This Tract House

If I still had a first floor bedroom, I could rip up the carpet and find.... a cement foundation. No hardwood with character that some poor misguided soul in the 1970s decided to cover up with orange and avocado shag. No fun floor discoveries here!

I'm not saying that all houses in California are like this, just the post-war cookie cutter tract houses, whose builders determined that basements were morally wrong and hardwood floors simply too expensive. Attics? Good GAWD man, just shoot them full of insulation and be done with it.

I see the renovation shows on HGTV and just gasp with envy - all that hardwood covered up by linoleum and carpet - rediscovered by some zealous and lucky homeowner, who polishes the new treasure to a rich gloss and then yells "neener neener neener" to all the poor saps stuck in tract housing.

Older homes in California have basements and moulding and hardwood floors. But you have to venture near the older communities to find those - and they are nice and cheap. Want an old craftsman in Pasadena? Get ready to write a check in the high six figures. An old Victorian on the outskirts of San Francisco or San Diego or some other San-something community? Don't make me laugh. You can't afford it.

My house was built by a builder with a dream. A dream to make money, quickly, without real effort. Work crews were hired for minimum wage, which would guarantee that no pride in workmanship would ever be present. Walls aren't straight because most of these workers flunked geometry. The roof might leak because the foreman only brought by one case of beer instead of two on the day the roofing tiles were nailed in place. The walls are literally shot with "texture" in order to camouflage the fact that they are not built to the specifications of the previous generation, let alone the guys on This Old House. I think Norm Abram would gnash his teeth if he saw how the corners meet in my family room.

My house looks exactly like every other 2 story house in this development. I mean, exactly. They used the same paint can after B&B Ubiquitous Stucco Surfaces came through in one afternoon and spewed a premix of stucco and coloring to the outside of each house. They had to count up from the end so they knew which house to "do" next.

And here's the good part. There is raised "trim" along the outside of the house that we thought was wood mistakenly covered by stucco in the interest of saving time. Because of course, time is money. I wanted all the stucco removed from the trim because I have this idea that I want my little piece of cookie-cutter suburbia to have "character" and be somewhat unique. Well, there is no wood underneath. I lifted a bit of peeling stucco from the trim by the door to discover to my amazement that it is (ready?)... styrofoam! Yup! Honest to goodness styrofoam that was nailed on or superglued or something to the house and then covered with stucco. This gave the appearance of raised trim.

Do you realize how disconcerting this is? To realize that your HOUSE is covered with the same material used by Dixie plates and disposable coffee cups? That you could literally tear this stuff off your house and recycle it as a floatation device? (Which makes me wonder - if we had a flood, would the house float?)

And it gets better. The stuff doesn't just come off when you whack at it. It comes off in bits and pieces that fly all over hell and gone when loosened from the house. It has been glued down with some space-age substance. AND.. you can't just nail down a wood board to replace it. Nosiree! They have to be glued down because the surface of the house will not, under any circumstances, accept nails or bolts or anything remotely similar.

I would love to discover something unique and wonderful about this house, I truly would. A hardwood floor, a hidden passageway, a subterranean wine cellar - how fun would THAT be? Instead, I am doomed to find old beer cans and bits of stucco when I dig in the yard.

Maybe I can recycle the styrofoam.