperity is to happen here again, they might start by fixing these, but no one seems to want to pay for it.

Surely though we will move into our house one of these days and bid adieu to Easthampton. We have learned it’s best not to get our expectations up. So I expect a lot more bumping into my wife in this tiny little apartment in the months ahead.