The Barn House Hardback - 2008

Summary

Media reviews

"A lively, often funny, sometimes startling, occasionally surreal account of the rehabbing process, from getting the mortgage to choosing the architect to balancing dreams with reality. It's the perfect book for armchair or would-be renovators."
Booklist

"If you are a do-it-yourselfer with a compulsion to fix up a house, this will be a fun read, and you can laugh along as Ed hires a homeless trumpeter to guard the open house, forgets to wish his wife a happy Mother's Day and single-handedly tames ancient radiators, forcing their rusted bushing to yield to his will.... I have no idea what a bushing is, either, but I read all 40 pages about that incident, a classic tale of Man vs. Rusty Widget. It was just that amusing."
Kay Severinsen, Chicago Sun-Times

"Ed Zotti has so much faith in Chicago that he spent years, untold thousands of dollars, and countless buckets of sweat to rehab a shabby old Victorian there – in a perverse mirror image of the folks who flee the city to fix up houses in the suburbs and the country. The man is nuts.... Zotti is, however, oh so very readably nuts. His new book, The Barn House: Confessions of an Urban Rehabber, will warm the cockles of any ham-fisted homeowner who hands half his paycheck to Home Depot every Saturday morning or fills his contractor's bottomless pockets – or both....

"As a writer [Zotti] is both a superb stylist and a superb explainer, a rare combination whose reigning demigods are Tracy Kidder and John McPhee. He begins in his childhood, when his irascible perfectionist handyman father (I had one of those, too) introduced him to the principles of the Brotherhood of the Right Way. Its members believe not in "okay" or "good enough for government work," but using proper techniques to build something both beautiful and lasting....

"This book is about a lot more than sawing and nailing, plumbing and wiring; it is about understanding one's community, its past and its future. And about understanding one's own place in that community. In one of many richly rendered passages, Zotti tells how an old electrician watched him 'crank down a fitting with what he considered excessive force' and said, 'I'd hate to be the guy that comes after you.'

"That gave Zotti pause. He wasn't, he realized, the first to work on that old house and he wouldn't be the last. He appreciated those before him who had done things properly, and he hoped those who followed would appreciate his work. Rehabbing the Right Way is a long continuum of skill and caring.

"The tradesmen who belong to the brotherhood often are unappreciated by the bottom-line guys, Zotti writes. 'You were an artist in a world that didn't reward artistry -- I knew that from my own experience. As a writer I occasionally got compliments for a well-turned paragraph -- people expected such things of writers. But rare was the electrical job at the end of which people came up to me and said, Hey, nice pipes' ...

Nice pipes, Ed. Nice book, too.'
Henry Kisor, "The Reluctant Blogger"; retired book editor, Chicago Sun-Times