The New, IMPROVED Great Plotnik World Headquarters

Okee Dokee, BZ. Here are your photos.



The very best view of The New, Improved Great Plotnik World Headquarters is from the large, scruffy bottlebrush tree directly in front of the house, but you have to be a bird or a squirrel to enjoy it. That's why you won't see any shots with direct, frontal beautidy.



New very old basement door, new window and window treatment above.



Closeup of front door with raised, Victorian panels. These, like all the other wooden embellishments, are the same as what was originally on the house when it was built in the 1890s, the shadows of which were uncovered when the 50-year-old aluminum siding was removed from the house a few months ago.



When the aluminum siding salesmen came through these neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s, the Victorian homes were already 50 - 75 years old. The old Victorian redwood, double-hung windows were rotting, the houses needed painting and the basements were all damp because the houses sat on brick foundations, or no foundations at all except a piece of wood sitting in the mud.

World Headquarters was, in fact, condemned in 1968 -- the Plotniks have seen the condemnation order. The two old ladies who lived in the house then began to shovel the basement out by hand, bucket after bucket, until they could shore up the foundation. Then the salsemen came, and told them they'd never have to paint their house again if they took off the rotting windows and put in nice, new aluminum ones.



Thousands of people agreed. They sawed off the Victorian window casings, hand-carved several generations earlier by craftsmen who had learned their work in Europe, then when they had a flat surface to work with, they threw on the aluminum siding and that was that.



But underneath the siding was 100-year-old dense-grained redwdood, probably shipped down on horse-drawn wagons from Mendocino, and that redwood never wears out. So when the Plotniks took off their aluminum siding, the old redwood was still in flawless condition. They didn't find one iota of rot. So what you're looking at is 100 year old redwood, which ought to last until -- well, spit over your shoulder and chase away black cats. And Jack had better last at least as long, because he's the finest painter you'll ever see.



Craft -- you care about it or you don't. TGP likes to think he's that way about writing songs -- there aren't two or three right ways, there's one right way and you have to work until you find it, no matter how long it takes. Todd the Carpenter seemed to be that way. Jack certainly is. The Great Plotnik loves talking to and dealing with people who take that much pride in their work.

The Great BZWZ's room has a new window too. Above it is the house's new signature. This is just the prototype, because Jack is having it molded. The final version will go up in a week or two. The Great Plotnik World Headquarters is in the key of P.






It's been fun this time -- nothing like working inside the house and adding rooms and shoring up foundations, like the Plotniks did two times before.

So this is it. No mas. Right?

Right?