The Carriage House
Wyck House & Gardens
In the year following the main work at Wyck when there was only enough money to take care of windows, stucco, gutters, etc, we hadn't been able to do anything about the primary or kitchen roofs, nor conduct anything but basic stabilization at the Carriage House. When it came time to work on the carriage house, we connected a trailer to the carriage house with roof and walls as a workshop to restore the carriage house doors.
During the main Wyck project we had decided the work would not go out to bid because we didn't think there were contractors with the necessary skills, plus trying to write enough detail in specifications to cover for lack of contractor knowledge would devour all the money and still would be hard to control. Instead we opted to assemble a team of craftspeople — masons, carpenters, apprentices — and have them work under the direction of a conservation management team (Restoration Group) with Architect Charles Phillips and the conservators training and supervising a lot of the workers. As is often the case, even though participation by Charles and the conservators was seen as important, the dollars were in short supply and much of the decision-making was left up to RGI.
In the following year they had a small amount of money to spend on the carriage house which was in desperate shape. Their budget was around $25,000 and I proposed a different approach to doing this work.
I wrote a scope of work based on what we knew needed to be done on the building, trying to estimate the cost of doing that work with a crew made up of local people who didn't have a lot of preservation hand skills, but wanted to learn. Andy Palewsk had an engineering background. Dorothy Krotzer and Anne Delucia were students in the Penn preservation program. I would head up the team and be there every day.
We decided to test a sort of rapid response system of management in which each day we would photograph the work, tracking hours and costs, so everyone had a real-time knowledge of expenditures.
If we finished one item ahead of schedule, that meant we had money to apply to the next item down the priority list. The goal was to make sure the major things like holes in the roof got fixed, but be flexible enough to address any unforeseen conditions that arose and be able to stretch the money to maximum effectiveness.
This was also a great opportunity to take three interested but unskilled individuals and teach them about tools and techniques with carpentry, adhesives, hand tools, making mortar and plaster, and iron work. Of course as apprentices their involvement kept the labor cost relatively low, but they got a broad introduction to materials and techniques in preservation that they could build on in the future. Each morning, photographs from the day before were selected, captioned and installed in a three-ring binder along with the documentation, drawings (existing conditions or solutions considered/used), and any correspondence or faxes, as well as a treatment report for the day outlining what had been accomplished.
This was early computer days, so we opted to cut and paste into 3-ring binders with duplicate copies — one for the museum, one for Wyck management, and one that stayed with us. This rolling approach to the work was quite efficient because we could respond immediately to changing conditions, which provided unexpected advantages in some aspects of project. At the same time the owners were apprised of all activities daily and were an active player in determining next steps and solutions. They knew where the money was the entire time and, although the architect was out of state, whenever there were any problems or questions he would get a phone call and a fax so decision could be made right then and there. Members of the Board visiting on any given day knew what had been done and where we were heading next. This helped us to gain their full support.
Working this way meant that there was a dynamic document in real time that was completed just as the project was completed, so we didn't have to pull all this together months later to issue a final report on the entire project. The success of this approach lead us to design a more efficient and expanded project when we did the facade restoration at Pope House in Lexington, Kentucky a few years later, which by that time was distributed digitally each evening.