The Burden of Refinement
We live in a modern, civilized and refined world. The last few nights we have watched some movies set in the late 1950’s and we are reminded that it wasn’t so long ago (a mere sixty years ago) that things were a lot less civilized and refined. We have watched Far From Heaven and Loving, both stories set in that era when I was a young child and when the country was far less tolerant than it has become. What makes that all the more concerning is that there are people around who actually want to see us return to those standards and feel that less tolerance is a better place to be. There are certainly times when civilization is overrated. If that were not the case, why would people feel the need to go camping or to go spend time at a beach or mountain second home that has less luxuries than their primary residence?
Refinement comes in many different flavors. In a housing sense there are many levels to consider. There are the floors and materials employed. There was a day when plush or shag carpeting were the rage, whether from natural fibers or synthetic ones. Those days gave way to the tradition of hardwood floors, from trees that were harvested and reduced the available oxygenating forest’s of the world. Those alternatives have now yielded increasingly to designer concrete or luxury vinyl…either of which can look like hardwood if one chooses (strange, but true). Those surfaces are much more practical…though increasingly also more expensive. That would be the result of supply and demand rather than the cost of production. Long term, concrete is a wise choice because it can stay cool in the summer and with the help of some imbedded radiant heat, can be cozy and warm in winter. The industrial chic sense of concrete flooring has overtaken the old sense that bare concrete is an impoverished look that lacked refinement. As for the luxury vinyl, the production process has allowed it to be realistically grained like wood of any sort. It’s verisimilitude to our childhood demon linoleum is also misleading since it turns out that linoleum is one of the most ecofriendly flooring alternatives available. Too bad we equate it with mid-Century Middle America. Luxury Vinyl, linoleum’s more refined cousin, is softer, cleans easier and requires less delicacy than hardwood or linoleum. It only takes one time seeing an expensive hardwood floor start cupping when humidity visits your home, to convince you of the merits of an alternative surface.
I am a bit confused by the sustainability issues. Concrete is made of Portland cement, water and various aggregates (like sand or stone), and cement is comprised of six or seven elements that are available in the ground. While making concrete is exothermic and gives off rather than uses energy, the making of cement is a big energy user and is less than ecofriendly since it emits large quantities of carbon dioxide in addition to throwing lots of quarry dust in the air. So, while concrete seems very “natural” it seems more debatable than that. As for luxury vinyl (LVT), it is made of PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) and is the world’s third-most widely produced synthetic polymer of plastic. Plastic. That’s the stuff that is floating in great islands across the Pacific Ocean, that is infiltrating all the creatures of the seas and that is causing me and others to sip our soda through soggy paper straws so that poor little sea turtles don’t get stabbed by plastic straws. The LVT industry is not unaware of the growing concern by consumers of the ecological implications of its substance, so that their adopted sales mantra is that LVT is more sustainable than other flooring alternatives because LVT is 100% recyclable. Is that good or does it just mean that PVC shit never goes away? It’s not any less confusing to consider the use of hardwood. We cut down a renewable resource, but in doing so, we reduce the earth’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide. The pace of clear-cut versus the pace and breadth of replanting and growth is the key calculus needed to figure out how harmful hardwood flooring is to our earth.
Naturally, refinement is hardly limited to flooring in the home. Without getting into furniture or the like, the other key attributes of the home come in the form of walls, ceilings and interfaces. By interfaces, I generally mean windows and doors and the surfaces that define them. There are many variations of actual windows and doors that get put into these interfaces, but the openings themselves have only a few variations. An opening for walking through or seeing through can only take on so many forms and refinement is more likely to be about ceilings and walls. Other than getting back into the conversation about covering a wall with some form of wood paneling or refined cloth or paper, walls are mostly about plaster in one form or another. The construction industry long ago realized the efficiency of substituting the labor-intensive art of plastering with pre-made plasterboard or sheetrock, which is easier to put up on 4×8 foot sections and then can be easily seamed and prettied up with little fuss and ready for painting. It can go on walls and ceilings alike and sheetrock is as smooth as the proverbial baby’s ass and is ready to paint lickety split. No need for nasty lathe and uneven walls or ceilings. But then people decided that too smooth looked too ordinary or cheap, so they started to fabricate a degree of roughness in the painting or covering of sheetrock to simulate an authentically plastered wall or a sand-finished ceiling. That even led to something that we call popcorn finished ceilings which the DIY shows spend great amounts of time and effort now scraping off. How crazy is that. It’s right up there with distressing wood or even jeans to give them that hard-used look and then deciding to repair and patch them. Refinement can turn on itself more than one time trying to decide when it gets too good and too smooth or maybe too rough. It gets rather confusing.
I am going through all this thinking and overthinking because Kim and I are trying to decide of the finish surface for my Hobbit House. She prefers smoother finished walls and me not so much. With two coats of stucco inside and out, it has an interesting roughness to its walls. The floors are pre-formed concrete block, which are purposefully rough and patio-like. The door and window are open and not intended to be portaled, but I have spilled them both with nice hardwood planks. The ceiling is an open-eaves affair made of wood planking and beams which I have stained with protective polyurethane blended stain. It looks….rustic, in a word. It has that square-jawed handsomeness of a lumberjack and not in small part due to the roughness of the Portland cement stucco walls with a sandy and irregular finish (from the natural process, not from any artificial application). I am arguing for leaving it rough and rustic since the newly stained, open-air vented ceiling looks more refined as stained than expected (in a very pleasant way). I even roughed up the ceiling by applying synthetic garland to create an error-disguising seam covering at the corners of the beams. That makes me guilty of back and forth, simultaneous refinement and unrefinement all at once and with unnatural materials and ulterior motive to boot.
I remember watching a contractor (who favored the easiest path at all times) and a construction supervisor with a penchant for authenticity and preservation arguing about how best to proceed with a shed building. The contractor voted with his bulldozer and the conundrum was resolved with a fresh new shed. So, I have now voted by adding refinement to the rustic stucco walls by affixing all the rustic adornment I can while Kim watches in resignation as the rusticity of the walls gets made more and more permanent. This is a case of “let’s wait and see how it looks over time”, like a parent telling a child “we’ll see” about going to Disneyland every weekend. Refinement turns out to be a more moveable and rustic feast than I ever imagined. The most convincing argument in its favor came from my neighbor who stopped by to see what was what. He said he thought leaving it rustic was what a Hobbit would do. That made total sense since who the hell knows what goes on in the mind of a Hobbit…or a retired banker for that matter.