The need of an architect where a new house is to be built or an old one completely remodeled is obvious.  We are convinced that the same holds true where only minor changes, replacements and the introduction of modern conveniences are the program.  Our own little country home is an example.  The necessary alterations were so simple that it seemed ridiculous to ask architectural advice.  There was nothing to the job but to install plumbing, move one partition, patch the plastering, and close chimney and other pipe openings cut in the days when stoves, rather than fireplaces, furnished heat.

We engaged a good local man who, with his crew of four or five helpers, was accustomed to doing everything from carpentry to plumbing.  His labor charges were on a per diem basis and considerably under the union scale that then prevailed.  Nothing was left indefinite.  We understood exactly how the work was to be done and what materials we were to supply.  In due time it was finished and we moved in.  Two or three years later, we discovered some serious shortcomings.  For instance, the kitchen sink was hung in the wrong place and, because it was easier, all of the water pipes were placed on outside walls.  This made no difference when the house was occupied only during the summer months but during the first winter we became experts in thawing pipes that “caught” whenever the temperature dropped to zero.

There was another economy that proved quite the opposite even before the work was finished.  We had agreed that wherever the old lath and plaster were in bad condition, they were to be removed and replaced with a paper wall board then being widely advertised as an inexpensive substitute.  But we had reckoned without the idiosyncrasies of an 18th century house.  When the old lath and plaster had been cleared away, our handyman contractor discovered that the old beams and uprights were spaced at eighteen-inch intervals, while our new wall board came in widths conforming to the sixteen-inch spacing that has been standard with American house construction for a century.  It was too late to return the wall board so new nailing strips, sixteen inches apart, had to be installed.  This took time and when the so-called inexpensive substitute was finally in place, the total cost actually exceeded that of the more satisfactory lath and plaster.

Further, because nobody was at hand to prevent it, we lost a good partition of feather-edge boarding.  It was between two of the bedrooms, concealed beneath several layers of wallpaper.  When stripped, two or three cracks were found through which one could look from one room to the other.  These could have been filled with wooden shims but the workmen did not stop to think of that.  They ripped it out and put in a tight and modest partition of that ultra-modern wall board.  It was well done mechanically and is still in place, but we mourn that original paneling of native white wood and continually keep an eye out for some like it.