Preparations

We have made the move, and I am thankful to have arrived in Madrid safely and in good spirits. I’m also abundantly happy to have all the packing and moving behind us. Amy and I processed a mountain of work over the last few months, all with the intent of wrapping up our previous lives and getting on with the new. By the time we left, we were dog-tired and ready to get out of town.

Take, for example, the job of preparing our home in the Helena, Montana for rent. I've lived in the Miller Street house for 22 years now, and it's been 20 since I performed the gut remodel that created the architectural feel that now defines the place. The big re-hab project included ripping off the original roof structure and adding a second story that includes three bedrooms, a big bathroom, and an open and bright room at the head of the stairs that I've always thought of as a lobby. In designing the remodel, I paid homage to family egalitarianism by carving out bedrooms for Sam and Max that were nearly identical in size at about 135 square feet each. But I claimed a big piece of the real estate when laying out the master bedroom, filling almost a third of the floor area, and framing in a bay window that admits beautiful top-of-the-hill views of the neighborhood. But the biggest adult benefit of that glorious room is the adjoining porch. Unfortunately, it took me twenty years to finish the thing.

Tom uses a grinder to cut the four galvanized 
steel panels to shape. We left one-inch stubs of 
wire at the edges to be inserted into holes 
drilled in the steel top- and bottom-rails.

The original single-story house, built sometime around 1900, included a modest front porch: eight by sixteen feet, sheltered by a flimsy shed roof, and raised two feet above the adjoining flower beds by a solid concrete slab that must weigh several tons. I designed what seemed to me to be the obvious upgrade: strip the entire structure down to the immovable slab, throw the wood-frame debris into the job-site dumpster, and build anew upon that glorious hunk of concrete. 

I decided to construct the porch as a two-story structure in concert with the new two-story house. But I allowed the project to stall as vision-only for a long time. I framed an exterior doorway in the second-floor master suite to allow passage to the yet-to-be-completed porch, but the magnitude of the big remodel project -- six months of hard work and a big chunk of my savings -- kept me from building the porch right away. In fact, for almost ten years you could open that second-story "porch" door and look down upon the sloped roof of the original porch below. I kept the deadbolt latched for safety.

I spot-welded the panels to rails 
that we fabricated from 
inch-and-a-half steel conduit. We
drilled weep holes in the bottom of
the bottom-rail.

Finally, after my kids were grown, I got around to demolishing the old single-story porch, and I assembled the beautiful two-story structure I had envisioned for so long. I raised it up into a sheltering box elder tree and I capped the second-floor deck with a high bat-wing of a roof. I wrapped the wood framing in masonry stucco to match the house and minimize maintenance. I left the ground-floor slab as bare concrete, just to honor the gray honesty of the thing. I laid a fancy textured rubber walking surface at the second-floor deck, and I built a little set of two steps that lead down from the master bedroom and provided a comfortable place to sit and watch the view. But I again ran out of steam when it came to the designing and building the guardrail, and my porch remained dangerously rail-less for six more years while I was distracted by work, divorce, and life in general. I spent a lot of time up there during this interim, at least during the warm months, drinking gin and tonic and watching the world go by. But I rarely invited friends up for fear of them stumbling into the twelve-foot fall onto the sidewalk below.

I cut a water-shedding chamfer on the top 
of each composite end-panel. We drilled two
inch-and-a-half holes in each panel to 
house the ends of the rails.

I also struggled with the guardrail design. I set the bar high for myself, hoping to use this high display to showcase a fancy piece of architectural steel work. I sketched out some ideas, photographed inspiring examples around the world, and even built a few steel mock-ups. My son Max drew up plans for a design that incorporated an incised-steel map of the Prickly Pear Valley. But none of those far-reaching plans ever came to fruition, and in the end I bowed to an immediate need: I was leaving for Madrid, we had a tenant in hand to rent the house, and it was unthinkable that anyone else would be willing to live as recklessly as I had for all those years. I needed to build the guardrail.

The design you see here was born at four o'clock in the morning in March of 2014. I mind-sketched the thing during one of those nocturnal periods when the checklists of life stack themselves up against the night. I assigned myself the task that day, over coffee and in the pre-dawn darkness as I laid the design on paper: design a guardrail that I could build in two days using less than $500 worth of materials. And so I did, though I cheated on the time a little by enlisting the help of my friend Tom Beneventi.

Tom aligns one of the four rail assemblies 
while I ease it into place with a rubber hammer.
We stuck the panels to the stucco posts with
silicone, and fastened it all down with big
electro-galvanized screws.

It was a fun project, working for those days among the shop, a work-station out on the lawn, and the second floor of the porch. We used common materials, though we morphed them into unconventional configurations. The upper and lower rails are inch-and-a-half electrical conduit. The mesh was cut from galvanized steel panels made for the livestock industry. We fastened those two metal components to one another with spot welds.The end caps, where the rail assemblies are attached to the posts, were milled from the plastic-and-wood composite that’s widely used as decking material. But despite this eclectic mix of materials, we used operations that are common and reliable. And this simplicity of method worked to our benefit: we fabricated and installed the entire experimental design without a hitch.

It’s a great space now. I finished the project two weeks before leaving for Madrid. We drank exactly one glass of wine up there, in our down coats, before we left town. It seemed odd to be surrounded by a guardrail in what I will always remember as a big, open, and somewhat precarious perch. But I am abundantly happy to have that project off my list, and I suspect that the next occupants of the house won’t even pay that guardrail a second thought as they relax in their secure little space up in the tree and watch the days go by.

Finally -- deck-goers can safely relax and appreciate the quiet ambiance of the neighborhood.