Rebuilding After Hurricane Charley

An Act of God Construction in the Wake of a Natural Disaster

Michael Heller

Background My birthday falls on August 27. I was going to be 60 that year.

Six years earlier my wife and I had moved to Florida’s southwest coast where we were going to start a boating and fishing section for the Charlotte Sun, the daily newspaper in Port Charlotte. We bought a nice little house right off the harbor and I bought a fishing boat. It wasn’t exactly a retirement move, but living and working on the water in Florida, and taking pictures, was what I wanted. I am a photographer.

They made me Special Section’s Editor and I created a weekly section called WaterLine.

Most of the time I was out on the boat exploring the incredible Charlotte Harbor. I had not expected the harbor to beas big or as teeming with wildlife as it was.

Numerous species of gamefish, both resident and migratory, manatees dolphins, white pelicans, eagles osprys, great blue herron... the list of creatiures goes on and on so I was thrilled and the newspaper bought all the gas for the boat. And even better yet I worked from home most of the time.

I had been a photojournalist all my life. I spent a lot of time growing up in Florida and started college at Miami. I knew the tropics and there was a lot I still liked about living here and being on the water.

I had eft Florida in 1976 and spent the next 20 years in Santa Fe New Mexico as a freelancer, then as picture editor for the daily Santa Fe New Mexican and finally as an independent publisher of our own monthly magazine.

My wife, a New York girl, had never lived in the tropics with the possibility of hurricanes every now and then. Our first four years were quiet, a few tropical storms here and there, a lot of rain, 20 inches in one weekend was an eye opener, but we had no hurricanes.

Then came 2004.

On Thursday August 12, Hurricane Charley, a cat II storm came up from the Caribbean and headed straight towards Florida. The water in the Gulf of Mexico was 89 degrees, the water in Charlotte Harbor was almost 92. In a coastal community, weather talk from oldtimers, longtimers and especially

those with a maritime interest fills the air. You can’t go to the supermarket without someone adding an opinion or questioning the weather forecast. With the warm water for it to feed on we were talking about how the storm could strengthen, then we went to bed. Some people had evacuated, but a lot of people hunkered down to ride it out. It was only a Cat II storm, only 90 mph winds. The consensus was it wouldn’t push the water up too high, the storm was moving at over 20 mph, “it will blow by,” was the sentiment because at that time the forecast tracks had it going north off the west coast of Florida in the Gulf.

But the storm turned right and headed into Charlotte harbor, an 14 mile bay with mangrove trees lining both shores and manatees, gamefish, dolphins shrimp and crabs in the water. Charlotte Harbor is a pristine estuary fed by two fresh water rivers. Before Charley the mangroves overhung the shoreline by over 25 feet in a lot of places. baitfish and crabs populated a fantasy like underwater environment in the tangle of mangrove roots and decaying leaves. It was an ecosystem that was truly intertwined and symbiotic. The storm mixed it all up and for the most part all the naturral life and beauty survived. And we survived too, although we sometimes wondered Later when NOAA and the local weather service issued printouts of the official track of the storm we would learn that the geographic center of the eye of the hurricane, the cross hairs on the bull’s eye, came within 100 yards of our house.

The wind gauge at the heliport at the hospital in Punta Gorda had reportedly touched 176 mph before it and the pole it was attached to were leveled by airborne debri. The hurricane it turned out was a tightly wound buzz-saw of a storm. It inflicted severe wind damage with very little water-rise and then it was gone.

We were publishing our boating and fishing magazine, Water LIFE before Hurricane Charley and we continued to publish after the storm and have every month since.

This story chronicles our experiences. The chapters are taken from

the series of monthly articles that appeared in our magazine and reflercts what our lives were like at the time In the aftermath of that storm and the three others that followed that year, and then Katrina the following year, and Wilma tghe year after that, construction in Florida went crazy. Prices went through the roof, contractors were taking on as much work as they could and doing just a little on each project to move all those jobs along. Materials were scarce, concrete delivery had to be scheduled weeks in advance. Fast buck artists came out of the woodwork, shoddy workmanship, rip offs, roberies and theft. There were an endless line of scrap metal scavengers. Disasters bring good people together, but bad things still often happened to those who were not alert.

Insurance companies across the board stalled for time before they made any payments. The county’s building department was

overwhelmed with permit requests.

There wasn’t a swimming pool cage in the area that did not collapse from the wind. Prices on pool cage replacement tripled overnight. And every wet-back with a hammer was in the roofing business.

Some of these unlicensed contractors actually helped, but how could you know who to trust? So it was with some reservation but with no real other alternative that, I decided to build our new house myself. There were a lot of fishing guides who were also in the construction trades. I knew many of them through our publication, I could network most of the tradesmen I needed. I would be the general contractor. I knew how to estimate, price and order materials, I could read a set of plans, I knew about concrete work, I could schedule the trades, I’d done all that before, back when I was a kid. But now I was 60.

- Michael Heller

We Almost Waited Too Long At 2:00 p.m. on Friday the 13th of August we gather all our last minute containers and important papers and put them near the door. Charley was now a full blown Cat III hurricane with winds of 125 mph and was 35 miles south of Sanibel. There was mention of possible Cat IV enhancement and then 25 minutes later the weather service came on the air with the news that Charley was approaching Captiva and was a full blown Cat IV storm with winds of 140 mph. A friend from Fon Du Lac Wisconsin calls to ask if we are ‘some of the knuckleheads’ he heard about on TV who are staying. “Will this house withstand a 140 mph wind?” my wife asks, as I stash stuff up high just in case there is a storm surge. I think for a moment and then answer “No.” I stop when I hear my own words reverberate in the empty garage. At 2:35 my friend Capt. Ralph Allen calls and asks: “What do you think?”

“I think this is the worst case scenario,” I tell him and we agree it is time to leave... if it’s not too late. At just before 3 pm my wife, dog and I are in our car. Ralph and I have decided to head to Arcadia. He’ll take Hwy. 17 from Punta Gorda and we’ll run out Kings Highway crossing the river at 560 where we will hook up with Route17 at Nocatee. There is not much traffic on the road any more.

The sky is grey black with some very gusty winds. Out past the Nav-AGator, transformers on the telephone poles begin to explode in electric blue eruptions. It is a scene right out of the movie Twister, but happening in real life. “This is not good,” I tell my wife as I mash the gas pedal harder into the floorboards. At Arcadia it is raining hard and it is extremely windy. We find out later that a tornado blew through Arcadia at the time we arrived. We make it to SR 70 and haulass east in and out of torrential bands of rain and gusty wind. It is amazing how slowly some other people are driving. We pass them all and keep hauling-ass. In a half hour we are in clearing conditions and we reconnoiter with Ralph and his family at a gas station outside of Okeechobee. We are now out of broadcast radio range and have no further contact with any real time reports about where the storm is headed. By the clouds I know

it is right behind us and is still closing fast.

Ralph decides to continue on 70 east, but we break off for Indian Town, running on the left side of the dark black sky. We pick up the Turnpike, then the Sawgrass Expressway and finally Alligator Alley.

Now we are headed back home from behind the storm, coming back up from the south. At Naples we see the first examples of damage, huge highway signs uprooted and thrown into the pine trees. As we proceed north the scenery only gets worse. At the Charlotte County line tractor trailers along the interstate are overturned and lay sprawled like toys on the road. We wait for 30 minutes near the Charlotte County airport for the Interstate to be cleared, then we move on. By the time we get to the Peace River bridge everything is dark. From the Harborview exit we follow a state trooper into Port Charlotte. The trooper swings his hand held spotlight in front of him as we move slowly ahead, through fallen trees and dropped power lines. Calamity is everywhere. A boat hangs against a power pole, houses and their contents are split open and strewn e v e r y w h e r e . At Whidden Industrial Park, a cluster of metal buildings is ripped open and balled up like tin foil in the trash. Aluminum roofs, plastic soffits, and wires are everywhere. At U.S 41 the trooper turns north and we are on our own. Driving down Edgewater we drive across lawns and in 4wheel climb over several power poles and felled trees. We are heading home. We turn down our block in front of two houses with no roofs at all. We look at each other in silence.

A chill runs down my neck, but by 8:30 p.m. we are home. Our roof is mostly intact, but devoid of shingles.

Bare wood shows through everywhere. One piece of plywood is missing and I can see into the attic there.

Our House

Two of our boarded up windows have been blown out into the street. The living room parquet floor is under an inch of water. Our bedroom only has a two broken panes and the bed is relatively dry. Holding each other in our

arms, my wife sobbing quietly with the dog lying against her side, we fall to sleep. It will be two weeks before the power comes back on. We will camp out in the ruins, trying to cope and figure out what comes next.

Then, There Was A Sign The eye of hurricane Charley passed over the Bangsberg - Beaney - Severin area in Port Charlotte where we live.

Five houses on our block were totally demolished, many others sustained major damage. At first I thought our house was ‘fixable’, but now it looks like our county’s 50- percent rule will force us to rebuild. The 50- percent rule ststes that if you spend more than 50-percent of the county’s appraised value of your house (without the land) then you must bring it up to current building codes. That means the finished floor elevation must be brought up to 11 feet. Homes in our area are at 7 feet, so the only way to comply is to rebuild. Personally I think this is a ‘conspiracy’ between the county (who gets their flood insurance from the Federal Government) and the insurance companies, who don’t want to insure these properties anyway. At any rate we may be out of luck, but we still see other things every day that remind us we are luckier than others. Folks on fixed incomes will be forced to move elsewhere because of this rule but in our case we’ll borrow heavily from the SBA and hope to survive. A month after Charlie, Charlotte County is still reeling. Our house was five lots up a canal from the Peace River in a place where the Charley was particularly vicious. The storm blew the plywood covered windows on the canal side of our home, plywood still attached, right out of the wall and through the living room and kitchen. Then it punched a hole in the boarded up windows on the opposite side of the house and blew the whole mess out. It was ugly. If it weren’t for the windows letting go there is no doubt in my mind the roof would have lifted off. But to every event of catastrophic proportion there

comes a point of closure, a time when you leave the disaster behind and begin to move on. For us, in the wake of hurricane Charley, closure came at 7:15 in the morning on Friday, August 27th, which happened to be my birthday. Up to that day we had been camped out in the one dry room we had left, living with bottled water, Red Cross “heater meals” and getting minimal power from an old gasoline generator. Every day we were up at dawn, asleep at dusk, probably still in shock. We were sitting in the living room, that morning, contemplating yet another day of sorting through the mess in the sweltering heat. There was a nice breeze blowing in from the south that came through the gaping hole in the Florida room and blew out through the open front door, pretty much on the same path Charley took. Up to that point every morning had been the same: wake up and start on the heavy work before the day got too hot, but on this morning we lingered in the breeze, drinking coffee boiled with the grounds, camp-style, and not saying much. My wife sat at the battered dining room table, that was in the middle of the living room now, and I was against the wall sitting in a pool chair about ten feet away. We were stupefied and exhausted from the long ordeal.

Suddenly, something caught my eye outside, a shadow moving in the air and getting bigger. I looked up, focusing on the street through the open front door and saw a wingspan that was big; three feet, maybe four. With the sun rising in the east the bird was clearly visible as it swooped down lower. An osprey, talons dangling, with great brown feathers and yellow eyes, tucked its wings back at the shoulder, then folded them some more and flew

right into the living room through our open front doorway - perhaps four feet above the ground. We didn’t have time (or the energy) to react. We sat still. Once inside, the bird extended its wings in a gentle glide, banked slightly to the right and flew directly between us, flapping once, ever so lightly as its right wing tip passed not two feet from my face. The soft air from the great bird’s wings blew across my face like a kiss from heaven. The bird dipped left then right, zig-zagging artfully from the living room into the Florida room and then flew out the large gaping hole left by the missing windows. We sat motionless for a moment or two, goose bumps blossoming, skin tingling, in an uplifting swell of awe. Like the great owl in the Harry Potter movie the osprey brought us a message, a reminder of why we live here; the wildlife, the birds, the fishing, clean water, unspoiled shorelines, tropical breezes, blue skies. That’s what Charlotte County is all about.

That’s why Frank and Chuck and Ron and Rob and everyone I know is re-

building. This is still the best place to live. Hurricanes happen, but that’s life in the tropics.

Page 10

Water LIFE

MAGAZINE

Blue Tarp Report More HURRICANE AFTERMATH

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE Editor It has now been almost six months since Charley and things are finally starting to move ... a little. Progress is being made on roof repairs and remodeling around town, but new construction still lags behind. Along the ‘Edgewater Corridor’ in Port Charlotte, trucks continue to carry away houseloads of concrete rubble – headed to the dump, but by late January only one new home had begun to come out of the ground. The process is slow and the hurricane induced consequences and revelations which have surfaced since the storms are numerous.

For me, the big thing is the way my life has changed. Before the storm I’d empty my pockets at night and have, maybe, a split shot or two, a swivel or some other fishy accoutriments mixed in with my pocket change. Now I find wire nuts, screw driver bits and nails when I dump my pockets.

Used to be, I’d wear boat shoes or be barefoot most of the time when I was on the boat. Now I’m in sneakers every day, wearing socks, on land, in my truck.

My truck, a new in 2002 Toyota Tundra was always clean and waxed. It didn’t have a scratch before the storms.

Now it’s a work truck and I’m lucky if I have time to whisk out the sand from the carpet once a month. The pick-up bed isn’t only scratched it’s dented with several new post Charley ‘impressions.’

The time dropping off and picking up my pictures is worth saving when every day seems to be backed to the max with things to do. So I bought a digital camera. Time is important since there is still so much paperwork to deal with.

First it was just the insurance forms but now insurance is pretty much settled.

Today, our time is spent chasing checks and permits. Insurance checks don’t just get made out to the insured, they have to be made payable to our private adjuster, the mortgage company, and since we are borrowing more money, to the Small Business Administration. I have one

February

2005

check we are still waiting on that has been ‘in the process’ since Nov 11; and when I finally get that check back, since it’s over $5,000, my own bank will put a hold on it for another week. This takes tracking and vigilance, not to mention Fed-X charges, phone calls and still more time ... often spent on hold.

On my ping pong table, files from FEMA, the SBA, the Insurance company, demolition contractor, a title policy, new surveys and proposals are all keeping company with the in-progress drawings for our new house. The ping pong paddles haven’t surfaced in two months.

We are currently waiting for a soil sampling and have engineering plans, and truss drawings in the works. The survey has been shot, but I have to go to Arcadia to pick it up. If everything goes in the right cubbyhole by the end of this month we’ll almost be on schedule. Then there will be another month of waiting until the county building department checks everything over and gives us our permit.

To keep the money flowing there are progress reports for the financial institutions and draws on the loans which have to be completed.

Over at the old house, we have ‘cut away’ our old garage and will be incorporating what’s left of that structure into our new plan. There is minor cement work and some carpentry waiting to be done on the garage and one side still has some broken glass to be replaced. Little projects for my ‘spare’ time.

I’ve got a gearbox on one of my davits that is going bad but I was lucky enough to find a used replacement. Now, the drive gear has to be cut off the old box and welded onto the new one. I hope to have that done by the time you read this, otherwise my boat may not get back into the water.

In the rental house we are living in, my wife refuses to hang any of our artwork on the walls (“it’s only temporary”) so where ever you look the walls are stark white. We call it the asylum.

The lush green shrubbery that once was the tropical alure of our old yard has been shredded, so we’re going shopping for trees when we get an afternoon off.

It’s not the same as it was, living in our shady little house on Bangsberg Rd in Port Charlotte, but in time things will get back to normal. I’ll know when that time comes because I’ll have split shots and swivels mixed in with my pocket change once again.

Page

28

Water LIFE

June 2005

MAGAZINE

BUILDING This New House Part 1: AINʼT NO THRILL WITH TOWER HILL

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor This begins a series about building our new waterfront home in Port Charlotte. Our old house was destroyed by hurricane Charley and after six months of battling with our insurance company, Clarendon Select, Tower Hill, we finally received our settlement checks for the house and its contents. Along with the check came a note from our adjuster that we had $7,500 remaining for demolition of the old house and $37,500 for law and ordinance. Law and ordinance is additional coverage which we paid for and which provides funds to comply with all the new building codes.

This is significant since the new code requirements for our area say the finished floor of the new house must be four feet higher than the finished floor of the old house. That’s a lot of extra concrete and fill. Another new code requirement is for hurricane compliant windows and shutters. That will ad another big chunk to the price of our new home. Law and ordinance coverage is very important.

Back in the early 70’s I was field superintendent for a company that built single family homes in Palm Beach County. In a five year period we completed over 600 homes. With that experience under my belt (and some help from more currently knowledgable friends) I decided I would be the owner/contractor for our own new house.

In late December I called Doug Timmons, of Shore Protection Inc. Doug is a friend and a local fishermen who sponsors a team in some of the local tournaments. His company built our new seawall two years ago. I contracted with Doug to do the demolition of our old house and, right around the same, time I contacted another boating and fishing friend, Jon Cole, president of Giffels Webster Engineering in Englewood, to start drawing up the plans for

Thanks to raised floor elevations and a move closer to the canal our new house will have a great second story view.

Like many homeowners who are starting over we demolished the house but are keeping our swimming pool.

our new house.

Doug sent over a heavy track-hoe in early January. When I talked to Nick King, the operator, I found he was also a fisherman and the father of the former Punta Gorda on-thewater policeman Joe King. All good people.

With the house knocked down and plans in the works we called Universal Engineering testing service to bore a couple of test holes in our lot and make sure there were no pockets of muck under the spot the new house was going on. When the drilling crew showed up they were interested in the fish in our canal - they were both fisherman, and when I went down to their office to pick up the engineering report I met with Lindsay Weaver. He was wearing a sailfish shirt – another fisherman.

Next came the roof trusses. Truss engineering takes time and the local suppliers were quoting 18 to 20 weeks for truss design and another month for manufacturing. I started looking out of the area for truss manufacturers and came up with Martinez Truss Company in Miami.

I called one Saturday morning and got the owner George Martinez on the phone. We made small talk for a while. I knew trusses made in Miami met the more stringent Dade County wind loading criteria. I found out George was a fisherman. The price was right and the design and production time was in weeks not months, so I went to Miami to

check out his operation. The office had pictures of boats on the wall. The shop was professional. George got my job.

In the interim I began to interview sub-contractors.

Manny, our concrete guy is a serious fisherman. Andy Medina, our monthly tournament fishing columnist is also a block mason, Josh Smith who fishes the Redfish Tour owns Palmetto Custom Homes and he is going to be our framing carpenter and Jack Pierson of Bayside Plumbing in Englewood, a loyal Water LIFE subscriber and another fisherman, is our plumber. Blake Beerbower, a regular at Fishin' Franks, has offered to help with the electric and Mr Snook, Norm Day will be the ceramic tile man. and Jimmy Frye of Cabinets Plus will do the kitchen. Windows and glass doors will all be PGT products and Mike our supplier is a PGT distributor and of course he is a fisherman.

There are still a few trades outstanding from our list: we are still looking for the right drywall crew and if we have enough money at the end, a roofer who does metal roofs and fishes will finish it off. It looks like our new digs on Bangsberg Road will be a fancy fish shack built on the water by local fisherman. We are excited. I couldn’t think of a better place to live in or a better crew to build it.

Now for the Bad News.

With our house torn down and the debris hauled away we submitted the demolition bill for our expenses to Clarendon Tower Hill Insurance.

A week later we got a call from one Mr. Chad Honea of their Gainesville home office. He said “We have reviewed your initial claim and it looks like we overpaid you, there for we are not going to pay your demolition bill or your law and ordinance claim.” You’re what?

I bit my tongue so as not to say anything which might later incriminate me. Brown and Brown Insurance is our local agent in Port Charlotte, they are the agents who put us with Tower Hill in the first place. We called them next and were told there is ‘nothing they can do,’ that we have to deal with the insurance company ourself. So I called our private adjuster and told him he was back on the case.

Now our private adjuster has had his law firm (there must be a fisherman in that office, somewhere) in Tampa file a Notice of Civil Remedy with the State Insurance Commissioner’s office. Clarendon/Tower Hill now has 60 days to resolve this matter or, as I understand it, they open themselves to a civil claim and we could then file for damages. Please feel free to contact me if you have similar problems. I’ll gladly give you copies of our Civil Remedy filing so you can copy it and file your own paperwork.

Next Month: Permitting with the county and ground breaking ...if we are lucky.

Page

28

Water LIFE

MAGAZINE

BUILDING This New House Part 2: PAPERWORK AND PERMITTING

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor You’d think it would be easy: Get someone to draw up some plans, take them down to the building department, pay a fee and get your building permit. If you were Bob Villa maybe it would work that way, but if you’re Joe Blow you’d be dead wrong. First of all, in a county where there are 18,000 homes and businesses being demolished nothing comes easy, or fast. Architects are backed up for months. If engineering is a nightmare then getting concrete is like finding gold. The story we were hearing in May was that August was the soonest most people would be able to even get a builder to talk to them about drawing up new plans.

Now, with all the rain in June, (19 inches in Port Charlotte) things have slowed down even more and complaints about new roofs leaking are tying up the lines even more.

“In general, everything is running seven weeks late,” one contractor told us, blaming the problem on shortages in materials, the rain and the fact that motivated by greed many sub contractors have taken on an unreasonable load of work and are now trying to divide their time between too many jobs. ‘Many builders are doing a little work in a lot of places and nothing gets finished on time’ was the perspective we heard most often.

Add to that the fact that the work force of laborers is stretched thin, and that contractors are pirating laborers from each other and you have the recipe for seven week delays if not more.

The biggest holdup in the building process right now is concrete. Blocks are available, but concrete in a truck is a delicacy. Only a few big customers are able to put cement on order and have it delivered on time, and even the biggest users of concrete have to plan ahead. If you are working with a small time builder, two months could easily be the waiting time for a delivery of cement. Our neighbors across the street waited a month for a 10-yard concrete order for their driveway. Then it started raining and their order was rescheduled for a month later.

Part of the problem is that three months ago CMEX the Mexican giant in the cement industry took over the concrete plant in Punta Gorda. With that sale a lot of the local goodole-boy concrete connections went away. The result is a lot of builders are pouring concrete whenever they can get it.

With the rain, it takes a lot longer to finish off the surface so on some nights we have seen concrete laborers working under the headlights of their cars.

Another stumbling block in the construction process is the flood plane elevation. Many houses being rebuilt have to be built on elevated foundations.

On our own house we spent $1,600 for an engineering survey of our property. For that we got a detailed report on sub surface investigation and how to build on our lot.

The primary caveat was: scrape the lot down to the natural surface elevation, then dig the footers at least 18 inches below the surface. When adding fill to raise the elevation do so in 10 inch to 1-foot ‘lifts’ with compaction between each lift to a density of 95-percent. That all takes more time and material. Unfortunately, what we are seeing around town now are builders who are piling dirt up three or four feet high and pouring a slab on top of it. We think this leads to settlement cracks and problems down the road.

Our plans went to the building department on June 17, almost 10 months to the day after the hurricane hit. We’re in the system now, but the zoning department we were told only has one examiner today, and some of their other staff are on vacation. We’re waiting again.

Permit applications are not just looked at and stamped.

Permits go through numerous different departments in the county before they are approved, and you need more than

It takes this much paper to apply for a building permit

just a simple set of plans to build your house.

First you need a survey, then you need engineered drawings of the structure. Then you need engineered drawings of the roof trusses you plan to use. If you are building a two story, like we are, you need engineered drawings of the upstairs flooring system as well. You need a list of the subcontractors signed by each and every one of them, you need window attachment schedules and you need energy calculations.

Energy calculations were new to me, and luckily my friend Bob Wills of Dolphin Air sat down with me at Hooters one day last month and explained the procedure.

The plans are examined for material, type of construction and exposure to the sun. All the data is fed into a computer program and the efficiency of the house is determined. That number is then correlated to the size air conditioning unit your plans will have to specify. There are supply and return air ducts required and depending on the square footage of the house and the distance the air has to travel from the air handler, the ducts must be correctly sized. “Insulating your house well is extremely important,” Bob said, suggesting it was a good idea to over insulate the sunny west side of our house and install a reflective barrier beneath the roof in the attic, to keep the attic cool. The less hot air you have around your living space the less the AC has to work. We are using solar shielded double glazed glass on the west side of our house and double insulation in the west side walls.

When we got our energy calcs back they ran 26 pages, itemizing each room and space within our new house, and all those calculations have to be submitted with your plans when you go to the building department. “Get four sets of these copied,” he advised “and save a set for yourself for later,” he said.

Also included with our plan submittal are two new surveys, a fire hydrant affidavit, tree preservation forms, drainage plans, site plans, window and garage door specifications, and a summary sheet showing flood zone and wind exposure (velocity) zone. Of course there is the application form itself and a $150 pre application fee. The actual permit fee will be calculated when our plans are reviewed.

Then a notice of commencement will have to be filed before we can start construction.

When we dropped our plans off they told us the wait would be four to eight weeks. What’s another couple of months at this point?

July 2005

You can follow any permit application through the county examiners at: www.charlottecountyfl.com

Meanwhile, at our rental house, the seawall has collapsed.

Seawalls in the area are old and many are in need of repair.

This one was made of corregated pannels which some say are asbestos based. Record setting rains in June (over 18 inches in a couple of weeks) have now taken their toll.

Water LIFE

August 2005

MAGAZINE

BUILDING This New House Part 3: SCRATCHING AND SCRAPING

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor Already I’m realizing how out of construction-shape I am. My hammer-hand is on the verge of blistering just from driving stakes into the ground. I’m afraid to think about the aches and pains I’ll have in a month when we really get started.

Right now I've been on the phone holding with the County for 20 minutes. It’s hard to get through to them, but they are helpful when you finally make contact.

At first, the permitting process looked good. Our application breezed through addressing (we already had an address) and Right of Way (that was pre-existing as well) but then we hit Zoning and our permit application sat in a box, or pile, somewhere for three weeks. We called every other day or so to check on progress, but there was none. The one day I spoke to Nicole Dozier and told her we really were getting tired of living in our rental house and asked what the hold up was.

Nicole pulled our file and told us it didn't say 'Hurricane' on it.

“Was there a box that I was supposed to check? Or a line I was supposed to write hurricane on?

Was there some instruction I missed in the application process,” I asked. Nicole said “No,” and that someone just should have told me

that. We lost almost a month on that ‘someone’s’ oversight.

Nicole said she would write the word ‘Hurricane’ on our application and later that day we got a call from Pat Haley at zoning saying that he was reviewing our plan right then. I smiled a thanks to Nicole, but it was a short smile.

Mr Haley said there was one problem – that the overhang on our second story bedroom encroached into the canal maintenance easement by about 6 inches and that we'd have to fix that. The fact that the overhang is 25 feet in the air didn't matter. We could get a variance but that could take three months, Pat said I called our engineers and told them of the problem. We talked over the options and decided to take one foot out of our new utility room and redraw the plans. In the mean time our old plans moved through to the next step, and into the construction plans examiner's department. That went without a hitch and they approved our mechanicals as is. It was a really important step and it happened almost too quickly for us to appreciate. We got busy with the Kids Cup redfish tournament and another week slipped by.

Right after the tournament, I checked the progress of our plans on the county’s website and saw that the zoning department had still had not approved our change.

I was 15 minutes on the phone before I finally got through and the nice lady on the phone said she would track down our application package and get it over to Zoning for them to sign off on immediately. Then the next day we were told our permit was ‘waived on’ by the health department (we are on sewer, and the Health Department only gets involved with houses having septic tanks) and Charlotte County Utilities passed us on us as well, since we still have water on our site and we are still paying a water bill. “Your permit is ready to be picked up,” the lady on the phone told me. “That will be $726.80,” she added.

We dropped everything and headed for Murdock, where in fact we were able to pick up our permit and our approved plans. The we went out to lunch for a mini celebration. It was an important day, and after hearing our jubilant conversation the waitress even brought us a complimentary desert.

Back on our old street, a demolition contractor was working on removing the 13th house from our block. I had talked to him the day before about scraping the weeds off our overgrown site, and as I waited for him to drive over, I opened the newly approved plans to have a look at them.

Everything looked good, except for one thing. They had stamped

Page

Late Flash! Weʼve now got the footer dug and by the time you read this it may be filled with concrete. Construction is underway!

and approved the original drawings, not the ones which we had resubmitted with the 1-foot shorter floorplan. If I kept those plans on the jobsite, the house might come out 1-foot bigger with the overhang back in the easement. The next morning I made the county aware of the problem. Then my wife went back to Murdock to exchange the plans. Two steps forward and only one step back. At least we are making a small amount of progress.

The phone rang. It was my wife, calling from the building department, the guy she has to see was ‘on break.’ We were waiting again, but this time not for long – he soon returned and then we had the right plans in hand. The building department has really been very good about all this.

29

Next: We get going with the construction.

On the insurance front, things are not moving ahead at all. The 60-day period which our insurance company, Clarendon Select / Tower Hill, had to reply to our complaint with the State Insurance Commissioner has now elapsed without so much as a word. Now our private adjuster says his lawyers will now sue them for breach of contract and for more ... which will be just fine with us.

September 2005

Water LIFE

BUILDING This New House Part 4

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor My fingernails are impeccably clean, a rewarding benefit of scratching in the dirt all day. I am tired. Its been a month of digging in the morning, rain in the afternoon, going home to get some rest, getting up early and doing it all again. At least I'm sleeping good, but I'm getting to be too old to be doing this on a regular basis. Luckily I am not working alone.

We received a successful inspection of our foundations.

Then concrete became the problem. Our foundation guy had promised concrete two days after inspection. It didn’t happen. We called and he said his ‘man’ at the concrete plant was on vacation. We called again, he didn’t answer.

Then he stopped answering our phone calls altogether. I called him from my wife’s phone and he answered. “I’ll call right now and call you back in ten minutes,” he said, but he didn’t. We dumped him and started looking for another guy.

It’s the way things are going in Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda. No call backs, excuses and broken promises. Time means nothing. Deals are made to be broken. Katrina will only make the labor scene worse in the coming months.

I'm thankful we're not living in a trailer like my next door neighbor Ronnie. Ronnie has a head start on us, his concrete work is already done and he is now moving into the framing stage. But Ronnie waited two weeks for his framers to show up. Everyone is waiting for something.

We have heard stories of people now looking for builders to construct their new homes and we have heard prices ranging from $300,000- to over $500,000 for a 2500 square foot house. These are ridiculous numbers considering a year ago you could build for a third of that. The local level of unconscionable price gouging is enormous. That's why we are building our own house. We can't afford to do it any other way. What happened to the Governor and the state and their promises of penalizing unfair practices in the wake of the hurricane?

Another part of the problem is a little known alliance between the insurance industry and the Small Business Administration. The SBA was quick on the scene with cheap loans when the storms hit. They offered low interest rates and a lot of people signed up. But, as we have found

Page 29

MAGAZINE

SBA LOANS

INFLUENCE INSURANCE SETTLEMENTS

out from our lawyer, there was a catch.

When you take an SBA loan you give up your rights to the insurance proceeds and you give up your right to sue the insurance company if they don’t pay you what they are supposed to. Insurance companies, according to our lawyer, know this very well, and as soon as they see you have taken an SBA loan they know they are free to ‘readjust’ your claim because the SBA seldom if ever perseus them.

“The SBA is intentionally letting the insurance companies off the hook,” our lawyer told us.

Tower Hill, our carrier, settled with us on our house and contents and then when it came time to pay us for our ‘ordinance and law’ and ‘demolition’ coverage, they backpedaled and said they were not going to pay because they had recomputed our claim. They owed us over $40,000, but only sent us a check for $10,000. We called a lawyer.

We filed a grievance with the state insurance commission and waited the requisite 60 days for them to respond. We heard nothing, our private adjuster heard nothing, the 60 days elapsed. We thought we had a shot at suing them for breach of contract and opening the door for a damage suit.

But there appears to be yet another unspoken wrinkle in the process, one only known well by insurance lawyers.

You don’t get notified whether the insurance company responds or doesn’t. “The insurance commissioner does not really protect the consumers of this state,” our lawyer told us. Currently there are 40,000 insurance claims in the state that still have not been settled. The insurance commissioner’s office is overwhelmed with notices filed from the 2004 storms. That’s not my problem...but now it is.

So now we are faced with yet another dilemma. We have not drawn any money from our SBA loan yet, so we could cancel the loan, there by opening the door to suing the insurance company for the money they still owe us, but if we come up short we might need to borrow money to finish our house. Will the interest on a new loan exceed $34,000? Our lawyer advised: “What you want to do is see how much meat is left on the bone (money remaining that could be collected from the insurance company) and then weigh your options.” It doesn’t get easier, it only gets more expensive. That’s the real disaster.

We have now fired our first concrete contractor and hired another, who got the concrete for us the very next day.

Water LIFE

October 2005

BUILDING This New House Part 5

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor Last month we poured our footers, thanks to our friend Doug Timmons of Shore Protection Inc., who helped us get concrete on short notice. This month, our friend and Water LIFE staff writer Andy Medina and his brother Greg pitched in for the block work. At one point we had a price to buy block for $3 each. That was ridiculous, so we called around. Home Depot in Cape coral was at $1.38 they had 500 block and could deliver, but we needed 2500. We talked to a guy at the CEMEX plant in Punta Gorda who told us their block should be $1.12, so we went up to the Peachland CEMEX plant and asked to buy some block. That will be $1.51 the guy at the block sales desk told us. Andy and I were flabbergasted, but that’s the way it is, the salesman told us, take it or leave it.

We were just about to leave when Paul Hardy walked in. Paul, I sensed, was important at the plant ... and Paul was wearing a Columbia shirt, a clean whiter fishing cap and a pair of Costa Del Mar fishing glasses. ‘Are you a fisherman?’ I asked Paul. “That’s what I do,” he said, ‘I only work here when I don’t feel like fishing.”

We hit it off right away and I came to find out he was important.

When I told him the problem we were having getting block, he told me they had plenty of block and

they were in business to sell block.

“What kind of fishing do you guys do?” he asked. I told him I wrote Water LIFE and that Andy fished the Redfish Cup. I showed him a copy of last month’s publication and he said, “... yeah I read this all the time.” Paul bailed us out, set up an account for me on the spot and OK’d our order for delivery the next morning. We talked about fishing in the Keys, redfishing, the Kids Cup and other important details of our new found friendship.

A fisherman helping out another fellow angler. It just doesn’t get any better than that. Thanks again Paul, we owe you a dinner!

Andy and I spent Friday afternoon putting the block out so it would be handy to lay-up and Saturday morning Andy and his brother Greg, got started. First we got the long wall, about 700 block done, Sunday we were at it again by 7 a.m. and got around the canal side corner and up the pool side to the kitchen – another 600 or so.

Then Monday, Andy and I were alone. I hauled block and Andy mixed mortar and layed it up. Greg showed up after work at 4 p.m. and the three of us worked until about 8 p.m., laying another 600 block.

Then Tuesday we started early and worked late. Andy and I did the day shift and by 3:30 Greg showed up.

Together the three of us worked until almost 10 p.m., under the illumination of my old photography studio lights and by the time it

MAGAZINE

Page 29

WEʼVE GOT BLOCK ABOVE THE GROUND NOW

was all over we had laid 2140 block and the stem wall was done.

But we had more work to do.

I made up some special connections to link the reinforcing steel in the footer to the steel in the walls and my wife and I tied it all together on Thursday, then on Friday afternoon, in the 92 degree heat of the day we pumped the stem walls solid with concrete - a must for filling the foundation full of dirt and not having the sides blow out.

A week later my friend Capt.

Keith Benner got us the first 5 loads of fill and on Saturday Doug let us use his loader and move the fill into the foundation.

Another fishermen-friend, J.R. Witt (Westwind Contracting) sent up a small vibrating roller from his job rebuilding the Pine Island Road and we used it to pack down the first layer of fill. Then, after another three days of hauling and packing we were done.

Next comes the plumber and then we have to form the edges and get ready to pour the slab. Then we can start laying the block for the actual house. Stay Tuned ...and thanks to everyone involved.

Once again our pal Doug Timmons from Shore Protection Seawalls Inc. helped us out by sending over three of his his crew to pump our stem walls full of concrete. Then, since heʼs working on a seawall job just down our street, he loaned us his loader to start moving fill. I canʼt say enough about Doug Timmons and his Shore Protection crew. They are not just OK contractors, they are first class, reputable people and they do excellent work at a fair price. If you need more of a reference, call me directly.

Water LIFE

Page 24

BUILDING This New House Part 6

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE Editor Jason from Universal Testing in Punta Gorda prodded around with a bent piece of re-bar, leveraging his whole body weight on it at various spots in the dirt.

Then, when it wouldn’t penetrate, he deemed our dirt ready for the compaction test. Not much science there.

It had rained for several days before. “All the slabs I tested so far this week had standing water on them,” Jason said. “I’m surprised yours is dry.” Jason dug a small hole and then got out a hammer-cup that he pounded down into the dirt, coming up with a soup-can-sized sample from six inches down. He took the sample back to his truck, weighed it and removed a small amount. That dirt went into a coffee-can sized canister with a gauge on one end and two lead balls inside. Some reagent chemical was added and then the whole thing was shaken like a margarita until the gauge registered the moisture in the soil.

When we passed the test, Jason issued us a green sticker that went on our building permit. I called our plumber immediately.

Jack Giuliano is our plumber.

Jack is from Englewood and a

partner in the H20 plumbing company. Jack of course is a fisherman, but like many tradesmen who love to fish Jack hasn’t been on the water in a while. “It’s crazy how much work there is,” Jack noted.

Jack and I had been coordinating the start of our plumbing project for weeks and Jack showed up on schedule Friday with his two laborers, Jesse and Kyle.

The first thing that happens after you have your nice hard dirt all compacted and you call the plumbers is that the plumber digs it all up. Jack laid out the main waste lines, calculated the pipe sizes and fall, and started cutting

PVC. Four-inch pipe makes up the main run, three inch runs from the washing machine and kitchen and the pipes from the upstairs. Once the drainage was

done they went back and laid in the water lines using a different grade of PVC and a special glue for drinking water and hot water lines.

All had gone smoothly to this point. And then I looked at the weather. It was nice in Port Charlotte but down in the tropics there was a depression forming. It was Wilma.

We went into ‘emergency mode’ immediately. If we didn’t get the concrete slab poured before Wilma came we’d be screwed. I called my friend and concrete man, John Bunch and we talked over the options. We were shooting for pouring concrete in a week or so, but now we had to move it up.

The thing I like about John (aside from his excellent concrete work) is that he’s a do-it-when-he says -he-will kind of guy. If John says he’ll be over at 2:30 you can set your watch by it.

“I’ve got a driveway scheduled for Thursday,” John said, “20-plus yards. Let me see what I can do.

I’ll be over on Wednesday to get started.”

I told Jack of our plan that afternoon and Jack said he’d have his plumbing done and ready to inspect on Monday. That sounded good. Jack had a soccer game to coach on Saturday but like the

professional that he also is, Jack and his guys came back Sunday morning to finish up and by Monday we were ready for a plumbing inspection. Meanwhile, out in the Gulf, Wilma was now a hurricane and moving closer.

November 2005

MAGAZINE

PLUMBING & THE SLAB

Monday came and went and the plumbing inspector did not. The county inspectors are busy, and plumbing inspections can be ‘next day’ or the ‘following day’ the lady in permitting told me. We needed plywood to form the slab edges. There was none available in Port Charlotte or Punta Gorda, so that night my wife and I ran

down to Home Depot in Cape Coral to pick some up. We’ll use that same material later to form the tie-beam atop the block walls.

We came back and immediately cut the 4x8 boards in half under the lights.

The steel and wire mesh arrived along with two rolls of plastic ‘Visqueen’ sheeting (which has to be put on top of the dirt as a moisture barrier) the next morning. At 1:30 on Tuesday the plumbing inspector showed up and approved our pipe work.

Wilma was a Cat 1 storm and headed towards the Yucatan, but the forecasts said it would turn east. John and his guys (Bubba and Ernesto) showed up on schedule and started to get the materials ready. They cut the wire mesh into manageable lengths and stockpiled it alongside the slab.

Then they backfilled the plumber’s ditches (the pipes remain uncovered until they are inspected) and I called in Sosh from SOS Pest Control to spray the dirt with a heavy dose of subterranean termite juice as required by the building code. Sosh put a pink sticker on our permit and we called in the slab for inspection.

John and his guys worked late Tuesday afternoon getting the

IN THE SHADOW OF

steel re-bar in around the perimeter and wire mesh in place. Then my friend Greg Medina came over at 4:30 after work and Gregg, my wife and I snapped a line around the stem wall and got out the tnailer to hang the form boards. By dark on Tuesday we had all the big boards in place and went home to rest.

Wednesday morning I got up at 5:00 and turned on the TV. Wilma was suddenly a Cat 5 storm!

I worked by myself all morning filling in the last pieces of the edge forms and tying up the steel on the concrete deck outside of the kitchen. At 11:30 the inspector came and took the plans and permit card out of the box. We walked around the slab talking

WILMA

mostly about the hurricane. “It looks like you know what you are doing,” the inspector said and he signed off on our slab inspection.

I called John immediately and he released the concrete for 9 a.m the next morning.

John, who had spent most of the day before forming up the

“You’d be surprised how many builders just leave that mesh lying on the plastic,” the pump guy commented.

When the concrete was all in place, we lifted the whirly-bird up onto the slab and Bubba took over. The whirly bird, as it’s called, is a four-bladed gas-powered circular trowel. It looks like an upside down helicopter. You walk it around like a floor polisher and it spins on the concrete to make a soothe fine finish. Bubba is a master at operating this machine. By 4 p.m. Thursday we had a beautiful, flat, smooth and shiny slab. One by one, John pulled the forms off the steps and our entry way looked spectacular.

I can’t say enough good things about the quality of John and Bubba’s concrete work.

I watered the slab down with a hose late that afternoon and then, when I couldn’t sleep at 3 a.m., I got up and drove over to the new house and put the hose on it again. The wetter you keep fresh concrete the harder it gets. The next morning I watered it again and again. Then early in the afternoon John came back with his cement saw to cut in the expansion joints. Wilma had stalled on Cozumel, so I set about securing the boat and the other things around the job site and kept watering the slab.

Friday afternoon I called about our framing lumber package and found the price had gone up again in the last two weeks. “Concrete will be going up 16-percent in

front steps worked meticulously to make it all come together. We poured the lower steps first then moved to the back of the slab and started pouring concrete towards the front. John and Bubba worked the long ‘screed’ keeping the floor level, while Erenesto kept the edges smooth. I worked with the pump guy using my hammer claw to grab the wire mesh and pull it up into the middle of the concrete.

January,” John told me and both drywall and plywood will be out of sight since the two biggest plants in the nation were outside New Orleans.

Our thanks to all the guys who are helping make it happen. “Just run our pictures big and in color,” Bubba asked. So here you go, Bubba, and thanks again!

By next month, we could be laying up the cement block.

Page 22

Water LIFE

MAGAZINE

December 2005

This New House Part 7: Blockwork Happening

A Mule named ʻUgʼ

By Michael Heller Water LIFE Editor In Pavlov’s famous response, an animal, I think it was a dog, was made to drool when it heard a sound associated with its feeding. It was a second level of response: the animal knew after the noise the next thing coming would be food.

Snowbirds returning to our block have wondered aloud why our new house is on such a high foundation. ‘It’s FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers,’ I tell them; ‘the same people who mandated our 5 foot high foundation were the wisdom behind the design of the levees surrounding New Orleans.’ Everyone laughs when I say that.

Actually in a way it’s way cool. Our view will be better, the breeze will be stronger and bugs and ants will be hard pressed to invade our new up-in-the-sky structure.

While houses along Edgewater drive are elevated three feet, we are a full five feet up because we are down by the big water. Our neighbors have come to call our new house and our next door neighbor’s new house ‘the tower section’ of Bangsberg Road. On the final plan, the tippytop of our second story roof will be a staggering 34 feet in the air. That’s three and a half stories any where else.

With such lofty levels comes some loft construction consequences. Materials which normally are simply laid out in front of a regular house are having to be hauled and hoisted up to the first floor level.

This month’s project was the blocking up of the walls, which meant about 2,500 cement blocks had to somehow get from the stockpile at the side of our old garage to the floor 50 feet away and 5 feet up, in the process. To accomplish this task, I hired a guy whose name I shall not mention because he turned out to be a flake, but at least in the beginning, he brought his Moffit, a soft tired, super-sized fork lift, to pick up stacks of block, and loaded 20 cubes of 74 blocks each onto our slab. The plan was to lay up those 1500 block and then have him return to load up the rest. His return, however did not occur, so we hand-lifted and stacked the last 600 block ourselves. I still feel the exercise in my back a week later.

The project started easily enough. My friend and block mason and super fishermen Capt. Andy Medina showed up the day he got back from the Redfish cup finals and started laying block. The immediate hard part was getting the mud (mortar mix) up from the mixer at street level to the slab. I had saved a dozen or so 4x6 rafters from our Florida room when the old house was destroyed and we used some of them to build a big ramp up the 5 feet to the slab. It was a good idea, but in practice it was more than any one human could do to wheel a full 200 pound wheel barrow up a 30-percent grade. So we doubled teamed it. Every time Andy had a load of mud to bring up he’d call me. “Ug” he’d say, “...come here Ug,” and I’d grab the dock line tied to the front of the wheelbarrow and Andy would take the back and we’d charge up the ramp with him pushing and me pulling... “Ug” I’d say, until we made it to the top.

Continued on Facing page It got so that what ever else I was doing when I heard the mixer stop I’d go ‘Ug,’ like Pavlov’s dog. I knew what was coming next.

Andy laid up the Florida room and the pool side one day and then the hallway and the kitchen the next. In block work the idea is to lay up 7 courses from the floor and then bring in the scaffolding to ‘top-out’ the remaining courses.

Andy single handedly must have laid 1500 blocks in four days. Then on Saturday his brother Greg showed up with his crew and they blocked up the long 63 foot wall and set

the four ridiculously high (25 blocks up) columns.

You learn a lot when you move that many block. Did you know there is a handle on every cement block? A thick part of the center web, designed to make it easier for masons to handle them? Did you know that almost every ‘cube’ of block you buy comes with the handle upside down? No, I don’t know why. Did you know that half blocks cost more than full blocks? and that without a concrete saw you are lost when it comes to making things fit. You’d think that CAD Water LIFE Editor Michael Heller (Ug!) and Andy Medina pulling up the mud. designed plans would have it down to a science when it comes to ‘block work’ with the right number of full sized blocks to go between the windows and in the walls so everything comes out equal. It ain’t so, not all the time anyway. The sponge is an invaluable tool to masons, used to ‘float’ the mortar joints and clean off excess mud.

‘Preachers’ are tools that hold the leveling strings in place on a wall and that masons use short levels and blocks themselves are really not that square. There are preferences for the type of sand that masons like and mortar mix left laying around too long gets stale and is hard to work. There are ‘right handed’ and ‘left handed’ trowels, ‘mortarboards’ and ‘jump boards’ that all come into play in building a house.

We finished the block before Thanksgiving and started on the tie beam, the concrete beam around the The block crew working on ʻthe long wall.ʼ top, the very next day. It’s not done as of this writing, but by early December we should have it. Stay tuned.

Now for an insurance update. After jerking us around for 16 months Tower Hill has finally paid us off. House contents, pool cage, alternate living, the whole eñchilada.

Done, finished, thank you and good bye. But it has taken so long that now the SBA wants us to requalify for our loan, in spite of the fact that we closed on the loan 8 months ago and have recorded a mortgage in their name.

More paperwork, more proof of insurance, a builders risk policy, flood insurance updates and some other stuff that I just don’t feel like looking up right now. Will it ever end?

It’s not the natural disaster that drives you crazy, you can deal with that, you can clean up and rebuild, but the man made disaster, the paperwork, the lying contractors, the guys that simply don’t do what they said, the government, they’re the ones that make it so difficult. Ug.

The four outside columns are 24 blocks in the air. Itʼs scary high!

Hereʼs a look at the start of the tie beam. The form boards are going up atop the block walls. One of the completed columns is shown in the foreground. Scaffolding will follow soon.

Water LIFE

January 2006

Page 25

MAGAZINE

This New House Part 8

F O R T I F I C A T I O N S : Steel, Concrete and the Big Tie Beam

Todd Pilcher ran his pump and walked the beam to pour concrete

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor “We failed the inspection.”

The words echoed in my head like a garbage truck backfiring on top of a morning hangover.

I had called in the inspection for our tie beam the day before, but on this morning we were short a few supplies so I ran up to Murdock to get them. My friend Andy Medina stayed at the jobsite and waited in case the inspector came early. Naturally, as soon as I left the inspector arrived.

And when I got back Andy said “We’re going to have to get a letter from the engineer detailing every single little change we made.” Thoughts of every tiny area where we deviated the slightest bit from the plans raced through my brain. There were a number of changes, but we only changed things for the better, how could there be a problem?

How could I get all that documented? It would take weeks. I was crushed.

Then Andy cracked a big smile. “Only kidding,” Andy said. “We didn’t fail, we passed with flying colors!” “Almost not funny, Andy,” I said. Then I smiled too.

If you’ve been following this construction story every month you’ll remember that last month we were just starting the tie beam and had hoped to be setting the roof trusses by now, but the beam took longer than we expected, the extra time eaten up by a family medical emergency, changing construction details and weather.

Several cold fronts moved through the area bringing rain and delays with them. And then there was one ‘clarification.’

We had struggled for three days trying to figure out how to form the tie beam in one continuous pour of concrete when it stepped up in height 16 feet

above the ground to accommodate the second-story floor joists. On the plans the beam was at one elevation over the front part of the house and at another elevation at the back. The already complicated scaffolding and supports required would need to be even more complicated and time consuming. We stood on the ground and cursed FEMA for making us elevate the new house so high. We were already working on two levels of scaffolding, sometimes with a ladder on top of that. We were stumped.

Finally I called the engineer and set up a meeting. We spread the plans out on his table and the senior designer at the firm looked them over. “You can’t do this,” he said matter of factly. “This won’t work.” “I don’t see how it will work either,” I said. With that, a change was made and life got a lot easier. The beam would be built all at one height and then we’d go back and use blockwork to construct the elevated area for the floor joists. It was much simpler all around, and stronger too.

But the work still wasn’t easy.

We were still climbing up and down double layers of scaffolding, and moving the few scaffolds we had around the site a lot. By the end of the day my legs felt like rubber. Lifting boards up, moving scaffolds over...and then there was all the steel and clamps.

We bought steel and more steel. We tied steel, built cages and laid them out around the house. My good buddy Fishin Frank came over and tied a lot of it together. A long time ago Frank worked tying steel on commercial jobs for a living.

When you drive over the 41 bridge, know that Frank helped tie it together.

Steel cages are what give support to concrete where it spans a distance between supports. We’ve

Frank and Andy setting one of the smaller ʻcagesʼ

Andy forming the beam he is standing on in the photo above right

We used the weight of a truck to bend some steel into shape

Cages of steel look are all custom

Clamps holding the beam together

got lots of spans and lots of cages in the new house. The worst part is that the cages are heavy and once formed we had to lift them up and set them in between the tie-beam form boards. A number of the cages are 16 feet in the air. This all took time. Much more time than we expected. One week quickly turned into two. Big work for the three of us.

Then came the clamps. All the

plywood and steel in the world is useless unless you clamp it into place. Clamps holds the weight of the 5000-pound concrete trying to push the plywood out.

Andy found a place in Fort Myers that rented clamps and we took two trucks down there to haul 225 clamps back to Port Charlotte. Then we went back and got 60 more.

When the inspector came he told Andy he had never seen as much steel in a residential project. I liked hearing that.

My theory is: bigger is better and more is good. There were places where five rods of steel would have sufficed, over the windows in the Florida room for example, but we built cages there instead. Over the door in the dining room, over the door that goes out to the pool; anywhere we had an opening on the exposed south or east facing sides of the house we ‘caged it.’ By the end of the tie beam process we were calling the house a fortress. When finished no compass will work in here! “The next time a hurricane comes, I’m staying at your house,” Andy said, and he knows he’ll be welcome.

When we finally finished forming up the ‘beam’ and got our approval on December 18th another old nemesis, unavailable concrete, came back to visit.

Apparently a lot of local contractors were pushing to get their jobs done before the end of the year when concrete prices were scheduled to go up 15 percent.

The soonest we could get concrete was Dec. 23, so we were on hold for a week. I took the time to clean up the jobsite and make room for the roof truss delivery.

I got the windows on order with PGT and we formed and poured the bases of the four big columns using sixty 80-poundbags of high strength concrete that we mixed up one by one in a wheelbarrow. We did that so when we pumped the concrete into the columns it wouldn’t blow out at the bottom from the weight. My theory is; you just can’t be too careful or build stuff too strong.

Then Friday the 23rd came and we were ready to pour. We poured the beam and pumped all the walls solid. Six hours and 33 yards of concrete later we were done and I can’t thank my friend Todd Pilcher enough for dragging the heavy hose full of concrete along the top of all 436 feet of tie beam to fill it.

On Saturday morning Andy showed up to strip the forms.

Every cell was full of concrete and everything looking great. We ordered our trusses from Miami because of the 146 mph wind loading Dade County requires (Charlotte only requires 130 mph) and two days after Christmas the trusses arrived.

We will soon be setting the trusses in place and putting plywood on the first floor roof.

Watch for the progress here next month.

Water LIFE

February 2006

Page 9

MAGAZINE

This New House Part 9

B i g g e r & Ta l l e r ... and Much More Difficult Than We Thought

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor The good news is that when I come home and take off my shirt my wife admires my shoulders and my ‘6-pak abs’. The bad news is that I’m asleep by eight o’clock! Lifting block up to the first floor was bad enough but working on the second floor was way too much. Having lunch at Harpoon Harry's, I saw our new house across the water. It rose to the tree line. I lifted every block up there – ground to slab, slab to scaffold, scaffold to second floor, second floor to second floor scaf-

fold. Nine hundred blocks. I think about it and it kills my appetite, but last month we made some great progress.

Early in January my friend Josh Smith (Palmetto Custom Homes and Tie Beams) got the roof trusses set and the downstairs sheeted with plywood. In the process I got a close look at the engineered ‘hold downs’ that make today’s roofs decidedly stronger and significantly more labor intensive.

Metal straps are still embedded in the concrete beam

Andy Medina lays the block for the door leadimng from the master bed room to the upstairs patio.

at the top of the walls so when the trusses are set the straps can be bent over each truss and nailed into them, but for the rare instance when a big wind could get under the roof (like a hurricane when a door or window blows in) engineers now calculate the exact uplift for each roof section and define the points where that force must be contained. In our roof there are four special attachment points where 5/8 inch bolts are embedded into the concrete beam to contain a theoretical uplift of over 4000 pounds at each spot. Uplift is the ‘buzz word’ in roofing today.

Buildings built in Charlotte County are designed to withstand 130 mph winds, but that wasn’t enough for us. We went to Miami to take advantage of the 146 mph Dade County hurricane code and had our trusses built there. Josh told me that on the barrier islands like Sanibel builders are required to not only nail, but also glue every outward sheet of plywood around the perimeter of the roof. So we glued the plywood to the trusses around the whole outside of our house, and to make it even tighter, every piece of 2x6 fascia was beveled so the plywood attached flatly to it. Additionally, we will be blocking up the space between each truss with more wood and installing screened vents to keep bugs out and a solar powered attic fan to help the air circulate. I don’t want any roof vents sticking up.

For thermal value we chose to

use the Solar Ply brand foil backed plywood. It costs a few dollars more per sheet, but it reduces the heat inside the attic.

When our roof was decked, but before the roofers came to put down the tar paper, I climbed up and painted the fascia and one foot of the roof’s perimeter with an oil based primer to reduce the chance of rotting around the edges if anything ever gets wet. The rotten edges were where numerous roofs came apart after Charley. Then we called in for a sheeting inspection from the county and after that, the guys from Superior Roofing came by to ‘dry in’ the downstairs roof.

They had it done in an hour and a half.

But the work we did on the front roof was only one part of this month’s progress. Out back it was a different story.

Out back we started the second floor, so while Josh and his boys were nailing the front off, Andy Medina and I were laying block getting up another few feet and forming the concrete deck which is outside the master bedroom.

I had thought we could set scaffolds to do the upstairs block work, but that proved to be a very bad idea requiring way too many contortions and way too much time. Andy suggested we ditch the scaffolds and install the floor joists, decking them temporarily with plywood left over from the tie-beam and working up from there. Block, mortar and steel all had to go up 28 feet above the ground. “Think of it as

muscle toning,” Andy said at one point, but I have to admit I was thinking more about a coronary thrombosis. But we worked like dogs and got it done, Andy and I. A few new changes evolved upstairs; a change from sliding glass doors to better looking and stronger PGT impact resistant French doors, a redesign of a wall, a strengthening change in the patio beam and a new 8-inch column where a cantilever had been designed. Thankfully our engineers at Giffels Webster were once again immensely accommodating. So this month, while you are reading about our progress we will again be moving ahead. Josh and his carpenters are scheduled to be back to set the trusses on the upstairs and to frame out the interior walls. Then we will have a roof over the whole house and be ready for windows, AC ducting and the rough plumbing. Stay tuned. All 128 yards of the structural concrete has now been poured and we’re moving into the next phase.

March 2006

This New House Part 10

Water LIFE

Hammers and Nails

ter boxes themselves are better.

Today they are lined with anitmicrobial' surface thet protects and insulates.

I loked around the house, what a difference a month makes.

The roof is on, both upstairs and down. Our fishing buddy Josh Smith started one carpentry crew on the downstairs but they 'moved on' before we had the upstairs ready so Josh made a call and hoked us up with Wayne Kerry who goes by the name of Construction Professionals inc for the upstairs Andy Medina lays the block for the door leadimng trusses and the from the master bed room to the upstairs patio. interiro wall framing.

I knew Wayne from

By Mi chael Hel l er the local tournament fishing Water LIFE editor venue and the day he arrived on Things have changed. Now the job our first conversation was when i go home at night and about his entry in the Kids Cup empty my pockets out I have tournament. I can't say enough nails mixed in with my change. good things about Wayne and his Big nails, 16-penny framing crew. Top notch, professionsl, nails. We’re out of the concrete down to business carpenters who phase and into the wood. Mike ?? knocked out the upstairs roof and our AC guy from Tommy's Air, interior walls in a week. Wayne noted things have changed in his had built my friend Bruce business too. Used to be AC Laishley's house out on Cayo ducts were metal, lined with Costa Island, one of the rough fiberboard insulation. onlystructures left standing, Ducting was a breeding place for intact after Charley passed overmiucrobes, bacteria and mold. head, so when Wayne was Now the ducts are smoothe douthrough glueing every piece of ble wall plastic insulated in the plywood onto the upstairs roof midle and wrapped with amylarand nailing it off with ring-shenk reflective covering that helps nails I knew our roof wasn't insulate them from high tempera- going anywhere. But Wayne wastures in the attic. Ducts are hung n't the only guy involved last from plastic straps to keep them month. Before Wayne was done from matting down the ceiling inside, the guys from Superior insulation in the house and where roofing were back to dry in the the ducts attach to the 'register roof, nailing metal flashing into boxes' the 'cans' behind the all the valleys, flashing the roof grilles in the ceiling or wall, they where it attaches to the upstairs are sealed with white mastic wall and putting the metal drip goop. First the duct hose is edge on around the perrimiter. sealed, then tie-wrapped and then Then they loaded the house with the outer hose is sealed and tire shingles, ready to nail down wrapped. This aint never coming when the dry-in inspectiuon was apart, Mike said as he lathered the done. white stuff on the duct for our Inside I had a little 'fixin' top second bedroom. Even the regisdo. There were some truss attach-

MAGAZINE

P a g e 11

Plumbers, Framers and AC

ments that needed additional straps, a few "chases' for the AC that needed ‘opening up’ and a whole lot of picking up and carrying out of wood scraps the carpenters left behind. Right around that time Jack and his guys from H20 plumbing in Englewood were back to’ rough in’ the plumbing. They ran the lines from the upstiars bath and got the water supply pipes into place.

But that wan't all for last month’s progress. We got a call from PGT saying our windows were ready so we made some calls to find a rental truck to go up to Venice and pick them up.

But there wasn't atruck to be found, so we got hold of a friend who graciously cleared his backhoe trailer off and we used that to haul our windows home. Also last month we trimmed off the jagged end of the old garage roof and repaired it so when the roofers shingle the house they could do the existing un-attached garage as well.

In the paperwork arena last month I ran down too 84 lumbrer in Ft Myers and talked to my salesman friend Jamie and got our exterior doors on order then I came back and met with the guys from two different stucco companies andworked out the numbers with them.

So by the time you read this the windows will be in and I'll be doing electric. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll be ready for our framing/AC/Plumbing and electric inspection. The county likes to doo all that on one pass so there is a lot to get ready.

Then we'll insulate the interior and get ready to hang drywall.

Stay tuned.

From the Top: 1) The upstairs roof trusses are set in place 2) The R-Max wall insulation goes on 3) Framing the interior walls 4) Finishing off the old garage roof – note the small square window in the house in the photo above. Thatʼs the ʻMolly window,ʼ an under-the-kitchen-counter vantage point designed for our dog to look out on the street.

Left: Plumbing for the washing machine in the laundry area.

April 2006

This New House

P a r t 11

Water LIFE

Windows and Doors ...

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor Our insurance company Tower Hill, and our local agent Brown and Brown have notified us they are cancelling our policy. Last I heard they can’t do that while our new house is still under construction ... ‘a special law signed by the Governor,’ another insurance agent told me. Obviously we’re going to have to research this and probably get back with our private adjuster and his lawyer. ‘Your insurance company is trying to limit their exposure,’ the other agent explained. They suck, I said.

We’ve gotten our plumbing and AC inspections passed and now we have some projects delegated to sub-contractors, the biggest of which was the installation of the windows.

We had planned to install the windows ourselves, but with my mom having medical problems, we called back our framing carpenter friend Wayne Kerry (Construction Professionals Inc.) and paid his guys to install the windows and French doors. In the real world installing windows is calculated at 25% of the window’s cost. The best windows don’t come cheap. We’ve got over 15large in PGT ‘hurricane proof’ Winguard products. Luckily, we had Wayne’s help and luckier yet, he cut us a ‘deal’.

We were extra careful when

laying the cement block and setting the openings for the windows, but when it came time to install them the fit was simply too tight. "I've found that with PGT windows you have to go 3/8 of an inch bigger than the measurements they give you," Wayne told me.

That sentiment would later be echoed by several other tradesman who are used to installing the PGT products.

Too bad we didn’t hear that earlier.

"Think about it," my friend Josh Smith, another contractor said. "If you had contracted with me to build your house and you had these tight fitting windows that took extra time to install you’d be all over my ass to fix them and I'd be wanting to charge you for the extra time to make them right.

That's the kind of stuff that ruins a relationship between a contractor and a homeowner. And that's happening all over ... and not just with windows. Shoddy work; laborers and manufacturers who are doing the least possible trying to spend as little time on each project as they can. Who gets burned? the consumer, the guy at the end of the line,” Josh said.

Dave Olmsted of PGT disagreed. “We design our windows for a very tight fit, that’s part of the hurricane impact testing,” he said. You want the tightest fit.

Still, we wound up having to grind down or resize numerous wooden framing 'bucks'. But now the windows are in and they are rock solid and air-tight. And our PGT French doors, with their 7/16 tempered and laminated glass, feel like they are bulletproof. All in all we are happy with the PGT products.

Back at our house, Wayne’s carpenters built the staircase to the second floor and hung the 'tray ceiling' in the kitchen. Then, with Wayne's permission, we hired a couple of his guys to work Saturdays and do some of the stuff

P a g e 11

MAGAZINE

and the fear of the ʻShower Policeʼ

we'd otherwise have done ourselves.

First up was the plywood. We had bought 40 or 50 sheets of 3/4 inch plywood some of which we used to edge-form the slab back when we poured it months ago, and the rest of which we used to form the tie-beams around the house. I've kept the wood flat and dry since then and last month it was time to 'recycle' it. We had Wayne’s guys (Robert and Jim) cover one side of almost all the interior walls with the 3/4 inch plywood. This gives us a much 'sturdier' house, better sound-deadening acoustics and when the wood is covered with drywall it will make a wall you can drive a nail into and hang a picture on anywhere. We ‘blocked’ (braced) the trusses in the ceilings to tighten everything up even further and 'scabbed’ the trusses where necessary so when we hang the drywall ceiling we will have a flat smooth surface. Finally our three steel exterior doors arrived: the front, poolside and kitchen doors. The front went in OK – my friend Andy Medina and I set that one late one Thursday afternoon, then Robert set the poolside door that weekend while we were in Miami.

The kitchen door arrived dented with a split jamb so we'll install that temporarily to get our framing inspection and then remove it and replace it when the new one comes in.

But all this stuff doesn't get my goat as much as one almost unnoticeable detail in this month’s construction process.

One day I was looking over the plumbing and noticed two adjusting screws on the valve that controls the water to the shower. I found a booklet on the floor that came in the box with the valve and read through it. "Pressure balancing valve" it said. So when the county plumbing inspector came to check our job I asked him what that meant. He told me it was required by code. That shower valves are now of the pressure balancing design so you can't scald yourself by turning on only the hot water. “The valve adds cold to the hot so you won't get burnt,” he told me. But what if I want just hot water? I like to get in the shower, close the door, adjust the shower head away from my body and put on only the hot to steam it up. I am even planning on putting a seat in the shower to sit on

The house looks deceptively small from the street, (above) but shows its size from the backyard view. Weʼve kept the openings small on the street side, which is the west side that gets full hot sun in the afternoon.

when I take a steam shower.

"You can’t do that," the inspector told me. How about a second ‘hot only’ water outlet? “Nope, not allowed,” the inspector said.

So it looks like I will be breaking the law whenever I take a shower, because I'll be dammed if the government is going to tell me what temperature the water in my shower has to be. What if I just call it a sauna? Maybe that’s the answer, I don’t know.

I’m thinking someplace down the line that valve may disappear, and I'll have to take my chances of ‘getting in hot water with the ‘shower police’.

So if you see me running down the street one day, clad in only a towel, at least you’ll know who will be chasing me.

Next month, it could be stucco on the exterior and wiring inside. Stay Tuned!

The pesky temperature regulated valve (above left), the shower area in the upstairs master bath (above) and the PGT French doors in the master bedroom (below)

May 2006

This New House

Part 12

Water LIFE

A Cementuous Coating ...

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor “There’s a bunch of seedy looking guys in a black truck parked in your yard. Are you expecting anyone?” It was my neighbor Ronnie calling at just before 7 am one morning and it was a fair question, considering our new house had been broken into earlier that week. Is there any stuff outside?

I asked, thinking what next of mine could be missing. I slid my 45 clip holster into my pants and grabbed my car keys. The house we are renting is only a minute away from our new house. “Looks like wire,” Ronnie said. “Flat sheets of wire lath,” he added. I slowed down and took a breath.

“Don’t run them off,” I told Ronnie, emphatically. “Those guys are probably my stucco crew!”

We’ve been a little jittery since someone kicked in our kitchen door and made off with a nail gun. Then, the very next night, they came back, tried to unscrew the side door to my garage and when that didn’t work broke through a 10-inch window and took a new sawzall and a $230 right-angle drill. “There is so much of this going on around here,’ the sheriff investigating the burglary later said, “that we just can’t keep up with it.” Two other houses on our block and one across the canal were also burglarized that week. Up the block, my neighbor Lance’s house, like ours, was hit twice.

“Be real careful when you get your air condition compressors and your appliances delivered,” the deputy had warned us.

“They’ll take that stuff the day it arrives.”

I topped off my coffee and cruised over to the jobsite to meet the stucco crew. Paul Hart is the stucco ‘sub’ we are working with – a long time local contractor who came highly recommended through a friend.

I wasn’t sure when Paul’s guys would start, but any day was fine with me, even if I

Page 25

MAGAZINE

wasn’t totally ready.

We had passed our framing inspection without a problem the week before and I called Paul at that time to tell him I was ready for stucco. I figured it would be a couple of weeks before he got to my job.

But he did me a favor by sending his guys over right away. One thing you have to know about working with contractors these days is when they show up, you never send them away, so I dropped what I was doing and went right to work getting the last few things ready.

The ‘few things’ had to do with electrical boxes that needed to be set around the exterior. I had drilled the holes through the solid concrete walls a week earlier, but now I needed a chipping hammer to get the outside ready and then tap-con the boxes into the wall. I’m an old fashioned kind of guy and I like metal electrical boxes, inside and out. I like them outside because they hold a fixture better and I like them inside because you can yank a lamp cord from across the room without fear of ripping a plastic box apart. But I needed just the right depth boxes. The inch-and-a-half ones were too deep, inch and a quarter would be just right, but I only had inch-and-a half ones.

Graybar electric is in Whidden Industrial Park, just across US 41 from our house. I went over and met the supervisor, Josh Boyd, who just happens to be a fishermen and who knows a slew of fishermen I know. Bingo! I was wearing my Kids Cup shirt so we talked about the Kids Cup and then about electric and in the end Josh set me up, gave me the boxes I needed and signed on as a Kids Cup sponsor. You’ll be hearing more about Graybar and our electrical progress next month.

We’ve been busy with the Kids tournament so having the stucco crew working on the house was a blessing since I didn’t have the time to do much else. It was a curse too, since I wasn’t able to be there, but that in turn was probably a blessing for the stucco crew ... because I wasn’t there, so it all worked out.

The crew spent two and a half full days stapling wire and attaching corner bead under the overhangs and around the house and setting up scaffolding. In the mean time my carpenter-helper Bob Schick hustled to get the brick moulding up around the exterior doors. Then my friend Andy Medina and his brother Greg took time off from pre-fishing for the Oberto Cup and nailed up the runners and ‘j’ channel for the soffit using the stucco crews scaffolding.

The scaffolding was a god-send because our roof is so FEMA high it would otherwise have taken a fire truck with an extension ladder to get up to it.

The stucco crew started with a skim-coat on the east canal side. The stuccoers worked their way down the long 75 foot wall on the north and around to the west

we get stuccoed and broken into

facing front during the next two days and then started on the back side and garage, hauling heavy 5-gallon buckets of mud up the walls with a rope and pulley. Little by little the blocky look of our house changed to a textured grey ‘cementuous coating’ (that’s what they call stucco now) that will someday get painted.

Earlier in the month, before the stucco crew, before the soffit, before the electrical boxes, I had a chance to get our main underground electrical conduit burried; running it from our existing meter on the unattached garage over to the new house.

That took a two foot deep trench and a bunch of other electrical supplies. Those parts came from City Electric in Okeechobee, through another fishing connection I had made in Sebring. Fishing really is helping to build this house.

Walter Groggins and the City Electric guys in Okeechobee were involved with a kids bass tournament fundraiser. One thing lead to another and, well you know, fishermen helping fishermen... so I drove to Okeechobee, went over the plans with Walter and came back with a truckload of boxes, conduit, the breaker panel and exterior disconnect; everything I needed to get the power from the meter to the new house and more. But the best part came when I called the county for an inspection of the underground work.

The inspector showed up and told me he had been reading about our house and was glad that he finally had a chance to see it for himself. “You are reading about this in the building department?” I asked. “I hope that’s a good thing,” I added, and he assured me it was. “If you have any questions about electrical work just call me,” he said and he gave me his card. ‘Senior Electrical Inspector, Charlotte County,’ the card read.

All the Charlotte county inspectors have been accommodating and professional and willing to help us with the owner-builder building process beyond my expectations. I told Jim appreciated that. “We’d do the same for anyone,” he said.

So next month we’ll hang some lights on the outside, wire the inside, insulate it and drywall one room. Then when that’s done, we’re camping out. I’m not counting on the sheriff to watch our stuff any more.

Top Left: Bob trims a piece of brickmold, on the stairs, for the front door. Above: Stucco scaffolding, facia and new concrete steps to the kitchen. Below: The canal side of our new house. The house next door has been boarded up since Charley.

Page 14

This New House Part 13

Water LIFE

Electrical Connections ...

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor This has been a month of small projects and little details coupled with one single massive undertaking. In the realm of small projects, our stucco contractor Paul Hart sent a couple of his ‘guys’ back to finish up the stucco work on a few ornate decorative walls we built around our swimming pool. We’ve decided not to put up a new pool cage so the two and three foot high walls, along with a full height wall surrounding the pool filter, needed stuccoing.

Where the main stucco crew worked with a mixer, these two ‘grunts’ mixed stucco for two and a half days by hand on a sheet of plywood with a shovel, but even-

tually they got the job done.

Another detail was the clean up. I had to get all the stucco waste and other concrete debris out front where we could scrape it into a pile with a tractor and load it up with a back hoe. Thirty three wheelbarrows of concrete later it was all in the right place and I went home that night to soak in a hot tub. Next we were ready to move inside and attend to caulking, foaming and then the electrical work.

Bugs are a part of living in Florida, but to what extent they share your accommodations is up to you. At this phase of construction a hundred dollars worth of expandable foam and silicone caulking goes a long way towards

keeping bugs from getting around behind the finished walls.

We noticed the prime highway where bugs can travel was behind the baseboard backing, below the wall insulation. So we drilled holes in the board every 10 inches all around the perimeter walls and filled the crevices with expandable foam.

We ran a bead of silicone around the window frames and caulked the perimeter openings as well. Then when all the wiring was in I went to Auto Zone and got a case of rubberized automotive undercoating and sprayed the the tie beam to seal the area on top of the rigid insulation so no bugs could enter from above. Right before we insulate the ceilings we’ll have the whole house sprayed professionally by an exterminator and before we drywall the interior walls we’ll spread borax on the floor plates inside the walls. You can’t not have bugs come into your house in Florida, but you can minimize their stay.

Small projects done, we moved on to the electrical work which broke down into several distinct phases. First up was the boxes. Outlets at one foot above the floor, switches at four feet, we went around the house locating the electrical boxes and installing them. In addition to the outlets and switches (almost 70

We drilled the baseboard backing and filled the area behind with foam

June 2006

MAGAZINE

If you think gas is expensive, wait till you price copper

boxes in all) we had fan boxes and ‘can lights’ to install in the ceilings. It doesn’t sound like much... until you realize some boxes are recessed into the concrete or saber-sawed into the 3/4 inch plywood sub walls. Some are surface mounted on the studs and others require additional wood supports to be cut and installed first. It took me almost a week to get the house ‘boxed out.’

Then it was on to the real wiring. We are using almost all number 12 wire, one step up from the code required number 14. We ran 25 ‘home runs’ of feeder cable from the panel to each area of the house.

Wire, copper wire, is going up in price faster than gasoline. A 1,000 foot roll of wire that was around $150 a little more than a year ago is now almost $360.

You’d think 1,000 feet would be enough, but it was more like 1,500 feet of wire when the job was done. That’s over a quarter mile of wire in our house and it doesn’t include phone or TV cable. Yikes!

Wiring isn’t all one size in any house. The wire that feeds the bigger stuff like the 220 volt oven or the heat strip in the air conditioners needs to be heavier.

I’ve learned a lot about wire and the circuits required in a new house in the last month. Things like we needed two small appli-

ance circuits in the kitchen, a separate circuit for the refrigerator, dishwasher, disposal oven and and kitchen lights. The smoke detectors needed to be on a loop so if one goes off they all go off (that uses a three wire cable) and all the bathroom outlets in the whole house need to be on one circuit and that must be a ground fault circuit as well. The bedrooms have to be on a computerchip arc-fault circuit to keep the chances of a fire starting in the bedroom area to a minimum and there has to be an outside outlet on the front side and the back side of every residence – the reasoning being that most fires are started by extension cords and outlets placed appropriately outside the house eliminate the need for a long extension cord on the hedge trimmer or weed eater.

We’ve got a dedicated circuit for computers, an attic fan and a circuit for the davits and the dock.

Then there are the phone lines and the cable for TV. Two weeks of wiring and I still wasn’t done.

Wire for the main 200 amp service was the real surprise.

Wire sizes, like fishing hooks, are gauged in numbers The num-

ber- sized wire (like #14 or #12) goes up in size as the number gets smaller (#12 is bigger than #14) until you get to #1 wire.

Then like fish hooks they add a slash-zero and the wire gets bigger. 1/0 is smaller than 2/0 wire and so forth. Our 200 amp service required 3/0 wire for the feeds and 2/0 for the neutral with a #6 for the ground. Since the service needs to be 220 volts, that requires two of the 3/0 wires. Big wire is sold by the foot. 3/0 was $3.40 per foot, 2/0 was $2.75 per foot and #6 was 80 cents a foot. Do the math. 90 feet from the meter to the panel and it

comes out to almost $1,000 for the wire to feed the house. Add in the inside wire and the switch and outlet boxes and you’re over twogrand and that doesn’t include the high end switches and outlets we want to use nor does it take into account the $60 cable cutter, $30 Klein pliers and a slew of connectors, pigtails, standoffs, a ripper and other ‘electrician stuff’ that will make it hard to keep the electrical outlay for hard supplies under $3500 when the house is done ...and that won’t include any fixtures.

My neighbor Ronnie used to be a commercial electrician in New York, so Ronnie showed me how to rig up the heavy 4-wire service cables and pull them through the 2-inch conduit from outside to the panel. That took a couple of hours a 3/8 inch rope and some special goop to make the whole wire bundle slide. Now the wiring is almost done. All I need to do next is hook up the panel and get my electrical inspection and then we’ll be on to insulation and drywall – and sometime, I’m going to get a day off.

Top Left: The wires feeding each circuit come to the breaker panel and each one is labeled. Middle above. Attic wires (not yet stapled down) run to the kitchen area.

Above: Before pulling wires, every receptical box had to be mounted first.Throughout the house, where the circuits come in, each box is coded red for future reference.

Page 14

This New House Part 14

Water LIFE

Insulation and Drywall ...

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor We made good progress this past month. It’s ten months into the hard construction and maybe 5 weeks to go. We got the electric done, the insulation is all in and the drywall is well underway.

In the interim, my friend Paul Hart, who did the stucco work for us a month ago, came by with a tractor and a laborer and spent a half-day cleaning up all the concrete rubble around the front and north side of the house. Paul went way beyond the call with this task leaving not a single piece of broken concrete in the dirt. I swear I could plant flowers and they would grow, but that’s just the kind of guy Paul is. They don’t come any better. Again thanks.

You can add being and electrician to the list of trades that I don’t want to do for a living. Not that it’s as tough as being a block mason, but being an electrician, especially a one-man-band electrician - wiring a whole house alone - is a never ending job. Other’s more knowledgeable than I (like the county’s electrical inspector, Jim Anderson) had indicated wiring my own house wouldn’t go as quickly as I had predicted. Jim was right. On the brighter side, my wiring work passed on the first go around, on the dim side it took me three hard weeks to bring it to that point. The wiring wasn’t hard, in fact having been ‘weaned’ on the tiny wires of 12-volt aircraft radios with 50 or 100 wires in a harness,

the big, fat 10/2 and 12/2 wires used in the average house are easier to see for a guy my age, but they run so far and every run means going up and down the ladder a dozen times. My legs are stronger, but my back is sore and I’m glad the wiring is done. I’m not a better person for it, but we saved about 10 grand.

The day after I passed my electrical inspection it was on to the next task at hand - insulation.

Now I may have been dumb about the electrical work, but I’m not stupid when it comes to insulation. I don’t do insulation.

Fiberglass, even in boats is not one of my favorite things, so I called around and wound up striking a deal with Richard Droege at West Coast Insulation in Sarasota - cold call, no referral. Richard came over to the house, measured it up and we agreed on a price.

Then on schedule and as promised his crew showed up with a truckload of the pink itchy stuff and went to work. It took three guys 5 hours to insulate the house and the garage. It would have been quicker if I had not had them insulate the main interior walls separating the living room from the guest bedroom and utility room and the walls around and floor under the upstairs master bedroom. We have a separate AC unit for upstairs and we want to keep things energy efficient.

Richard and I made small talk while his guys cut and stapled the ‘batts. We put R 30 in the ceil-

July 2006

MAGAZINE

weʼre pushing hard to be in before August 13

ings, and R19 in the 2x6 walls and under the bedroom. The county requires every new home to submit professionally prepared energy calculations along with the building permit application. At the end of all the insulating there was a county inspection to make sure we did what our calculations had specified. The whole focus is to reduce energy use. To that end, we put in a separate switch upstairs so at night, when we go to bed, we can shut off the downstairs AC. We could have had a programmable thermostat downstairs, but how do you know what time to program it for? I figure when I go upstairs to hit the hay, I hit the switch ... what ever time it is.

The insulation crew was a professional team. One guy worked from a rolling scaffold, wheeling himself around the room, hand over hand by the ceiling trusses, stapling up four foot sections of insulation effortlessly. The other guy, he introduced himself as Perro, (but isn’t perro Spanish for a dog, I asked? – No , Perro, he said ... OK Perro!?) was the team leader. He worked on stilts, walking around the house doing the tight spots up high that the rolling scaffold guy couldn’t get to. He peeled the paper backing off the insulation around the can lights to keep the danger from a fire down.

The third ‘hombre’ was an all around low man who did the walls and filled in with what ever else needed doing. Everyone wore masks and they even left a few masks for me to wear – breathing

fiberglass is a bad thing.

Insulation done, I vacuumed up the pieces and walked around. The house had taken on a different feel.

Gone was the view looking up to the silvery underside of the roof.

Gone was that open feel. The insulation gave the house a homey feel, a secure personality.

Sound won’t travel in this house, which has its good points and, I just realized, its bad ones. If I’m in the upstairs bedroom and wifey is in the kitchen at the other end of the house will she hear me when I call out for a cold drink? I think there is still time to put in an intercom.

When the insulation was done it was on to the drywall.

Jim Stephens is my go-to guy on drywall. Jim is another fisherman. I met him at a FlatsMasters tournament two months ago.

He’s sponsored by Seacoast Supply, the biggest drywall supplier in the area. They told me they are selling 2,000,000 square feet of drywall a month in this area.

Jim has been a great help. He

arranged to get the drywall delivered and for Robert Becerril’s drywall crew to hang it. The next day a truckload of drywall arrived and with a little artful manipulation the guys from Seacoast filled the downstairs through the front door and then squeezed their big truck down the 9-foot alley on the north side and ‘boomed’ the ‘rock’ up to the bedroom patio. It was a plan we had come up with the day before and it worked like a charm.

Sometimes you get lucky!

Jack and the plumbers from H2O plumbing snuck in and set the tub in the upstairs bathroom.

The hangers took three days and then left at noon. The tapers came in an hour later and that’s where we are today. Next, Jim will spray the texture on the walls and ceilings and then it’s on to the trim.

We are getting closer!

Page 14

This New House Part 15

Water LIFE

MAGAZINE

Texture, Paint and Cabinets ...

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor We must be getting close because all my work clothes are now covered with paint instead of concrete. After we got the drywall hung and taped Jim Stevens came in and texture-sprayed it. The drywall texture process is necessary to cover the taped seams of the individual drywall boards hung in the interior. In our case 212 boards, to be exact.

Texture spraying involves applying a watery liquefied mixture of gypsum with a high pressure air gun. It’s a noisy, messy process. The gun ‘screams’ loudly as the spray goes on. Hearing protection is required. After covering the windows, Jim ‘fogged’ all our ceilings on the first day with a thin layer of white. Then he came back the next day and sprayed over the walls and white ceiling with texture. The texture coat goes on in a controlled splatter pattern - Jim then ‘knocks down’ (flattens) the splatter with a big acrylic paddle.

The finished result is elegant. Jim’s work shows a soft subtle detail that has already inspired complimentary comments from other contractors. Our ceilings look like a finely detailed bride’s veil. The walls are equally perfect.

When Jim finished the texture spray he came back a third day and hand-sanded the round corners and window openings. What a great job!

Then, the next day, my friend ‘ACMike’ came over to set the air conditioning units. Suddenly we were ‘under air.’ This was a big step forward. We were no longer sweating, in fact we were shivering. Two tons upstairs, four tons downstairs. On a ‘test-dive’ we got the temperature down to 65. Moisture ran out of the condensation pipes in a stream and the house started to dry out.

My fishin’ friend Mel who lives in Miami is in the barrel, drum and bucket business. As it turns out, he supplies 5-gallon pails to Povia Paint, in Fort Myers. Mel hooked me up with the owner of Povia, and we cut a deal on paint. I had a painter lined up who was going to do the exterior but he flaked out. I knew I didn’t want to do the exterior myself – the AC had me spoiled already, so while we were waiting on the exterior, my wife Ellen, my friend Bob and I started painting the interior.

One morning when I ran over to True Value Hardware for some more roller covers I ran into Gary Arnold, owner of Spectrum Paint. Gary and I struck up a conversation and then he followed me back to the house to check it out. We cut a deal and two days later Gary and his crew started painting the exterior.

From the start I could see Gary’s guys were professional painters.

They’ve done this before. Gary’s price was fair and he got the job done on schedule. I’d recommend him to anyone. But there was one problem. When it was done, we hated the way the house looked. What we thought would be a subtle brown turned out to look more like a dirty diaper. It was nothing Gary did, we simply picked the wrong color.

So we had Gary paint it all again. The house took over 200 gallons in all!

While Gary was doing the outside the first time I started on the plugs and switches for the interior electric - 83 outlets and 36 switches. We used the Leviton ‘Vizia’ line of digital switches that not only dim the lights but fade them out when you turn them off – expensive, but nice. I only hope they hold up to the typical Florida power surges we get. I put in a whole-house surge protector just to be sure.

Long about the time I finished the electric, Jimmy Fry’s guys from Cabinet’s Plus in Punta Gorda arrived to install our cabinetry. They too turned out to be professional-quality craftsmen, assembling the various modules that made up our kitchen and two baths. Then the guy who does the Corian countertops came by and cut out cardboard templates for his shop. The house is starting to come together.

Our one little stumbling block this month (if you don’t count painting the house the wrong color!) was the sewer line.

Jack from H2O plumbing came out and dug up the yard to hook up the house to the sewer, but he could only find an old 3-inch plastic line. I went up to Charlotte County Utilities and talked to the lady behind the desk who told me I’d need to hire an engineer and retain a licensed sewer contracting company to design and install the 4-inch tap I was looking for. “Why don’t you just reduce it to three inches?” another worker suggested. Both were bad ideas.

The lady handed me some paperwork that she said could take four months to get approved. I asked to speak to one of the guys in the back.

To make a long story short, the guy in the back told me who to call and in a couple of days he had the problem solved. Thank you Charlotte County Utilities.

So on Monday July 24, we took a mattress over to the new house and spent the first night. It was one year to the day from when we got our permit.

August 2006

we spend our first night in the new house.

Photos from the Top:

Jim Stevens sprays the drywall, then he ʻknocks it down and finally Jim and his wife Brenda clean up the mess and scrape the floors.

All clean and aired out, the house looks good in the afternoon light.

Cabinets installed, cardboard templates for the countertops are cut out.

Spectrum painters work the exterior while my wife Ellen paints the second bedroom.

Insert: Ollie Tipton and his crew plant the first of three 16foot palm clusters to replace trees Charley broke off.

Page 14

This New House Part 16

Water LIFE

Floors and countertops ...

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor “No, that’s not the way we do it. I want to be paid in full before we finish your job. In fact, I want all the money before I even unload my truck.” The words came as a surprise to me, words from Rod Bodell owner of H20 Plumbing in Englewood. Rod and his partner Jack Guiliano were already late in arriving to set the toilets, install the hot water heater and ‘trim out’ the house. Jack had avoided my phone calls for a week. I chalked it up to him being busy in Englewood and our job being an inconvenience in Port Charlotte. But I thought Jack and I had a good relationship. He was introduced to me by a mutual friend and we had no major problems, I thought, to date. But Jack went partners with Rod after my job got started so I didn’t know Rod and I didn’t understand why the demand to be paid up front. Our agreement was three draws, with payment on completion for each stage. Piping in the underground for the slab, rouging in the pipes inside the house and then the ‘trim out’ of toilets and sinks. The previous two stages had been paid on the day they were completed.

“Why the change?” I asked Rod. That’s the way we do it,” he said. “We’ll that’s not what we agreed on,” I answered. “I’ll have the cash in my pocket. I’ll show it to you when you arrive. I’ll even give you half up front, but I want to see the toilets flush and feel the water get hot before you get the last part.” I said. “Nope,” Rod answered, “all or nothing.” “Then I guess you’re not going to finish my job,” I said.

The next day I called BK plumbing in Port Charlotte and talked to Bob Konig the owner. I never, met or talked to Bob before that call. “You live on Bangsberg Road?” Bob said, “I grew up on Bangsberg. I used to live at 210,” he told me - 210 was the house directly across the street from ours.

To make a long story short, Bob bailed us out. The next day he sent over a couple of plumbers and they got to work. A wall had to be cut open to fix a problem. One toilet was roughed in too close to the wall and the flange had to be moved to make it fit. The stub for the hose fitting on the upstairs deck was too short to solder. I called Jack to talk with him about the problems, but he never returned my call.

I didn’t get it until a couple of days later when another plumber shed some light on the situation. “They took their money out of the ‘front end’ of your job,” he said. “They might not have wanted to finish your job. They might have wanted you to refuse to pay them up front so they didn’t have to come back.” Maybe, I thought, but I didn’t want to believe that.

On the brighter side, there was a lot of good stuff last month. On any job, once the drywall is done things usually pick up

MAGAZINE

September 2006

and a plumbing problem I still donʼt understand

speed. Ours was no different. Jimmy Fry and his Cabinets Plus team got the kitchen and bathrooms looking great.

Everything came out just as planned and their installer, Dave, went an extra mile fitting the custom top crown moulding that took the cabinets right to the ceiling.

Next, the corian guys came to do the tops. At first there was a little glitch with the kitchen top but after a trip back to the

factory it went on and looked great. They used a special vacuum clamp to draw the countertop sections together, literally seamlessly – an interesting procedure if you like building. In the baths we used corian tops as well so the sinks took a special overflow connection but once we got that worked out all was well.

While Jimmy’s cabinet guys were working in one part of the house, David Carter showed up to do the tile work.

David was a referral from my friend Ralph Allen’s daughter Jan. Thank you, Jan. David was great. He and I talked fishing on an off throughout the week he worked on our house. David’s a tournament angler, and a life long Florida boy who grew up doing tile work. I don’t know enough details of the tile business to tell you the nuances of what David did, but when David was done it all came together square. Showers, floors, walls, the laundry room. A few days later we went to Seahorse flooring in Murdock and bought some Impregnator 511 sealer and sealed all the tile and grout. You wipe it on and buff

it off with a clean towel. Do this if you have new tile.

Next up was the downstairs wood floor. We had wood in the old house and we wanted wood not tile in the new house as well. We searched around see facing page

COUNTER CLOCKWISE, FROM THE TOP: The kitchen looks good but the range is missing some parts and doesnʼt work.

The vacuum device used to pull the Corian countertop sections together and make an invisible seam.

FLOORING: MVP undercoat is applied to the floor FLOORING: Wood going down in the family room FLOORING: Wood going down in the hall Gutter work The new rain barrel was full the first day David Carter doing tile work in the master bath.

Page 14

This New House Part 17

Water LIFE

Carpet and One New p i ece of Glass ...

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE editor “No Way!” was the consensus of opinion when I told my friend Capt. Keith and a group of his friends about the anvil test.

Earlier that day I had borrowed an anvil from Keith’s A-1 Auto Body and Sales in Charlotte Harbor and lugged it up to the second floor patio of our new Port Charlotte home. The house is on a 6 foot high foundation, thanks to FEMA, so by the time I balanced the anvil on the patio rail it was 22 feet above the ground. I had constructed a wooden frame 16 inches above the ground and placed a sheet of 1/4 inch PGT laminated glass on the frame.

PGT touts their hurricane resistant glass to withstand a 2x4 traveling at 60 mph, but how would it do with a 90 pound anvil dropped from 22 feet?

Several friends thought the idea was ludicrous, that I should start by dropping smaller stuff on the glass. Sinkers, then bigger sinkers, a hammer, a sledge, a small cannonball, a bowling ball - there were as many suggestions as there were people who I talked to. But an anvil there is just something about an anvil.

The glass we used had come from our Florida room and our first repair. A month before, one of our installers had hung a large piece of brown paper over the east facing window to keep the morning sun out. Later when the paper was removed there was a crack in the glass. The installer owned up to the problem and last week we had a new piece of glass installed. This was roughly a 30 by 54 inch piece of laminated glass that filled the center opening between two casement windows. The replacement process wasn’t easy.

The first problem was selecting an installer. PGT recommended several of their ‘certified’ installers and after calling around we picked Quality Door in Port Charlotte. They came out and measured and gave us a price; $750 installed. That’s $62.50 a square foot. It could be the most expensive square foot in the entire house!

At those prices, homeowners might want to install hurricane shutters just to protect the expensive hurricane glass.

And if there is a big storm how long will it take to get all the laminated glass changed? A hurricane window will break but it’s still very hard to penetrate.

It took the two man crew about two hours to get the old glass out. PGT Winguard glass is secured by rubber edged aluminum strips that go in with what is called (in automotive terms) an ‘interference’ fit. Interference fit means ‘wedgedin, really tight.’ And in case that’s not enough they also use a heavy bead of silicone.

“Sometimes the new glass breaks when we put it in,” the installer said, but luckily ours didn’t. The new glass in, sealed

with silicone, wedged with aluminum, the glass guys packed up their truck.

“Just a minute,” I said. Can I have the old glass? “Sure,” they said and they leaned it against the side of the house.

“What do you want it for?” one installer asked. “I want to do some tests,” I said.

With only the one piece of glass I wanted to go for the gusto right off the bat – that’s where the anvil idea came in.

Up on the patio I lifted the anvil off the rail and let it go. The sound it made hitting the glass, a loud dull thud that clearly said something had broken, caused the workers on the house across the canal to look up from their jobs.

Looking down from above, the concentric circles of the impact were what first caught my eye. As I followed the rings my eyes came to the center...and the anvil. Not having been secured to the frame, the glass had collapsed inward, but the anvil hadn’t passed through. “I’d stand behind that glass in any hurricane,” my wife said when she saw what happened, “but I’d still duck if a cow was coming,” Capt. Keith later added!

This was far from a scientific test, but it still spoke volumes for the merits of annealed and laminated glass. Annealing in case you don’t know, is the process of heating and slow cooling glass which gives it strength.

There were other house projects on our list last month as well.

We’re working on our right-of-way improvements. Doug Timmons of Shore Protection (the local seawall and dock company) came to our rescue when they stopped by to cut our swale down to the required contour and ordered some sod for our front yard. The sod hasn’t arrived yet, but we’re on the way to greenery one day soon. Once again, thanks to Doug.

Inside the house, my neighbor Butch spent another Saturday mitering trim and baseboards and then we caulked the nail holes and painted it all just ahead of the carpet installers. We shopped around local-

October 2006

MAGAZINE

How much can it take?

ly for carpet and settled on Hessler Carpet and Tile in Punta Gorda to get the job done. The carpet was ordered on Thursday and by the following Wednesday it was in.

In preparation for the carpet install we sealed all the plywood joints in the floor and had a water-resistant under carpet pad installed so that if we ever leave an upstairs window open in a big rainstorm maybe we won’t ruin the ceiling in the room below. Maybe.

The carpet guys arrived at 10 a.m. went upstairs and came back down. “Boy it’s hot up there” one fellow immediately said.

It was. We intentionally left the upstairs air conditioning off the night before, the reason being; you want carpet installed hot so that when the room is later cooled off the carpet will shrink a little tighter.

What a pleasure having carpet. We’ve been living for the last three weeks like hippies from the 70s, with a mattress on the plywood floor. I was reminded of how old I was getting every morning when I tried to crawl up to a standing position.

Now we’re in high cotton. The carpeted floor is like having a new pair of air-Nikes under your feet, everywhere.

Our dog Molly came upstairs for the first time and sniffed her way around the perimeter of the room, covering every inch of it. Then she lay down in the middle of the floor and gave a big sigh of relief. She didn’t much like the old plywood floor either.

Outside we painted the front of the garage and up in the attic I began to map out the plan to install the United Enertec vent and fan.

United Enertec’s unit is a beautiful piece. We wanted something strong when it came to a vent fan, something to go with the strength of

Top: I couldnʼt photograph the anvil-drop so we illustrated the path here in this photo.

Below: The glass sen from above, before and after.

the rest of the house. A vent that failed in a hurricane would be a breach in the integrity of the entire house. We found nothing that looked stronger than this unit which is engineered to meet the Miami Dade hurricane codes. It’s welded 1/4 inch aluminum continued on facing page House continued with a weather tight motorized clamshell door on the back side. With a fire hose on

October 2006

it you might have a 1/4 ounce of water come through in an hour. The fan will go in the north side gable, anchored in a custom fabricated angle iron frame bolted to the top of the tie beam. The only other hole in the roof is a our 14 gauge gooseneck vent for the kitchen hood fan bolted to the roof trusses.

Now for a few updates: After talking with the county’s zoning administrator the county has agreed to allow us to post a bond instead of pay a fee for our tree requirements. Previously we had been told we couldn’t move in until we either paid $500 or planted five trees. We agreed to plant the trees, but we couldn’t get it done

Water LIFE right away. The county bent over backwards to give us some leeway to buy and install trees on our lot, which is what we wanted to do and still move in under a temporary C.O. That was good.

Last update: We received a letter from a law firm in Englewood demanding we cease publishing any more information about our previous plumber and the problems we had with him. The letter called for us to print a retraction.

Here’s my retraction: Jack you no longer need to call me.

This 16-inch square United Enertech vent has a motorized weathertight clamshell door on the back side. A second duct and a housing for the vent-fan will be attached in the attic. The wiring is set so the fan is regulated by a thermostat in the attic.

When the fan comes on, the small motor on the vent opens the clamshell doors.

The website is: www.unitedenertech.com

MAGAZINE

Page 15

Water LIFE

Page 28

This New House

Part 17

The Neighborhood Invasion of the ʻBig Houses”

Across our canal itʼs easy to see how much bigger and higher the new houses are.

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE Editor My wife ran into a friend in town a couple of days ago. “How much longer are you going to write about that house? Aren’t you living there? Haven’t you milked that story long enough?”

This fellow never had a problem coming right to the point.

‘No’ is the answer, “...not quite yet.”

This, it turns out is not just about building a new house, these stories are about rebuilding our lives. I’ll quit when things are ‘a little closer to normal,’ but that hasn’t happened yet.

I can still dig pretty-much-anywhere on our property and find some smashed smitherene of our old life. Not necessarily storm smashed stuff, although there is still a lot of storm glass around in our landscaping; but I’ll find a blue piece of tile from my old bathroom, a piece of wood from the parquet floor in the living room, maybe a fleck of the green plaster from the living room walls. No one else would know what it was, pieces crushed up in the demolition and left now for future archaeologists to rediscover. Or to be a future oyster bar. But I know.

A lot has changed in our neighborhood. The biggest thing is the invasion of the ‘big houses.’ I call it an invasion, even though I’m one of the invaders. FEMA made us do it. I would have been very happy to roll the dice again and still live at our old 7.5 foot elevation. In the event of another Category 4 storm, I’d still do the same thing I did last time...get out!

But now we have a big cement house with a finished floor elevation that is 5 feet higher than our old floor.

If anything, these big new houses may give us all a false sense of security.

Time will tell, and I hope I still run.

What’s become evident, as new houses sprout up, is the disparity in elevations when compared to the old

neighboring houses. In areas like the Edgewater corridor of Port Charlotte, where so many houses were torn down, the contrast is striking.

This neighborhood was hit with what residents all pretty much agree was an outbreak of small tornadoes.

Parts of the eye wall were dangling down like dreadlocks. Finger-like appendages touching one house, and skipping over the next.

Now the new houses are here, many with steeply sloped tall metal roofs that magnify their already disproportionate size.

Where once people in the older houses had a view out a side window with sunlight coming down from above there may now be a tall cement wall to contend with and no sun at all.

I’ve already noticed the shadow from our own second floor roof and how they stretch across the street and cover half of our neighbor’s garage in the early morning. With all this new cement and the new contours on the ground what will happen with the old drainage and run-off when we have our next big big rain event? Some of these new houses are simply built on mounds of dirt.

What will wash away, or undermine and what will remain is also a question.

How real estate prices will be effected by the advent of the ‘Big Houses’ is another important concern.

And the fabric of our neighborhood has changed as well. Gone now are the travel trailers that people lived in for the first two years. Where once we were a seamless knit of residents, today we are a patchwork of more transient types.

There are houses for sale, vacant lots for sale, houses for rent, construction trailers, pick up trucks, heavy machinery, concrete pumpers, trash dumpsters, boats, motorhomes, generators running, nail guns hammering, still more pick up trucks and trailers.

Not much real construction inside

MAGAZINE

our house this month. Our GE Monagram high end stainless steel dishwasher, the one we bought from Bill Smith Appliances, coughed up its pump after less than a month. The GE washing machine squeaks like a subway train and the service-rep tells me I have to accept the noise. We narrowed the source to a metal rod that rides on a metal plate. ‘Bad design’ I said. “Yeah it is,” the service guy concurred, “...but that’s the way they make ‘em. You could put some lithium grease on it, if you want to,” he added.

So, new GE owners: – don’t forget to grease your brand new GE washing machine when you get it. Come on!

This is the holiday season. Things can’t end on a sour note. Not on holiday. I look down our block and there are holiday lights wrapped around the palm trees and icicles on some roofs. There are red bulbs in the bushes and out back, on the canal side, a neighbor across the water already has his pool cage decorated. In the next canal over, some neighbors are rigging up Santa on a sleigh for the mast of their sailboat.

There are two lighted boat parades this month. I’m going to put our boat in the water tonight and see what else is lit up around in our neighborhood. The holidays are here and this community is still a great place for night boating at Christmas. I’m glad that hasn’t changed.

December 2006

Water LIFE

Page 14

This New House Part 18

One Deck Finished ...

By Mi chael Hel l er Water LIFE Editor My life is upside down. I’ve had a month of eating and sleeping on a regular schedule. The heavy lifting, climbing and push-push-push of the past year has come to an end. My body doesn’t know what to do. My tendons are in shock.

With all the local talk about increased taxes, millage and assessments we’re glad not to be done with our construction.We are at a conveniently awkward spot. We’ve moved into our new house under a temporary Certificate of Occupancy but we don’t have our final C.O because we’re missing hand rails at the stairs, a few ceiling fans (which figure into the energy calculations) and a few assorted light fixtures here and there.

Our plans call for a small deck with steps at the hall door to the yard and a larger one off the family room. The bigger one is in progress, but the railing and the steps aren’t done. The smaller one has yet to be started. So I’m thinking...big taxes, a new assessment.... why rush?

It’s not realistic to get all this stuff done by the first of the year anyway and if we roll over to the new year still under construction our taxes should reflect an unfinished house and should be (theoretically since this is still Charlotte County and anything can happen) based only on the land value of our property.

Theoretically. In the meantime, I’m getting used to the deck with no railings. I just hope I don’t fall off it one night!

That deck was the sole big project of the month. It took almost $1000 worth of pressure treated lumber. It’s a frame and ledger of 2x10’s bolted to the wall with 5/8 studs epoxied into the cement and stringers of 2x8’s spanning the length. Then 2x6 decking. It was a simple but tedious project, especially when you count the 700 screws, 50 pieces of decking and 7 big stringers that all had to be carried in from the canal side gate.

Luckily we had a gun to put all the screws in.

The deck connects the breezeway outside the kitchen with the dining room. It really opens up the flow of traffic – if flow really matters in a house with two people and one dog.

Deck done, I hauled the scrap lumber out to the driveway. And then it struck me. We need a gate between the unattached garage and the wing wall off the house, why not use the remaining deck material? I had just enough.

MAGAZINE

November 2006

But too much else to be done before the first of the year.

Sticking with the heavy-duty, overbuilt is better, theme of the whole house, a six foot high 4 foot wide 2x6 and 2x8 gate would be just the ticket.

We stopped over at Crossties Farm and Garden supply out on Highway 17 and bought a set of pasture gate hinges with 3/4 inch galvanized threaded rods and huge hinge pins and brackets. You’d use these on a 10 foot wide gate with no problem. I got out the hammer drill and punched some 3/4 inch holes in the solid concrete wall and epoxied the studs in place and then cut and screwed a gate together while the epoxy was drying.

I built the gate right where it would hang so I’d only have to stand it up, jack it up to the hinges and drop it on.

That was a good idea! That sucker of a gate must weigh 200 pounds! My wife uses two hands to open it. She says it should not swing but instead should raise and lower on chains. We’ll call it the ‘Castle Gate. All we need now is a moat,” she said. “It’s ridiculously overbuilt.” I took that as a compliment.

Inside, we stained the upstairs doors and painted the jambs.

Downstairs we’ve been living with a concrete floor in the utility room which doubles as the Water LIFE office so last month when Home Depot had a 20-percent off sale on carpet we had the office done. A steal at $230...installed.

The carpet installers showed up one Friday morning and parked their truck in the street. Then two men lugged a roll of carpet up to the house. I wasn’t paying much attention when an agonizing ‘Arragaaahhhhh!’ yell echoed through the neighborhood.

Immediately I knew what it was. The sound of a grown man scared to death by a little wooden snake.

Back when we lived in New Mexico we collected wood carvings made by local artisans. One of the popular items at the time were carved tree roots, cleaned up and painted to look like ornamental snakes. Stores had them stockpiled by the hundreds, literally barrels full of snakes for sale.

We unpacked some boxes last month and found one of our own carved wooden snakes. It was a little weathered and had lost a most of its hand painted vibrant coloring. Now it looked like a brown Florida rattlesnake. Its head was arched up and its red painted mouth was open. I put it on the front stoop, its bent body curled around a post. You can’t miss it when you come up the stairs. The carpet

guy will attest to that.

Looking back, the poor carpet guy could have dropped dead and it would have been my fault, but in the end we all laughed it off.

Back outside the last project of the month was my favorite.

We had the front yard sodded and the swale area along the street contoured and sodded as well. We didn’t need a whole truckload of sod, only four pallets.

My friend Doug from Shore Protection Seawalls had some extra sod from a job he just finished so I made the call and he had his guys come over and sod the yard. As you can see in the photo above the grass is green and the old bougenvilla we dug up from the back yard a year ago, left laying in the dirt for a month and then replanted, is doing well. You just can’t kill those suckers. And yes, I know I’m going to regret it when I have to prune that thorny thing, but right now it’s in bloom and it looks great. Lastly, the county came by and passed our final right-of-way inspection so when we get our bond money back I can buy a lawnmower.