home at last

growing pains

Months of mud, sweat, and tears produce a seamless Santa Fe home addition with personality to spare.

By Christine Mather Photograph by Julie Dean

This article first appeared in Winter 2010 Su Casa

It may take a village to educate a child, but it takes a small army to build a home addition. Very much like the army, the process involves a whole lot of hurrying up and waiting. Picture, if you will, a snail inching its way across a glacier or an elephant picking up a pea. In this metaphorical package you’ll find the makings of home renovation in the City Different. First, take Santa Fe’s bureaucracy (please, please!), throw in the nature of hand-built adobe homes, and top it all off with me, the classic nut case. You have before you a process designed to crawl.

Somewhere back in the Cretaceous period we, rather I, decided we needed a home addition. Practical reasons backed this decision—like keeping our guests from knocking themselves out when entering the front door if they stood taller than 5 feet 7 inches—but the lust to build and decorate had also invaded my soul, a housewife’s version of demonological possession. The long-suffering spousal unit, sensing I had once again been bewitched by home voracity, left me to my fate in hopes that it might all work out before the money ran out. Fortunately, this being a just world, I sort of got exactly what I bargained for—that is, a nice pair of modest rooms, totaling a bit more than 400 square feet, to be used as an entryway, art gallery, passageway, dining area, closet, and sitting room. Modest, yes. Simple, not so much.

Of course, the criteria for the addition were as demanding as the uses to which the rooms would be put. Foremost, the addition had to appear as if nothing had occurred at all. The new should be virtually indistinguishable from the old. This tricky goal involved making the new addition look like an old portal that has been enclosed—a typical occurrence in an old Santa Fe home. The fact that we never had a portal to enclose was even lost on the final inspector, who couldn’t quite figure out where the addition was. The inspector for the electric even went so far as to ask if we had enclosed a portal—score!

The other important criterion dictated that everything had to be real from the ground up. If I could have gotten away with ox-blood floors and a stone foundation, I might have tried, but I settled for adobe, brick, and timbers—the real deal—with various nods to reality in the form of a concrete foundation, radiant heat, and an insulated roof.

All of this emerges after the gradual receding of a bunch of guys who have become my daytime roommates. I say gradual because they haven’t quite left the building. They were “done” last weekend but it seems breaking up is hard to do, so we have yet to see what it feels like to be out on our own again. An optimistic four months has stretched to a realistic six months plus a week or two. Unlike more sane individuals, we chose to remain in place during the addition. As a result, on a few mornings I awoke to the realization that someone was pouring concrete or something right outside my bedroom door. For months we lived with a giant electrical octopus of wires in the place of a wall with a phalanx of switches. On more than a few days, turning the corner onto our tiny lane and into the garage proved impossible because the army transportation corps had filled every available space and occupied a few that should have been considered public right of way.

And then there was the mud. Springtime, Santa Fe, adobe, foundations—you would think that these words might have clued us in to the dirt factor, but we forgot. Everything, and I do mean everything, has been covered by a not-so-thin layer of dust and dirt arising from the constant traffic through the mud as each individual tramped across the nonexistent floor of the new addition into and out of the house. Dogs count as individuals times two. When they tore through the plaster and adobe wall, the giant blue tarps covering the furniture became tan with the accumulation. Our world narrowed to a pair of rolling easy chairs perched in front of a tiny television screen. Ah, the marvelous adaptability of human beings.

While the dust has remained a constant, we have seen a rather consistent changing of the guard among the crew, with a few stalwarts around to give a vague sense of continuity. For a few zany weeks we were treated to the hilarious antics of the exterior stucco crew as they catcalled, whistled, and bellowed to one another and anyone else who might be listening. They came with carloads of girlfriends, wives, and kids, to say nothing of soda cans. They were followed by the rock star–like interior plaster crew, who were as smooth as their walls, making the exterior guys seem like garage band wannabes.

All home improvements are subject to the laws of unintended consequences and happenings. Ours is no exception. Happy surprises included the discovery of a giant ancient beam that probably originated from the little mill house that formed the earliest part of our home. It emerged, along with the electric wire octopus, during demolition, and we were able to incorporate parts of it as headers in the new addition. Less felicitous by far was our plumbing conundrum. An early exploration of our drainpipes revealed that they mysteriously snaked over vast distances—not to mention being cracked—when a dozen feet of length would have done the job.

My most recent reality check was the embarrassing realization that all of the mental heavy lifting I have been doing to plot the movement of our furniture and high-class junk into the new space has been an exercise in futility. It turns out the actual furniture—as opposed to the fantasy furniture—looks terrible in the places I was so sure it belonged. Unfortunately the only way to ultimately know that something will look good in a spot is to actually place it in that spot. Giant cabinets lumber around the house, and tables of every conceivable dimension get a workout; enormous wooden pigs vie with side tables for their turn against this wall or that. My so-called design prowess has been totally squandered, and I have been thrown into the proverbial tizzy, no longer even sure how to use the space we have just created.

I must live in hope that in a few years, when even more dust has settled, my worries will have flowed away like so much water down the acequia. Each piece of furniture will have been wrestled into its final resting place, the accumulated artful junk we love so much will shine forth, we will be relieved from the stress of accidental knockouts when our friends come to call, and we can enjoy a wee bit more space to fill. As for the plumbing, living in the land of mañana comes with its privileges.

Christine Mather is a museum curator, as well as an author of Santa Fe Style, Santa Fe Houses, Native America, and True West, volumes that explore design and lifestyle.