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All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House, by David Giffels
Free PDF All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House, by David Giffels
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With the lyrics of a Replacements song running through his head ("Look me in the eye, then tell me that I'm satisfied"), David Giffels—with his wife and infant son in tow—combs the environs of Akron, Ohio, in search of the perfect house for his burgeoning family. The quest ends at the front door of a beautiful but decaying Gilded Age mansion, the once-grand former residence of a rubber-industry executive. It lacks functional plumbing and electricity, leaks rain like a cartoon shack, and is infested with all manner of wildlife. But for a young father at a coming-of-age crossroads, the challenge is precisely the allure.
All the Way Home is Giffels's funny, poignant, and confounding journey through the great adventure of restoring a crumbling house on the way to discovering what the words "grown up" and "home" really mean.
- Sales Rank: #545900 in Books
- Brand: William Morrow Paperbacks
- Published on: 2009-06-23
- Released on: 2009-06-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .76" w x 5.31" l, .56 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
- Great product!
From Publishers Weekly
This Old House meets The Money Pit in journalist Giffels's search for an affordable home. The Giffels family settles on a run-down, soon to be condemned early–20th-century mansion, but when he arrives at the mansion to begin his work—aided eventually by scores of workers—he finds leaks in several areas of the roof, crumbling brick, dry-rotted wood, warped floors, vermin droppings and nests, as well as a beautiful old staircase, a fireplace in the bedroom and gorgeous brass hinges and other fixtures. Convinced that he can recover the former glory of this house with a little elbow grease and perseverance, Giffels sets out on his mission—fueled by the strains of R.E.M. and the Clash—to renovate the house one room at a time. Giffels fights a losing battle as he seeks to remove squirrels, mice and a raccoon from his abode—his attempt to scare away squirrels from the attic by using an electric guitar is especially amusing—and he discovers that every victory carries with it a failure somewhere else. Sometimes humorous, Giffels's memoir comments sadly on one man's stubbornness and selfishness (even his wife's miscarriages don't stop him from his work) in his quest to make a house a home. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
David Giffels is an assistant professor of English at the University of Akron, where he teaches creative nonfiction. Formerly an award-winning columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal and a contributing commentator on NPR, his writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and many other publications. He lives in Akron, Ohio, with his wife and two children.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Belle Elving
Well-tended houses are all alike. Every ruined house is ruined in its own way.
Two new memoirs about extreme fixer-uppers illustrate this point. Each will appeal to those who like stories of real estate gone wrong, with plenty of rotting plaster, curling linoleum and basement beams chewed to powder by termites. But amid the wreckage, the books also reveal as much about the interior needs of their authors as they do about the houses they rescue.
David Giffels, a columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal and a former writer for "Beavis and Butt-Head," needed a larger house for his wife and baby. But instead of taking the easy path and buying a tract house with a manageable mortgage, Giffels gave his heart -- and years of his life -- to a tumbledown turn-of-the-century mansion in a city sunk under hard times. His memoir, All the Way Home, is not only a chronicle of this renovation but also an homage to Akron, Ohio, and an affirmation of his place in it.
The details of ruin are delicious. The once-grand house was built by a rubber executive during the Gilded Age. But when Giffels bought it a decade ago, it was struggling just to stand, vines prying apart its brick walls and decay eating the wood out of the window frames. One upstairs bedroom floor was lined wall to wall with aluminum roasting pans set there to catch water from the nearly useless roof. Most of the electrical outlets were dead, the pipes were corroded, and the boiler in the basement spewed streams of water at the fuse box.
The author's D.I.Y. skills, like his toolbox and budget, were no match for the challenge. But what he lacked in experience and financial resources he made up for in hubris and in sheer determination to salvage, scavenge, improvise and prevail. But over what?
Giffels is a man deeply in love with his hometown and its history. He has paid tribute to it in two previous books: Wheels of Fortune, about the glory days of rubber production in Akron during the 19th century and Are We Not Men? We are Devo!, about the emergence of the band Devo at Kent State in the '70s. He's had a job offer in New York City and felt the lure of Los Angeles but remained rooted in place, upholding his local paper. He can't make Akron into the Big Time -- or even into what it once was -- but he can shore up a piece of its fading glory, with his bare hands.
But as the renovation project began to consume weekends, savings and marital good will, it became a mirror for self-discovery, and what it reflects is not always flattering. Giffels's determination swelled to obsession, keeping at bay other responsibilities and connections in his life -- friends, family, marriage and fatherhood. One low point, among many: Giffels on a clammy basement floor at midnight, scraping decades of paint off kitchen hinges while his wife lies alone upstairs, worried about miscarriage.
Gradually, as the house revived, Giffels began to recognize his folly. Toward the end of the book, he quotes a family proverb: "It's only finished when you sell it or you die." And in the meantime, other things, like reading his son a story at bedtime, matter more.
Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block is less about the house and more about the block and is as likely to appeal to social activists as to serial renovators.
After more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent covering such places as Rwanda, Chechnya, Colombia and Sudan, Judith Matloff was ready to unpack and call someplace home. Newly married and with her biological clock ticking, she left her journalist husband alone in Moscow to find them a house in her hometown of New York City. Intrepid by nature and toughened by experience, Matloff followed the classifieds to the only neighborhood in Manhattan she considered suitably vibrant and affordable: West Harlem, which in 2000 was an essentially ungovernable area caught in the crossfire between Dominican and African American drug dealers. Just 20 blocks to the south, a "new Harlem renaissance" had brought shops, cafes, real estate agents and, soon, Bill Clinton's post-presidential office. But none of that had yet reached 145th Street.
By any standard of prudence, Matloff's decision to buy a once stately 1888 row house there was reckless. But after breezing past the Romanesque façade, six fireplaces, four bathrooms, chandeliers and cast-iron tubs, she offered cash -- on the spot. She even prevailed over another bidder in $10,000 increments, getting what seemed to her a steal at $200,000. All hers, then, were 4,860 square feet of decay, where squatters, termites and plumbing leaks had ripped out or ruined the fine old wainscoting and high plaster ceilings. She had barely paused to notice the crack dealers leaning on her front gate, syringes tossed in a corner of the backyard and the lingering stench of men behaving badly in stairwells.
There are chapters that slog through the fixing of this, but Matloff's real interest was less in restoring the house than in feeling at home. And for her, doing that seemed to entail seeking out the most perilous place in Manhattan to live. With barely a second thought, she exchanged Chechnyan militants for crackheads, Colombian drug lords for knife-wielding street thugs. Her tough exterior softens when she describes her emotions after the fall of the World Trade Center: grief mixed with jealousy and depression about being home with a baby, away from the action. But at least she can say she has gone to the edge, and made a nest there.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent Book!
By Paula A.
I too, live in Akron Ohio and my husband and I are working on our 1928 home, so when we saw this book in our local bookstore it was irresistable!
We gulped the book down the same night - first me, then my husband (he started it at about 2am and finished it the next day), finding it wonderfully well-written, humorous and poignant (near the end).
His adventures in house restoration were far more extreme than what we've had to tackle but we could totally relate to his desire to return a once-beautiful structure to its former glory. Akron indeed has some very special neighborhoods with really wonderful, full-of-character yet affordable homes (including spectacular Tudor mansions like David's). They've all changed hands numerous times over the years and many have suffered from neglect and/or really unfortunate decorating decisions, but their bones are marvelous and they are really worth the effort to renovate and restore.
Intertwined with the very humorous saga-of-the-house, though, is his personal struggle with parenthood, ego, obsession and his attempts to balance work, an overwhelming renovation project and his fears that he was neglecting his family through his efforts to provide for it.
It made for an absorbing, at times hilarious and also touching read.
I don't want to recommend it only to people who are working on their houses (or have in the past) but I have to say that if you are or ever have, you will really relate to this book. The sheer hard work, the choices you struggle with, the level of perfection you settle on, the sense of accomplishment and the feeling that you'll never be finished - all are addressed here. Also, the attraction of old, beautifully built homes that seem to embody a kind of romance not available in modern houses. Anyone who looks for "character" in their dwelling will enjoy this book.
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
I loved every page!
By MLPlayfair
"All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House" is the true story of Akron resident and Beacon Journal writer David Giffels' attempt to restore an old house to its original beauty.
When Giffels' wife finds out she's expecting Baby No. 2, they go hunting for a larger home and find a big, run-down old mansion in Akron. Giffels admits that he loves restoring and reconstruction projects, but this fixer-upper needs an awesome amount of work. He is driven by a challenge, a "wholly impractical, mostly secret yearning to find peace through chaos," and he has just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
He gives us terrifying descriptions of the state of the house -- including smells so vivid that I needed some fresh air: "The ceiling drooped heavily and dripped with cobwebs and flaking paint and strange extensions that looked like stalactites made of dirt. The thick plaster on the walls was reduced to piles of horsehair-infused sand on the floor and the walls were stained and restained with rust streaks and calcified blotches where the leaky steam lines and water pipes had left their mark. The walls seemed poisonous. The whole basement smelled of something that had been soaked and dried and soaked and dried until its scent had texture in three dimensions: one old, one new, and one fermenting." Oh, dear Lord. There is so much wrong with the house, I'm amazed he didn't turn his back on it in the beginning: there's no running water; the roof, windows -- 733 panes of glass -- and drainpipes are compromised; the flooring and walls are warped and filled with holes; not to mention that raccoons and other critters have been or still are in residence.
But he's filled with an image of the house's former glory, and he's tantalized by the idea of "a life of butler's buttons and summer bedrooms" in a mansion a mile from Stan Hywet Hall. As we live through the renovations with the nice, self-effacing guy and his gentle wife and son, we see how all the work affects their lives, and he says that "as much as I was trying to change this house, it was changing me more."
This absolutely lovely book is an intimate, funny, heart-warming and heart-breaking memoir, with occasional commentary from Gina, the usually patient wife. This is so well written; it's a keeper.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A Home Run!
By Lisa Getty
Wow, I LOVED this book! Admittedly, I am a junkie when it comes to books about the joys and pains of home improvement, and this one is the best I've read so far! The story is an interesting one and the subject is my favorite, but what really makes "All the Way Home" stand out is his eloquent writing - the clarity and humor he uses in describing feelings and events is engaging, absolutely beautiful and made me eager for the next page like a crack addict about to make his next score. I don't think I have ever (literally) laughed out loud so many times while reading a book. At the same time, it was thoughtful, relatable and real. Loved it, loved it, loved it... I want to be friends with the author David and his wife Gina - and I want to visit their home! In fact, the only thing I felt was lacking in this book were more pictures of the house, the starring character of the story. A terrific read for anyone who's ever loved an old house (or hated squirrels!).
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