Dispatch From New Orleans

Ariane's home: Did she get it secure enough to survive Gustav?

As you may know, we've been following the work of Ariane Wiltse as she rehabilitates a Katrina-damaged home in the Lower Ninth Ward. Here you see her dad, who flew out to help her a few months ago, inspecting a sill.

While fixing up the inside of the home will be the most fun, Ariane's overriding goal has been to get the 1800s home structurally sound before the bad part of the hurricane season, which is happening now.

I asked Ariane to send us an update, and she hopes to send one later today. For now, she has shopped for emergency supplies and is boarding up her home and helping her neighbors board up theirs. She will make a decision today at noon CST whether or not to evacuate.

Stay tuned for a possible update on her progress.

See all posts about Ariane's home here and keep track of storm news here.

Live Q&A about coming storm

Ever wonder what it's like to be in New Orleans with potentially the biggest hurricane since Katrina aiming at you? Ever hunger for more than a sound bite or two from residents on the nightly news?

Check out this live Q&A from the Times-Picayune with hurricane expert Mark Schleifstein. While reading the questions from residents, you really get a sense of what they're thinking and feeling right now: Whether or not to leave home? When to leave home? Which way to head?

The good news is, you get a feeling that things are being done differently this time around as all eyes are on the region.

Check out the latest news at the Times-Picayune New Orleans Hurricane Center.

(Photo: HurricaneKatrina.com)

August home tour

Perhaps because I grew up in California's San Fernando Valley, where homes older than 1950 are rare, I'm enthralled with the bounty of old homes from the 1880s and beyond in New Orleans. The failure of the levees in 2005 destroyed many of those homes, but plenty remain. Some are loved and cared for. Some neglected. Some abandoned. I fantasize about buying one of these some day, if only for the pleasure of choosing paint colors. And because you can buy a house in New Orleans for around $150,000, the prospect for home ownership is better than where I come from.

This house, crying out for color, is in the Mid-City section of New Orleans. Some areas of Mid-City are what I would call rough, and some are what real estate agents call "coming around." Some have come around.

Here's a "double shotgun" in Mid-City that's getting some color. These are called shotgun houses because they are deep and narrow, generally with one room after another, and theoretically if you fired off a gun at the front door the bullet would go all the way through the house without hitting any walls. I'm loving the old, carved doors on this house, and the Victorian trim. So far, I can see six different colors on this house: gray, dark blue, light blue, maroon, white and yellow (in the sunburst around the attic window).

This double shotgun, also in Mid-City, has three colors — green, cream and maroon — and looks very festive. If this was my house, I'd be tempted to paint the rectangular trim pieces on the corners various colors.

Here's the kind of Mid-City fixer-upper I would find hard to get involved with. You have to know your limits. There might be great historical treasures inside this house, but I'd have a hard time getting past the sidewalk.

Enough of the past, though. Over in the Lower Ninth Ward, prototypes are being built to show the types of homes that can withstand future flooding. In the foreground is a stack of BluWood, which is wood that has been treated to prevent damage from fungus, rot and termites. The house on the left looks to me like it was built new on the spot where an older home washed away when the nearby levee failed. The house on the right is being built by Make It Right, the foundation Brad Pitt is involved with. This house is on pillars and will one day have solar panels. It looks nothing like the traditional New Orleans homes I love. But it will withstand hurricanes and nature better.

Here's another Make It Right home. You kind of wish these new and improved homes could have just a little more of the charm New Orleans is known and loved for. The other Make It Right homes have a contemporary vibe to them, which seems out of place here. I'll keep an eye on these prototype homes for you, and we'll see if some charm gets added in by the time they're finished.

In advance of Gustav, a city gets tense

Friday, the 29th, was already set to be a meaningful day, being the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall.

(FYI: In New Orleans, Katrina is often referred to as "The Storm" or "The Storms," with the latter including Rita, which came after. No proper names needed; folks know what you're talking about.)

Now, with Hurricane Gustav hovering near Cuba and acting like it wants to enter the Gulf of Mexico, the end of this week is getting more intense than expected.

The hurricane could veer off or lose steam or otherwise not make its way to New Orleans. Hurricanes are funny that way. The good news is, you are given lots of warning, unlike earthquakes in my home state of California. Imagine how much easier it would be to handle earthquakes if we had five days notice.

If New Orleans citizens are ordered to leave, one hopes they do so. And after what happened in 2005, they are more likely to take an evacuation order seriously. When officials say something to the effect of "If you stay, you're on your own," we all know that is not an empty threat.

For folks who are going to "ride out the storm," here's what we know now that we didn't know so vividly three years ago:

• The levees could breach again. And that means houses may flood. And that means citizens might be spending the night or several nights on the roof or trapped on upper floors or balconies.

• If an attic is the escape plan in case of flood, there needs to be a hatchet up there and someone strong enough to swing it through the ceiling and roofing so you can get out. That's not easy.

• If someone has a blow-up mattress or raft, getting that out of the closet would be wise.

• It's good to stock up on bottled drinking water, soda, beer, whisky or whatever floats the boat (metaphorically speaking), because as we know, a rescue might be several days out.

And if another big one hits, clean up will start right away. As I heard from the recently deceased Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture, we are given troubles and roadblocks in life so we can prove how much we want something. We want New Orleans to survive and thrive. This bump in the road will not end that.

Check out the latest news at the Times-Picayune New Orleans Hurricane Center.

(Photo: Times-Picayune)

New Orleans Newsroom

A memoir of New Orleans' strength, not Katrina's

Book review of "The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story," a memoir about author Julia Reed's year of getting herself and her Garden District house back up to speed after Katrina. She's got money to play with, so her struggle is a little easier than many others who are rebuilding. (Los Angeles Times)

'Architecture School': Rebuilding New Orleans on Reality TV

The Sundance Channel will air the first episode of "Architecture School," a six-part miniseries that follows the undergraduates at Tulane University's URBANbuild program as they design and construct a house in a blighted New Orleans neighborhood. (New York Sun)

Interactive 'sound map' lets you hear New Orleans online

The site encourages anyone to record sounds from around New Orleans and share them online. The sounds are plotted on a map, creating a digital, auditory landscape of the city. (The Times-Picayune)

Looky Loos: What are we good for?

If you're visiting New Orleans for the first time, or for the first time since the storms in 2005, you naturally want to see the effects of the biggest man-made and nature-made disaster in our country's history.

So it makes sense that enterprising tour companies offer tours of flooded areas as well as tours of the French Quarter, the Garden District, and other points of interest.

You can see a tour van above, operated by Tours by Isabelle, driving slowly through the Lower Ninth Ward. Notice that all the windows are up and the glass is darkened. Isabelle charges $60 per person for these tours.

Perhaps this irritates some locals. You see people sitting on their porches, watching a bunch of nicely dressed people in their fancy cars, and you wonder what they're thinking. How do they feel about me driving through their neighborhoods like it's some kind of wild animal park? I think about this.

One group who has made its disgust about this known is Common Ground, which maintains a house in the Lower Ninth Ward and seems to be populated by good-hearted people doing good deeds. Check out these two hand-painted signs outside their house:

One side of the sign seems OK, but look what it says on the other side . . .

Ouch! Are you talkin' ta me?

I'm a little torn about this subject. I think it's good for as many people as possible to see what's going on in New Orleans. On the other hand, maybe these people are tired of their neighborhoods being spectacles.

What do you think? Should tourists drive through disaster areas? Should we only drive there if we intend to get out and help? Or should we just leave these folks alone?

Scene from the Street: Tour around town

We are each called to duty by our passions.

Some people I know are called to help homeless animals, homeless kids, the dying, the wrongly accused, and so many other good causes. I feel for all those. But it's houses in need of help that stir my passions.

And New Orleans, where you see block after block of charming houses that need help, is the mother lode for someone like me.

Here are scenes I saw last week:

A row of "double shotguns" in the Mid-City area. This area was hard-hit by flooding and is coming back.

Here's what these houses look like before they've come back. The spray-painted symbols told rescuers if the house had been searched after the storm in 2005 and what was found there. A haunting book by Times-Picayune reporter Chris Rose is named after the writing on one house: "1 Dead in Attic."

This the saddest scene, when a school has not come back. And so very many of them have not. A beautifully reported and written article in the New York Times Magazine explains why.

Over in the Lower 9th Ward, many of the homes were totally destroyed by the breech in the nearby levees. Some neighborhoods look like this.

Just up the street from the desolation, new homes are being built on piers to withstand the next flooding event. Mike Holmes, of the popular Holmes on Homes TV show, is building one of them. You can see him here, just to the left of the pole.

Elsewhere in the Lower 9th Ward, Ariane Wiltse is still trying to get her home structurally sound before the bad part of the hurricane season is upon her. The going is slow, and she has taken a construction job with a local builder to learn more. That gives her knowledge, but less time to work on the house. She gets set back when too many people stop by to visit.

Just around the corner from Ariane is a beautifully restored cottage. I saw a woman and baby on the front porch, and that was a good sign. The Times-Picayune reported recently that the steady stream of people moving back to New Orleans is slowing down, and some say people with kids don't find it a good place to raise those kids. So whenever you see kids and babies, that's a good thing.

For those who do come back, though, there is a welcoming.

While the return of permanent residents may be slowing, the volunteers keep on coming. Here you see volunteers from a group called Common Ground mowing some razed lots.

And here are volunteers from AmeriCorps putting a new roof on a Lower 9th Ward home.

So this is what I see: a city that was already full of heart and beauty (and struggles, to be sure) that is coming back, helped along by a flood of volunteers and good-hearted people.

In terms of my passions, this is paradise.

And finally, after all my hard work, I stopped by a street fair in the Lower 9 and enjoyed this female drum and horn band. That's me in the hat on the orange chair. I was tired when I sat down and energized when I got up. That's what New Orleans does for me.

Second guessing herself

By Guest Blogger Ariane Wiltse

Every now and then, some story in the local press forces me to reevaluate my decision to move back to New Orleans and buy a house in the Lower 9th Ward. Sometimes the story that jolts me from my idyllic rebuilding spirit focuses on leaks in levees and the recycled newspaper found to be stuffed inside of them. Other times it’s stories about the condition of the swamps to the south and west of the city, stories that describe how the land out there is literally falling into open water, and in doing so allowing the Gulf of Mexico to creep closer and closer to our fragile city.

But today, I’m not fretting over the potential environmental disaster lurking behind the next hurricane. Today, it’s the city’s rampant violence that makes me question my decision not only to move back here after the storm but to sprout roots.

One recent morning, around 2 a.m., a man in my neighborhood was found dead in his home. He had been shot in the head. The man lived a few blocks away from the house I’m restoring, the trailer I’m living in, me.

Although the police have released the barest of details, it appears that the man was murdered in either a drug deal gone wrong or for some retaliatory reason. Typical tit for tat street justice meets the cheapness of human life.

My neighbor is merely the city’s most recent murder victim. By the time the summer finally draws to an end, dozens of other people will be dead. In a city long known for its incessant and often random violence, summertime is the scariest time of year. It’s the time when the murders become so common that the city guarantees itself the morbid distinction of becoming the nation’s murder capital for yet another year. I call this time of year the killing season. The killings are a fact of life down here, or better put a cycle of death.

After two of my friends were murdered last year in separate incidents, and my car was surrounded by drug dealers on a sunny Saturday afternoon – three blocks from my house, I decided to get involved in anti-crime efforts. I started asking questions at my weekly neighborhood association meetings, and the next thing I knew, I became co-chair of the crime committee. Ask questions? Get the responsibility. It was that simple and that unpopular of a job.

Since then, the other co-chair and I teamed up with local grassroots organizations and launched a petition to keep the Louisiana National Guard in New Orleans. Former governor Kathleen Blanco deployed the guard in June 2006 after five teenagers were found gunned down. During the past two years, however, the economic strain of paying, feeding and housing the nearly 300 soldiers stationed here has become extremely unpopular in the rest of the state, placing political pressure on our current governor Bobby Jindal to pull the guard out of New Orleans.

But for some of New Orleans’ most vulnerable residents, true pioneers rebuilding in a post-apocalyptic atmosphere littered with block after block of abandoned houses, the guard provides their only protection. Dressed in fatigues and riding in military Humvees, the soldiers patrol the areas of the city that took the most water, and therefore have been the slowest to recover, neighborhoods like eastern New Orleans, Gentilly, Lakeview and the Lower 9th Ward. These patrols allow the undermanned and over-worked police force to focus their patrols in the more populated areas of the city. Without the guard patrols in the sparsely populated areas, either NOPD would be forced to pull officers from administrative and intelligence departments, effectively bringing investigations to a halt, or large tracts of the city would be left to fend for themselves.

Sensing the post-Katrina political tide in Baton Rouge was shifting, and not in New Orleans’ favor, Jeffery and I along with volunteers from Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans collected nearly 5,000 signatures asking the governor to keep the guard in the city. Mayor Ray Nagin, Supt. of Police Warren Riley and City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis endorsed our efforts and made personal requests to the governor.

A few weeks ago, Jindal announced that the guard will stay through the end of 2008. It’s a temporary success that helps me and a lot of other people working hard to rebuild our homes and community rest easier, for now.

But it doesn’t quiet the cacophony of second guessing in my head. That still comes in loud and clear.

Contact Ariane Wiltse

(Photos: Kathy Price-Robinson)

The foundation saga, continued

By Ariane Wiltse

My mom arrived last week with the best of intentions. Like other relatives who have come before her, she came to help with my house in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. She also came knowing that we’d be working in temperatures hovering around 95 degrees with 95% humidity. And, the air conditioner in the trailer is busted.

Mentally, she had prepared for the heat. But she hadn’t prepared for the mosquitoes and fire ants. They made a buffet of her, leaving her arms and legs a red, swollen mess. After her first night here, she had 50 bites. (Yes, she counted.) I’m sure she’s up to hundreds by now. I, on the other hand, have about five. I don’t know if being better acclimated to summer in New Orleans makes my blood sour to the little suckers. But they sure find hers sweet.

Heat and bug bites aside, we weren’t able to get much done on the house this week. I had hoped that between my mom (“Mama Lin"), my friend Beau, myself and another worker recommended by a friend, we’d be able to knock out the rest of the foundation. But the worker decided that he didn’t want to work this week, leaving me scrambling for another set of hands, and I found those with Andy.

I’m also partly at fault for the delay. When Beau and I and Mama Lin poured the concrete footings and set the piers in the front of the house last week, I hyper-focused on making sure the damn things were level. And in my obsessing, I missed the small detail that the piers weren’t in line with the house. In fact, they set a good six inches too far back, clearly missing the sills.

I didn’t notice this little problem until we were about to install the sills, after the concrete had had a long weekend to cure. Seeing the distance between sill and piers, Beau grabbed the sledgehammer. He said he was preparing for the inevitable. (He’s become an expert, of sorts, at breaking rocks in the hot sun.) I figured there must be some kind of way to fix the piers without going to such extremes. But Beau said to do so would only be doing a “Peanut job.” (See what we mean by a "Peanut job" below.) The piers had to go.

Andy stepped in and found a middle ground. A post-Katrina volunteer and graduate student from the University of Wisconsin, Andy moved here after finishing up at school. I called him the day before, pleading for help after my scheduled worker decided to take the week off. Andy has worked on lots of crews, so he brought a degree of expertise and rationality that was missing from the trifecta of ignorance among me, Mama Lin and Beau.

Speaking with the authority of the anointed, Andy suggested that we wedge a pick (his favorite tool) and a crow bar under the concrete slabs to finagle them forward. This sounded like a fine idea to me, so I grabbed my camera to document the Moving of the Slabs. Beau kept the sledgehammer close. He knew he’d be vindicated.

The first one moved quickly and easily, so quickly that I almost missed the shot. The second one didn’t work out so well. I tried to encourage Beau and Andy from behind the camera: “Heave! Ho!” But it was no use. The damn thing wouldn’t budge. And even if it had, it probably wasn’t the best-made concrete pier. It was our first attempt at pier-building without experienced supervision. And it looked like it too. It might as well have been duct-taped and bubble-gummed together. A real Peanut job. So after much deliberation, I sacrificed the pier to Beau and his sledgehammer.

Because the concrete footings and piers need at least three days to cure before we can put weight on them, losing one pier to the sledgehammer put us back several days. We’ll get the foundation in the front of the house finished this week, but the remaining 24 feet of sill and half a dozen piers on the side of the house will have to wait until I return from vacation. Bummer.

From the ground up

By Ariane Wiltse

As the big day approached, the day when we'd jack up the house, cut out the old sills and rebuild the piers, I began to take great joy in watching my good friend Beau squirm (he's standing while watching my dad Joe).

"What's the matter Beau?" I asked as he paced incessantly, stealing peeks at my crumbling brick piers. "Afraid we'll drop the house and squash you?"

Now, I don't want to come across as too bold, and Lord knows I don't want to jinx the job -- we still have a good little bit to do. But so far, we've replaced all the sills and piers along one long side of the house without so much as a stubbed toe, let alone a squashed Beau.

And for that, I have my dad and cousin to thank. My 60-year-old "Papa Joe" and 50-year-old cousin Markey spent five hot, humid and hard days here recently working from dawn to Miller time (4:30ish) rebuilding my disintegrating foundation.

In that short period, they replaced 46 feet of 6-inch-by-6-inch sills, poured 24-inch-by-24-inch footings with 4,000 pounds of concrete and rebuilt 22 concrete block piers, setting footlong steel rebar and pouring more concrete inside each cavity. Then we added termite shields, shims where necessary, and leveled the old gal.

Had I been forced to hire a contractor to do the same work, it would have cost, according to estimates, from $10,875 to $13,400.

While my family and I worked on the foundation, Beau busted up the front concrete porch. (Visions of his feet jutting out from underneath a flattened house, Wicked Witch of the East-style, had become problematic.)

Sledgehammer in hand, Beau chipped away at the solid, steel-reinforced structure for a solid two days. (You heard me -- Beau the computer geek was breaking rocks in the hot sun.) I asked him to sing us a little ditty while he swung the sledgehammer, perhaps a Woody Guthrie chain-gang tune, or at least "I've been working on the railroad, all the live-long day," but he refused. Instead he stuck iPod plugs in his ears and turned up the volume to some political podcast. He didn't seem amused, but he never complained.

On their last night in town, and as a small gesture of my gratitude for all their help and hard work, I treated Papa Joe and Markey (Beau didn't return my call in time) to dinner at Commander's Palace, one of the best and most highfalutin' restaurants in New Orleans.

After dropping my family off at the airport, I got to thinking: I don't know many people with as large and close-knit a family as mine. Although we have our disagreements (we are a passionate and proud people prone to stubborn arguments), I know I can count on a crew of kinfolk, as they can count on me. Few people in our fast-paced, cross-country modern world can pick up a phone and ask parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles (living thousands of miles away) to put their lives on hold and come help with a big, nasty and hard job, especially in the New Orleans summer heat.

For that, and so much more, I am truly blessed.

See the whole story in pictures below:

Papa Joe inspects a termite-infested sill. Markey and Pereaux (my dog) supervise while Papa Joe makes The First Cut. Markey rips out the old sill while jacks hold her steady. After cutting the lap joints, Markey, Beau and Papa Joe, from right, carry a new 6-inch-by-6-inch treated sill. The gang carries the sill to the house. With Russel the contractor watching from inside my house, the gang fits the new sill under my house. I take a much-earned break from the back-breaking work of documenting the job to mix a little concrete. Markey takes the tirst whack at my former, and very ugly, 1940s concrete porch. Beau busting rocks in the hot sun, and refusing to sing about it. A posed photo of me pretending to be braking rocks in the hot sun. Miller time with contractor Michael Gomez and his crew. Middle-aged Mighty Men flex in front of my house. Papa Joe and Markey pose in front of some of their handy work, as well as their Lazy Y brand made in the freshly poured concrete. (Markey uses the historic and prestigious Lazy Y brand to mark his horses in Montana.) Markey, me and my dad in front of my house, sans porch, on their last day in town.

Southern California contractor moved to New Orleans after storms

After I wrote about a green home renovation in New Orleans (see it here), I heard from contractor Tom Borland, who had made that home's beautiful wood countertops. The counters are notable for the warm beauty that came from old, salvaged pine with super-tight grain.

It turns out Tom was a SoCal builder who moved to New Orleans just after the storms of 2005. Tom has a lot of tales to tell. Here's what he had to say:

Question: How is it that you came to move to New Orleans just after the storm? Many people were leaving at that time.

Answer: For some reason, the storm was an event of great interest to me from the start. I was working on a vacation home my wife and I bought in Jacksonville, Fla., when it happened. I remember telling my wife in California at the time that I wanted to do something to help, as I heard the daily reports on National Public Radio about the destruction and the failed response in its aftermath.

My church in El Segundo (Hilltop Church of Christ) has an elder who is from Slidell, La., and church members put together a major relief effort, comprised of more than 10,000 volunteers, over the following year. A friend called and asked if I wanted to take part, and on Sept. 17, 2005, we were en route to Slidell. After two weeks of gutting homes in St. Tammany Parish, I flew home to Los Angeles, met my wife at the airport and told her that we were moving to New Orleans. I packed my stuff, finished the job I was on and left for NOLA [the city's nickname], arriving back the beginning of October.

I suppose I moved here out of a combination of wanting to help, the possibility of making a little money, a chance to escape the traffic and rat race of L.A. and the feeling that the future was wide open in NOLA. I remember riding around the city from job to job and feeling like the city was just waiting to not only be rebuilt but possibly reinvented. The people involved in the rebuilding were an interesting combination of hucksters, idealists, do-gooders and hard workers.

Q: How is building and remodeling in NOLA different from building and remodeling in Southern California?

A: The differences are so many it’s hard to know where to start. With the exception of the suburbs, everything here is old. I know that back in L.A. we have neighborhoods like Pasadena, Hollywood, etc. with plenty of '20s-era homes, but I think most guys are working on homes like you would find in the Valley — post-war, minimal detailing as far as interior trim, level floors, lots of stucco exteriors and most important, you can remodel them with materials readily available at your local Lowe’s.

Here, the stock of turn-of-the-century and older homes seems to be endless. Also, the architecture and building practices here -- such as bargeboard construction -- really seem to be native only to Southeast Louisiana. If the owner is at all trying to rebuild in a manner sensitive to the character of the house, you will be making lots of replacement moldings from scratch, patching plaster, restringing double-hung windows, tracking down appropriate plumbing and lighting fixtures, restoring old hardware such as mortise locks, haunting the salvage yards like Ricca’s for odd-sized doors and windows, and looking for lots of building materials that aren’t at Home Depot.

On top of all this, I have never encountered so much deferred maintenance -- out-of-plumb walls and floors, bad wiring, bad plumbing and poor foundations.

For example, it seems to me that it was not uncommon, prior to the flood, to be living with a six-circuit 40-60 amp service with a fuse box and knob-and-tube wiring for a 1,200-square-foot house. One of the conclusions I’ve come to is that, unfortunately for the city, when you look at the homes that have been damaged (from the viewpoint of a dispassionate outsider), a lot of the homes down here don’t make economic sense to fix. In other words, the repair bills will exceed the fair market value of the house fully restored.

I’ve found that the reason I have rehabbed the 20 or so homes that I have done is because the owner has enough insurance/Road Home proceeds to do the job (rare) or they have too many memories and emotions tied up in their home to contemplate not fixing it. For them, the economics are not as important as going home.

I’ve found that the '50s and later homes in Metairie and the like were relatively easy to fix, and people seemed to get enough insurance money to fix them. The problem has been with the older homes that probably needed to be rewired and repiped, didn’t have central HVAC, had termite damage and shoring issues, and all sorts of other problems prior to the flood that have been laid bare when they were gutted.

Unfortunately, the checks for the storm damage often don’t cover all of the other items that need to be fixed (and were not caused by the flood). To me, this is the biggest reason there are so many homes that aren’t fixed, and probably never will be.

Q: What's been the most challenging part of working down there?

A: Rather than the biggest challenge, here some of the many I have faced:

• Going to City Hall to get licensed and, after asking two or three questions, being told that I was “out of questions” and would be getting no more assistance for the day.

• Calling numerous insurance agents for a Louisiana workman’s comp policy and finding that the one out of 10 agents who will talk to you tell you, "I’ll have a price for you in three weeks, payable upfront and in full for the entire year, and you better take it whatever it is because nobody wants new contractors on their rolls." This was frustrating for me because before you can apply for a license in Louisiana you have to buy the workman’s comp.

• Going to four different Home Depots or Lowe’s to buy things that back home you would get in one trip -- because all of the other builders got to the store first.

• Falling 15 feet off a roof a month and a half after my arrival, landing on my back and having to wear a cast from my fingers to my shoulder for 12 weeks.

• Finding skilled labor the first year.

• The prevalent attitude that all of the out-of-towners were here to steal from every unsuspecting homeowner they could find.

• The unbelievable amount of racism and crime. The number of homicides within half a mile of my shop is staggering.

• The incredibly ingrained culture of corruption. Tales of bribing inspectors to get jobs passed seem to be legion around here.

Q: What's the most rewarding?

A: The most rewarding thing about working here, without a doubt, is the fact that your work is not to satisfy Susie Homeowner’s desire to have the best kitchen on the block but that you are allowing people to get back into their homes that they love. This gives real meaning to your work that granite counters and custom cabinets for wealthy individuals don’t. That and the fact that I never sit on the freeway.

Q: What can you tell me about the cabinets in that green home renovation?

A: I originally was brought in to build custom cabinets for the job using formaldehyde-free panels and safe finishes. Unfortunately, custom cabinets weren’t in the budget, and Julie was able to get some store-bought cabinets that were also formaldehyde-free. I did paint them. However, we used Benjamin Moore Satin Impervo oil enamel as we didn’t feel the water-based alternatives were durable enough.

The counters came about when she told me that she would be using laminate and I suggested that the wood might be a more green alternative. I obtained the wood from a remodel we did on Esplanade Ridge, old 2-by-4s made redundant by the moving of walls, and from piles of timbers from the side of the road from houses that were demolished.

After planing, jointing and gluing the boards together, they were installed and finished with Bona-X Traffic (a two-part water-based low-VOC finish). The amazing thing is that because the wood is old growth, the growth rings are very tight and as a result, the wood is very hard, and there are few knots. My favorite feature, however, is the rich natural red color of the wood.

Tom Borland can be reached here.

(Photos: Tom Borland)

The sweet sound of progress

By Ariane Wiltse

Oh, what beautiful music power tools make -- the steady hum of a compressor crooning like a late-night jazz singer in a smoky haunt, the staccato beat of a nail gun, the trumpet of a power saw. At last, the ubiquitous sounds of New Orleans’ recovery have come home.

After eight months spent prepping and planning -- of chopping down the 15-foot-high jungle that consumed the yard, gutting 1,800 square feet of house to the studs, finagling insurance coverage that costs less than a mortgage, scouting for a reasonably priced yet highly recommended contractor and fighting with City Hall for a building permit -- I finally broke ground on rebuilding my house. Can I get a hallelujah?

Now that I’ve come this far, I hope to get the house structurally secure and waterproof before the scary part of hurricane season arrives in August. It’s ambitious but oh so necessary.

Starting from the ground up, Michael Gomez and his crew are shoring and leveling the original 1830s back section of the house, which is made of bargeboards (see a definition of bargeboards).

Structurally, it’s a wreck. Most of the sills have gone soft from decades of water rot and feasting Formosans. Others are cobbled together from mix-matched pieces of lumber. Several lack lap joints. Sill ends sit precariously on ancient, crumbling brick piers. Walls lean. Floor joists float several inches from the sills. And the ends of the structure aren’t square.

It’s a big, nasty and complicated job. I figured it best to let the experts tackle it. By the time they finish, they will have replaced about 60 feet of sills, rebuilt two dozen concrete block and steel-reinforced piers and racked the walls into their proper place.

As Mike and his crew work, they also are teaching me and a couple friends I’ve hired for the summer how to finish the sill and pier work on the main portion of the house.

Although the back of the house is in the worst shape, many of the sills and piers along the relatively newer front section also need replacing. And because I don’t have the budget to hire a contractor to complete the job, I’ve hired friends to help. Furthermore, because I have only two friends available to work, one with a good bit of experience, the other with zilch, my dad and a cousin arrive later this week to help us jack up the house, cut out the old sills, fit new ones, pour concrete footings, build new cement block piers and level the monster.

People say it’s not a complicated job, replacing sills and piers, just labor-intensive. They add, however, that if we screw up, walls or even the entire house could fall. Kinda scary. To avoid such a disaster, my friends Sam and Beau are working hard to secure sagging ceiling joists, sister up wobbly studs and brace leaning walls before we even look at a jack, let alone hoist up the house.

Wish us luck. Say a prayer. Light a candle, do a dance, whatever. I have a feeling we’re gonna need it.

(Photos: Ariane Wiltse)

History salvaged from the side of the road

There are two basic ways of thinking about old windows in post-Katrina New Orleans. On one hand, old windows are rich with history and architectural detail. On the other hand, they can be cracked, broken, rotten and leaking.

It's the latter category that causes the contractors, workers, homeowners and volunteers who are rebuilding New Orleans to toss old windows out and replace them with new ones that are watertight and weather resistive.

But it's the former way of thinking — with reverence for century-old handiwork — that causes people like Ariane Wiltse to salvage old windows from the piles of demolition materials tossed alongside so many storm-ravaged streets.

Above, on the left, you see some of the windows Ariane has collected to use in the 1870s cottage she bought and is restoring in the Holy Cross neighborhood of the Lower 9th Ward. Anywhere Ariane can preserve history in this house, she is determined to do so.

Also, see the stacks of old bricks Ariane has collected for future projects.

(Photos: Kathy Price-Robinson)

An altar for the missing

Ariane Wiltse is restoring a Katrina-damaged 1870s home in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, and she is sharing her journey with us. Here's her latest installment:

The Altar

In the front room of my house, the room I tell visitors will one day serve as my library, sits a wood-burning fireplace with an Arts & Crafts-engraved slate face. It's quite fancy. A real eye-catcher, that fireplace. So much so that I figured it for just the right spot to place an altar.

I hadn't planned on putting an altar on my fireplace mantel, although no one in New Orleans would question my judgment. It's a fairly natural thing to do here. But I'm not from New Orleans. Michigan by birth. Virginia from there on out. And up North, people don't put altars on their fireplace mantels; they put fancy candles and knickknacks, family photos in fine silver frames, and during the Christmas season they cover 'em in all manner of evergreens. This doesn't leave much space for the dead and gone.

I don't know if the people who were living in my house when the Storm struck are dead. But I do know that they are gone. Gone so far and for so long that the neighbors don't know where to find them. We've tried. They don't return calls to their pre-Katrina phone numbers. City Hall says they still live at my house, but they don't come around anymore.

The banker has no answers. Foreclosures have a way of dehumanizing people, treating them as if they never existed. Even Google can't locate them. It's as if they disappeared.

Seeing as I can't find them to return the items they left behind, I decided to show my respects by placing their smallest belongings on the fireplace mantel. It seemed only right. I couldn't bring myself to throw away the common remnants of past lives. So I put them on display to remind myself and any visitors that a family once lived here, a family which likely lost all they had in the flood.

I catalogued the items I found. They include:

• A Zippo lighter
• A CD of the movie "The Wedding Singer"
• A 2-lb. hand weight
• Several large, primary-colored Legos, the kind used by toddlers
• A stick of women's concealer, just like the one I use to hide dark circles under my eyes
• A black barber's comb
• A plastic figurine of the cowboy from the Disney movie "Toy Story"
• A bottle of peach-flavored Cisco, the same "liquid crack" we used to drink in high school once we'd graduated from Boone's Farm wine coolers
• A 9mm bullet
• Little girl hair ties with large red balls on the tips used to hold ponytails in place
• A sugar dish made in Japan
• A tarnished silver spoon
• A prescription bottle of Orphenadrine, used to treat the painful muscle spasms so common with Parkinson's disease
• A rusted set of keys
• A boomerang
• A form letter from a class-action lawsuit for "clients who sustained a stroke, heart attack, or any other cardiovascular or heart-related injury while, or soon after, taking Bextra or its generic equivalent, Valdecoxib"
• A plastic green tiger
• Two spools of thread, one blue, the other pink
• A Hibernia bank card
• A pitchfork-looking utensil used for barbecuing
• A golf ball
• Comedy & tragedy masks, just like the kind my aunt used to give me every Christmas when I was a little girl

I pulled down bigger, perhaps, more significant items from the attic. There was furniture, all kinds of wall treatments, a cream-colored and beaded mother-of-the-bride wedding dress, reams of upholstery fabric and boxes. Boxes and more boxes. Overstuffed with paperwork and family photos, Christmas ornaments and toys. I had to put those boxes out for the trash.

A woman can only look at Easy-Bake Ovens and remote-control race cars for so long. Soon enough they begin to they make her crazy wondering what happened to the children to whom they belonged. Maybe one day they'll pass by for a visit and tell me.

(Photo: Ariane Wiltse)

Rebuilding green in New Orleans

New Orleans is the setting for the National Assn. of Home Builders' National Green Building Conference, which runs Sunday through Tuesday, May 11 to 13.

The conference includes a tour of green homes, including the one pictured here:

1. The exterior of the charming turn-of-the-last-century cottage. The home is owned by a woman who bought it from her grandmother, so it's been in the family a long time. After the levees failed in 2005, it was flooded with at least 5 feet of water and was nearly a teardown.

2. Contractor Julie Groth (pictured here), of Step by Step Construction, said this was the most damaged house she had ever worked on. Now that it has been restored, however, the house feels new, clean and healthy. Green features include paperless drywall to prevent mold growth in the humid climate, nontoxic paints, Energy Star appliances, a dual-flush toilet, an efficient heating and cooling system and kitchen counters made from heart pine salvaged from the framing of old buildings.

3. The home includes a tankless water heater. Out back is a deck built by women in a construction class (titled Sophie the Riveter) that Julie teaches at Tulane University.

4. The ceiling of the attic is coated with blown-in insulation and is not vented. Whereas vented attics in other climates make sense to allow hot air to escape, in a hot and humid climate like New Orleans, a vented attic will bring in hot and humid air that will condense around the air conditioning unit, causing water damage and future mold and rot problems. Thus, no vented attic for this house.

Rebuilding New Orleans is a monumental task, brought about by the hearts and hands of homeowners, volunteers and local contractors. And here's the amazing part: There is a mindset among many in the area to rebuild New Orleans as the nation's first carbon-neutral green city.

Read a long story about green pioneers, featuring this house, in Gambit Weekly.

To read more about the green building conference, click here.

(Photos: KPR)