Love Among the Ruins
Two writers pour their hearts into rebuilding dilapidated houses.

Reviewed by Belle Elving
Sunday, August 10, 2008

ALL THE WAY HOME

Building a Family in a Falling-Down House

By David Giffels. Morrow. 314 pp. $25.95

HOME GIRL

Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block

By Judith Matloff. Random House. 286 pp. $25

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: W heels 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. ·

Belle Elving is the former editor of the Washington Post Home section.