Builders = Remodelers...Or So the Story Goes

"Contractors Turn to Home Remodeling as New Construction Slows"
Associated Press (12/20/07)

In the Madison, Wis., area, some contractors are undertaking more remodeling jobs in the wake of sluggish home construction. Michael F. Simon Builders previously did roughly 60 percent new home construction and 40 percent remodeling. But that has now reversed, according to the firm's Phil Simon. The National Kitchen & Bath Association (NKBA) says more Americans remodeled their kitchens in 2007 compared to last year, but spent less on each renovation. As a result, homeowners spent approximately $96.2 billion in 2007 compared to $127 billion in 2006, says the NKBA. But the overall number of bathroom renovations increased, as did the amount spent on them, according to the NKBA. Mike Sweeney of Sweeney Construction says projects are becoming smaller and people are spending money more carefully.

This story illustrates what happens when new home building goes "south".

Now let's take a look at what's really going on here:

Builders are seeing their livelihoods drying up, so they are now calling themselves remodelers.

This happens whenever there is a slow down in building...Nothing to worry about. Right?

WRONG!!!

Builders build houses for developers, working at arm's length with architects and engineers. They are NOT accustomed to working on a home with people LIVING IN IT! They are builders because they PREFER not to have homeowners looking over their shoulders.

At most they have to put up with visits from the buyers. Often there are no buyers yet; so they are simply pleasing themselves and the developer/architect/engineer.

Remodelers, on the other hand, work with homeowners on EVERY project. They are familiar with the post-it-notes routine of constant communication with their employers...YOU. They know that the lifeblood of their future business is referrals from happy past customers, architects and designers; and that communication and partnership with their customers is paramount to their success.

Builders build and remodelers remodel, and the twain only meets in times of stress in the industry...When builders are trying to figure out how to pay their next house payment or buy groceries.

These are the times that try a good remodeler's soul; as builders working out of the backs of pickup trucks descend on the built-out neighborhoods around San Francisco Bay and create low-ball estimates to muscle in on remodeling work.

Last time it happened was 1989-1995, when we had our last housing bust. Many well regarded and experienced remodelers retired during those years because the competition for jobs just got too ugly. I fully expect that things will be the same this time around.

Now I am not saying that '89-'95 didn't produce a few good remodelers from the thousands of builders who became remodeler wanna-be's; just that I don't want to see MY clients be the guinea pigs:

I had one client during that period who paid for her tile roof material twice because the roofing contractor her general contractor hired went bust and didn't pay the supplier. No, her contractor hadn't bothered to get a lien release before paying the roofer. He hadn't sent her a copy of the lien either.

This was the same whole house remodel where the contractor "overlooked" the fact that an addition built onto the back of the existing house was built right on the ground with no foundation. The first day on the job he hit her with a change order that was half again his original bid.

What you, as remodeling consumers, need to realize is that the price you get in a low-ball bid is not the price you will ultimately pay if the contractor overlooks obvious deficiencies in the plans and figures he/she will make it up in change orders. Believe me, you won't be in a position to negotiate when your home is torn apart.

These are the times to go over credentials with a fine tooth comb and check and double check licenses and insurance and references; and quality of work with your own eyeballs. And if all the work is not within easy driving distance, then beware the roving builder!

Pay attention to quality contractor referrals by professionals. Get FIXED PRICE BIDS on well planned and documented projects. Cross all your t's and dot all your i's.

Don't say I didn't tell you.

Peggy

Kitchens: Do them Right. Do them Once.

There is an article in the current issue of Kitchen & Bath Design News (December 2007) that details the findings of a survey of more than 800 consumers who have remodeled their kitchens.

One paragraph caught my eye and I would like to discuss it further here:

"Researchers also found that more than three out of 10 remodelers said they would spend more money on a kitchen remodel if they had to do it over, while only 7% said they would spend less. Of those who would spend more, the key things they would do differently next time are upgrading the cabinets and increasing the size of the kitchen."

Now cabinets are a big chunk of your outlay when putting together all the things you have to buy when remodeling a kitchen. They can easily amount to a quarter or half of the total budget.

So why do you think these (now) experienced remodeling consumers would spend more on the biggest part of their kitchen budgets? I think I can answer that question:

1. The cabinets are not as sturdy as they assumed, and are not holding up.

2. The shelves are not thick enough and are bending under the weight of their dinnerware.

3. The drawers are very shallow and items catch in them all the time.

4. They keep chipping plates trying to get around center dividers in two door cabinets.

5. The shelves in their cabinets are fixed and not adjustable, or the adjustments are drilled too far apart to give real adjustability.

6. The shelves in their base cabinets are 2/3 depth instead of full depth.

7. Their drawers are made of skimpy materials, like particleboard, and are breaking.

8. Their cabinets are unfinished on the insides and require shelf paper and drawer liners.

9. Their cabinet hardware items (hinges, drawer slides, etc.) are flimsy and not holding up.

10. The finish on their cabinets is lacquer, and is not holding up.

The fact is, these people assumed that the beautiful cabinets they saw in the showroom were all the same because they could not SEE any difference between the set that cost $8,000 and the set that cost $24,000. And now they have LEARNED the difference by living with their choices.

Now, I am not saying that you have to spend three times what you would like to spend to get a quality cabinet. But what I am saying is that you have to look at what you are buying with a critical eye. And you MUST do the research to know what features you absolutely must have in cabinets.

Then, you must spend whatever is needed to get a quality cabinet...Otherwise you will regret spending less, as those consumers in the study did.

They also regretted not expanding their kitchens, either by opening up the walls, or adding on...

Most people get only one shot at a kitchen remodel in their lifetimes, so these mistakes go on and on.

Don't regret. Do it right.

Peggy

Weenie Royale: The Impact of the Internment on Japanese American Cooking

Weenie Royale: The Impact of the Internment on Japanese American Cooking
Morning Edition -Dec. 20, 2007
Web Extra: Recipes, Internment Camp Remembrances


This historical Hidden Kitchen comes from the memories and kitchens of the Japanese Americans uprooted from the west coast and forcibly relocated inland after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In camps like Manzanar, Topaz, Tule Lake some 120,000 internees lived for four years in remote and desolate locations — their traditional food replaced by US government commodities and war surplus — hotdogs, ketchup,spam, potatoes — erasing the traditional Japanese diet and family table.

I (Davia) was getting my hair cut by Akemi Tamaribuchi. Imagine Audrey Hepburn if she had a Japanese-American father. That's Akemi. It was the first time we met, and we were in the midst of getting-to-know-you questions. She asked what I did, what I was working on. I told her about The Kitchen Sisters and the "Hidden Kitchens" series — secret, underground, below-the-radar cooking in America, contemporary and historic. She kept cutting, but didn't miss a beat. "Weenie Royale," she said. "Weenie Royale?" "We eat Weenie Royale because of the internment."

She began to tell me the story of her grandparents' four-year incarceration in the camp at Tule Lake during World War II. In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, about 120,000 Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry were forcibly evacuated from the West Coast, their homes and land taken from them, and put into one of 10 remote and desolate locations until the war's end.

They lived in barrack-like conditions, standing in long lines for little food, eating off tin pie plates in big mess halls. They were fed government commodity foods and castoff meat from Army surplus — hot dogs, ketchup, kidneys, Spam and potatoes. The Japanese diet and family table were erased.

In the early years of the incarceration, grizzled old Army cooks, used to feeding armies of men, now fed women and children. It was wartime, with strict rationing for everyone. At the Topaz Internment Camp in central Utah, it was decided that no one except children under 12 would receive milk — 6 ounces a day. Pregnant women, because their children were unborn, were not allowed any milk. Tami Tomoye Takahashi, who gave birth to two babies at Topaz, found a Sears, Roebuck catalog and ordered calcium tablets to benefit her unborn babies.

In the chaos of the dining hall, families no longer ate together. Teenagers wanted to be with other teenagers. Old people, who had once sat at the extended family table, were isolated. Grandparents, parents and children broke apart in the face of mess hall dining. Mothers no longer could cook for their children. The family table, with its traditions and conversations, began to fade.

Akemi said that during this time her grandparents and parents — her father was a little boy then — began to acquire the taste for hot dogs. Weenies began to make their way into their postwar cooking. Weenies in eggs (the aforementioned "Weenie Royale"), hot dog sushi, Spam sushi. Ketchup crept into the cooking.

Akemi's story sparked this Hidden Kitchen story. It made us ask — What was the food in the camps? How did it impact the culture and cooking of Japanese Americans in the following years?

Millions of people live in refugee camps around the world now, being fed commodities and surplus. It made us think about the impact on so many cultures within so many nations when they are denied their own food and traditions, when they are forcibly displaced and their land and homes taken from them.

Jimi Yamaichi, director and curator of the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, says the internment camps became a world unto themselves. Tule Lake, a camp in northern California, had chickens and a slaughterhouse where hogs were butchered for meat and rendered to make soap. About 3,800 acres were farmed by the internees. And the food grown there was sent to many of the other camps across California and the West.

Artist Howard Ikemoto said his father had owned grocery stores before the war and lost them all when the family was interned in Tule Lake. After the war, his father (whose given name was Ito and who later took the name Ed) became a gardener in the Sacramento area as did many of the other men who returned from the camps. At lunchtime, the men would meet to eat together either in a park or on a lawn they had just mowed. They would eat rice with a plum in the middle, a slice of Spam and corned beef hash in a tin.

Hot Dogs for Days

Yamaichi, a retired contractor, recently returned to Tule Lake with a group of former prisoners. It was their first visit since their incarceration during the war.

"Here's where the slaughterhouse was where we rendered the hogs. Here's the chicken coops," Yamaichi said. "They would bring carloads of hot dogs in by the tons — we'd eat hot dogs for days."

Takahashi, 92, grew up in San Francisco and attended U.C. Berkeley in the depth of the Depression. As World War II broke out, she worked at the Sheraton Palace Hotel, helping translate Japanese radio messages for the U.S. Army. Takahashi, along with her husband and parents, spent six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor interned in San Francisco at the hastily converted "Tanforan Race Track Assembly Center," living in a stable that held a horse. Then they spent four years incarcerated at Topaz Internment Camp in the Utah desert, where temperatures averaged about 125 degrees. After the war, Takahashi and her husband, Henri, went on to form the Takahashi Co., which sold furniture, home design items, and arts and crafts to major department stores and fine art museums.

Shousei Hanayama, the priest at the Buddhist Temple in Watsonville, Calif., remembered that after the war, American soldiers in Okinawa brought hot dogs and introduced them into the island culture.

Hanayama noted that hot dogs are still a part of the Japanese culture, pointing to the story of Takeru Kobayashi, who can eat 63 hot dogs in under 12 minutes. The winner of six consecutive Nathan's Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contests, Kobayashi revolutionized and popularized competitive eating with a technique called "Japanesing," separating hot dog from bun as he crams to victory.

Rice, the Soul Food of Japanese Americans

Within this hidden world of internment camp cooking was another hidden-kitchen tradition: the clandestine making of sake from leftover rice from the mess halls. Tamaribuchi's great-grandmother would dig a hole in the dirt floor of the barracks where they lived and bury rice in a pot and let it ferment. Old, burnt rice was saved and brought to ferment in any number of contraptions — keeping the forbidden tradition of sake alive in places like Tule Lake, Yamaichi said.

In the early years of the internment, prisoners were fed potatoes instead of rice. People in the camps rebelled, and slowly rice was added to the mess hall menus, though it was often prepared badly, served nearly raw or burnt. Ikemoto said his parents ate rice every day of their lives. He calls rice the soul food of Japanese Americans. —Davia Nelson

The Archives

In putting together this story we drew on an astonishing collection of archives, oral histories and images of the internment. Some were gathered by historians, anthropologists and remarkable photographers, like the legendary Dorothea Lange. Others were collected by the internees themselves. We hope you will explore some of the links we've gathered below and learn more about this under-chronicled aspect of our nation's history. - The Kitchen Sisters