Divine Inspiration

Divine Inspiration

Carol and I are racing through downtown Los Angeles. We don’t want to be late for our meeting. We’re wondering what will we tell him? What’s enough anyway? We just don’t know. We’ve never done this before…

Maybe $120,000 I blurt out. That should leave us each enough for holding costs for at least a year. Carol thinks that might be too low. Come on I coax… This is the cheap design/build guy. He figures out how to do amazing projects on half a shoe string. It’s just a starting point anyway. Let’s toss it out and see what happens. My side vision catches her blond hair bobbing up and down. This will be our approach.

Carol exits Lincoln Avenue and turns right. I smell the ocean. She turns right again on Colorado. I look at the boxy, worn buildings on either side of the street. What’s up with Santa Monica I wonder, why can’t they spruce up this super prime commercial real estate? Then I remember one of the richest men working on this street, the cheapest boyfriend I ever had.

A few blocks later Carol makes a right and pulls into a parking space opposite a grey cinderblock office building. It’s kinda hip, counter-culture. Cool. This is where this Fontiveros guy imagineers his fantasy bathrooms. I wonder if he’ll design one for us… Hope so!

Inside the conference room Carol and I seat ourselves at one end of the table. A young Asian man with one of those difficult-to-remember names asks if we’d like anything to drink. Uh, sure. As he returns with our tea, right behind him is Jose. He looks naughty, boyish, tired, playful, bored… Lots of things at once. He’s tall, thin, with a mass of longish and wild salt and pepper hair. He looks like a semi-retired rock star. Maybe he still parties a lot. His eyes are slightly bloodshot.

After the formalities, introductions, our summary of our project, he begins talking… About light. And shadows. And light and shadows together. Dancing throughout the day and into the night. He is brilliant, the real deal, an artist. Good. This is what I’m looking for, someone with originality.

A few days later Jose calls Carol and tells her our budget is just too low. He can’t design the addition we want for this house for $120K. Carol says she’ll talk to me and see what we can do. I say I dunno, let’s sleep on it.

The next day… Carol calls me again. She says she prayed real hard last night for a solution, for a way to build on the extra cheap… And she found it! On EBay! Used portable classrooms... They’re steel frame… They break down into units measuring 12’X40’… We use them like building blocks! She gives me the link and I pull it up on my computer screen. Yuk! They look hideous. But they’re steel framing, for nearly free!

Carol calls Jose and explains the concept of recycling used portable classrooms into housing. I call Jose and invite him to drive with me out to the site where they’re stored.

A few days later Jose and I are headed in his new Volvo out to a storage yard in the middle of nowhere in San Bernardino county. We drive past miles and miles of new housing developments, endless track homes in all the latest fashions, modern low-budget craftsman and Mediterranean style groupings of houses, crowded together with the lack of landscaping that comes with their newness.

Finally we turn off and pass through a maze of agricultural fields, finally arriving at a large dusty patch, 10 or 20 acres, fenced with chain link. We pull up in front of the gate and I hop out and try the combination for the padlock. It opens and we walk in, tentatively. There must be 50 used portable classrooms inside. We start scanning the serial numbers spray painted on the fronts of them and quickly find the ones we’re looking for. They’re set up high on stacks of wood blocks.

We climb up onto the landing of the first one, pry the door open and we’re inside. It’s dark but the open door lets in enough light for us to see fairly well. The carpets are trashed. The paint on the walls is dingy and scuffed. Everywhere we look is lifeless. Here and there are formica-topped counters. Jose climbs onto one and begins poking around the top edge of a wall, eventually pushing a ceiling panel aside to reveal the steel framing. A gleam comes into his eyes followed by a smile.

We continue inspecting, running from one classroom to the next, each revealing its innards to us… Steel, steel, and more steel framing. Jose begins repeating over and over in his thick Venezuelan accent, “this is gift, this is gift!”

Two weeks later the classrooms are mine, bought and paid for on EBay.

Six months later, it turns out there are just too many complications with our building site as great and unique as it is… That’s the problem, a steep hillside on the east property line, a seasonal stream on the western edge, and too many county building restrictions to go with these. Carol decides to buy me out, rehab the little shack that’s there for her personal residence. Since I paid for the classrooms, well, now that’s all I have, 2 giant used portable classrooms and nothing to do with them.

Eventually, the pressure to do something with them leads me out to Joshua Tree – international rock climbing mecca and eco-tourist destination just north of Palm Springs -  in search of affordable land on which to build. I have the weekend free, roll into town around dusk and stumble onto the Wild West Coyote Fest, the chamber’s big annual fundraiser. The little town is buzzing with activity.

I check into the Joshua Tree Inn, built in 1950, the oldest building in town, made famous for life one night when rock notable Graham Parsons drank and drugged himself to death. On my way to my room I see the alter commemorating this act of insanity outside one of the rooms, a square patch of cement with dead flowers and an empty bottle of Jim Beam in the center. I put my little overnight bag in my room and head back to the Fest where skimpy clad young women are twirling batons blazing fire on each end to blaring rock music. The local men, inspired by beer, are extra impressed. The next day I’m back to the Fest early for the pet parade, furry critters of all sizes dressed in costume and doing tricks. This place rocks!

A few weeks later I’m back with my beatnick mother. Though it’s late in the afternoon, we walk into a local real estate brokerage and strike up a conversation with the gals there, an older couple, Reiki masters. I tell them about my classrooms in need of a building site. They don’t think I’m crazy, they get it!

A few days later I’m back in Joshua Tree again and one of the gals, Kathy, takes me on a tour of local building sites. The last one is 2 ½ acres near the park entrance, the best neighborhood in Joshua Tree. It has a giant boulder pile, maybe 40 feet high and a panoramic view of the local mountains that border the park. This is it! Location and drama. This is where I’ll build the first “schoolhouse.”

A year later, after 5 revisions of the building plans – the local county plan check office had a hard time swallowing our idea of building an ultra-modern house out of used portable classrooms but we finally prevailed – at last we, Jose and I, the Angelenos, get approval. By now however, the credit market has tanked and the stated income construction loan I’d been banking on is no longer available. I find a contractor and get a bid anyway, go ahead and pay for him to grade my site. Now I’m stalled. A few months later, my contractor loses his license.

I make a list of my assets. I have the money to build, it’s just tied up in assets. What to do? How can I eek through this? Build even cheaper? But how?

Finally I realize a possible solution, the owner of a second storage yard for used portable classrooms, he rehabs used classrooms, then resells them. New modular housing, it gets built at the factory, then transported to the site. Maybe Joe can do the same for me… Rehab my classroom according to the approved plans, then transport them to the site. This will reduce my construction costs even more, definitely to under $100 a square foot, maybe even lower!

I call up Joe, ask if I can bring my plans over to his office so he can give me a bid to build. After a couple of cancelled appointments I arrive at his office late one morning with my plans and the model of the house. I bring it into the conference room, set it in the middle of the table. Soon the room is swarming with half a dozen of his employees wildly clicking their phone cameras at the model. They get it! They’re excited! These people have been working for years doing the behind the scenes work, getting permits, doing bookkeeping and such, to transport used portable classrooms all over the state and now they’re among the first to see an exciting new use for them.

I unroll the dozens of giant pages of building plans - showing them how the plans correspond to the model… The entrance, the living/dining area that opens to the kitchen, the open “bridge” that leads to the lower bedrooms and the upstairs master suite. Then I point out the fantasy bathroom Jose designed for it – how it has no back wall, making it wide open to nature, for showers in the warm desert air. Office clerks meet an architectural masterpiece about to be built out of used portable classrooms. They’re mesmerized. I see these are the people to build it. The Larkspur Schoolhouse is closer than ever to getting built. What a long road it's been. I am finally starting to taste it. But the financing, where’s it going to come from?

That night back at my house I run yet another Google search on construction loans. I see yet again the requirements for income documentation. Payroll, payroll, I need to be on a payroll to document some income for myself… I have a corporation, a dormant one, but a real, bona-fide corporation no less… I had a contractor who did some work on my house a while back and used a bank payroll program to pay his workers. I need a payroll program too. A program… A software payroll program? For my corporation to pay me? Maybe this is my solution. Hello Amazon… Send me that payroll software… Click, click, click… It’s on its way! Maybe I'll end up using it, maybe not.

In the days that follow Jose’s words about another type of documentation begin replaying in my brain… The need to visually document the construction… especially the big day when the classrooms arrive at the site on the trucks and get craned onto the foundation. I can’t let it slip by unrecorded. It’s architectural history after all. Important. A big breakthough in the world of housing and construction… Divine inspiration finally coming to fruition.

 Copyright 2009 Kerri Colegrove