Coming Home to Roost: Chapter 7

I was up at sev­en-thir­ty, show­ered, donned some of my new duds, had a light break­fast, and was wait­ing on the front porch enjoy­ing a pleas­ant morn­ing and anoth­er cup of cof­fee, wait­ing for Gibson to show up.

He actu­al­ly arrived a bit ear­ly, dri­ving a maroon Buick Lacrosse, and as he stopped behind the Lexus, I arose from the wick­er chair and head­ed down to the curb.

“Mornin’ Martin,” I offered, open­ing the pas­sen­ger door and enter­ing the car.

“Mornin’, Michael.  Beautiful day for a ride in the coun­try. Flanagan Station Road, right?”

“Right.  I’ll let you know when we get close.”

He pulled away from the curb as I fas­tened my seat belt, and we head­ed south on high­way 627.  Ten min­utes lat­er, I alert­ed him, “About two hun­dred yards on your right.”

As he pulled into the dri­ve­way and head­ed up the slight incline, he exclaimed, “Wow.  You weren’t kid­ding when you said it was a total loss, Michael.  Looks like it was a mir­a­cle you got out unscathed.”

“I guess. Let’s have a look around.”

“I see the vault you men­tioned.  Shouldn’t be any prob­lem build­ing around it.  If you’ll give me a hand, I want to get some dimen­sions of it so we can incor­po­rate it into the plans for the new place.”

“Sure,” I said.  “What can I do?”

He opened the trunk of the Buick and with­drew a reel of mea­sur­ing tape, the kind made of fab­ric and prob­a­bly a hun­dred feet long.  The reel had a loop han­dle and a small crank on the side and was obvi­ous­ly made for pro­fes­sion­al use.

“I want to get the perime­ter mea­sure­ments, the height, the door loca­tion, and maybe locate a cou­ple of cor­ners to some per­ma­nent fea­ture.  I think we’ll use that oak tree over there,” he said, point­ing to the large oak that occu­pied a spot in the front yard.

“I can’t imag­ine design­ing some­thing that would endan­ger a mag­nif­i­cent tree like that, and we’ll prob­a­bly want it to have a promi­nent place with the new design.  If you’ll just hold the idiot end — oops, sor­ry about that.  That’s what we call the zero end of the tape.  No offense intended.”

“None tak­en,” I replied, smirk­ing, accept­ing the end of the tape and walk­ing it to the cor­ner of the vault that he indicated.

After tak­ing the nec­es­sary mea­sure­ments and jot­ting them down on a notepad with a quick sketch, he reeled in the tape and began to look around the remain­ing debris.

“Looks like some of the rooms weren’t total­ly destroyed.  Is there any­thing there you want to try to salvage?”

“Well, I’m going to come back out with some box­es and col­lect some of the con­tents in the kitchen and some clothes out of the bed­room clos­et, but oth­er than that, there’s no rea­son to try to save any of the walls or any­thing like that.  If we’re going new, we might as well ignore every­thing but the vault.”

“That will cer­tain­ly make the new design a lot eas­i­er.  I’d sug­gest we get a demo­li­tion con­trac­tor out here as soon as pos­si­ble to remove every­thing and get the old foun­da­tion removed at the same time.  Once the debris is removed, we’ll prob­a­bly want to get the site grad­ed out, fill in the foun­da­tion area, and get it prop­er­ly com­pact­ed so that the new foun­da­tion loca­tion won’t be affected.”

“Can the demo­li­tion con­trac­tor do that grad­ing work as well?” I asked.

“I expect so.  Most of them have the knowl­edge and equip­ment to do some min­i­mal grad­ing work.  I’ll give you the names of a cou­ple on the way back to town.”

As we entered his car, he placed a call to his sec­re­tary Shirley and asked her to look up a cou­ple of demo­li­tion con­trac­tors and call him back.  We had been only a few min­utes on the road when his call came back.  He asked me to take his pad and write down the infor­ma­tion as Shirley dic­tat­ed it.  I was glad to see that Martin was a cau­tious man and did­n’t allow his con­cen­tra­tion to drift from his driving.

Within a few min­utes, we had pulled up in front of my rental.

“Well, Michael,” he began, “I think we’ve got enough infor­ma­tion to get some things start­ed.  I sug­gest you con­tact those con­trac­tors and have each of them give you an esti­mate for doing the demo­li­tion and grad­ing.  If you want, I’ll meet with them — and you if you want — at the site again, so they’ll know pre­cise­ly what has to be done.  We want each of them to give you prices on the same work so that nei­ther is disadvantaged.”

“Okay.  How do we arrange for all of us to be at the site at the same time?” I inquired.

“You set up the times that are con­ve­nient for you and the con­trac­tors and let me know.  If I can’t be there, I’ll have one of my staff there instead.  This process is pret­ty sim­ple, and I’ll brief them on what’s going on.  It should­n’t be a problem.”

“Sounds fine.  I’ll get on it right away.”

“Good. Listen, why don’t you stop by the office tomor­row morn­ing so we can go over your require­ments for the new place?  Number of bed­rooms and baths, stor­age require­ments, style of house.  Things like that.  It will be pret­ty loose for the schemat­ic phase, but we’ll be able to get the basics down and go from there.  If you can con­tact the con­trac­tors today, you might also have an idea of when they can be at the site, and we can coör­di­nate that as well.”

“Will do.  And tomor­row sounds good.  Say about ten?”

“Yeah.  I’m pret­ty sure I don’t have any­thing sched­uled for tomor­row morn­ing, so I’ll put you on the calendar.”

“Okay.  See you then.”

As I left Martin and walked to the front door, I was feel­ing quite exu­ber­ant and pleased at the speed of the process so far.  And I was begin­ning to feel that maybe Martin would become a friend as well as my architect.