building

Will was a general contractor in Santa Clara, CA from 1973 until the success of Windham Hill Records so eclipsed the building that he devoted full time to music. Over the years he has kept his hand in building, constructing everything from the occasional horse barn to the structure for Imaginary Road Studios. What follows is a story about a recent building project which is the focus of an article in This Old House Magazine's April 2002 issue.

"In August of the year 2000, I finally bought a tractor. Sometime during the Triasic I realized that I should have bought a tractor about ten years earlier. Every year I'd get to December and find myself throwing logs into the wood stove and saying out loud to the cats, "I should have bought a tractor ten years ago." I kept thinking that somehow those ten years would run out and I'd decide I no longer needed a tractor. It never happened. I finally bought the tractor; a huge bright orange Kubota.

I outfitted the beast handsomely. I bought a huge front bucket, the capacity of which was described by the salesman as "big enough to sleep five drunken loggers." I considered the back hoe, but decided it was merely a very expensive toy and that the York Rake and Brush Hog would be far more useful. There was a week where I had a shiny new snow plow attachment, but quickly concluded that someone might expect me to actually plow snow with it and immediately thought better of the concept. I was looking for something to trade it in on when Godfrey Renaud. suggested the Farmi Winch. Until you've seen the Farmi in action, you can't appreciate it's horrible beauty. Essentially, if you have logs on the ground, scattered around the forest floor, this machine can snake around and drag the logs together like they're being poured through a funnel and then have them charge en mass toward the tractor like rabid and suddenly fleet-footed Rhinoceri. I couldn't resist and bought the Farmi.

In 1884 a woman named Sarah L. Winchester, the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, began building her house in San Jose, California. Sarah probably began crazy, but she got worse. Someone (probably the Gypsey wife of a particularly rapacious general contractor) told her that she would live forever if she kept building. Sarah did as she was told. The result was a structure containing 1,257 windows, 950 doors and 40 staircases which required 20,000 gallons of paint to cover. Windows opened to other windows which opened to yet other windows only to have a door appear outside of that. Staircases climbed floor after floor only to end at a door which opened to a seven-story fall. The Great San Francisco Earthquake toppled three stories of the place, reducing the building from seven stories to four. I doubt Sarah ever actually wielded a hammer herself, but I like to think of her brandishing a 32 oz. hammer over a 20 penny nail when she let out a gasp and died.

Sarah L. Winchester and I have much in common. While I do not share her delusion of immortality, I am nonetheless a compulsive builder (a legion of therapsits and, consequently, self-help sections of bookstores are now reflecting an awareness of this tragic addiction). Friends created a bumper sticker for me which reads "stop me before I build again!" Don't forget that in 1980, the year we released George Winston's Autumn LP, I was a general contractor and my business card still read WINDHAM HILL BUILDERS/RECORDS/MUSIC (BMI). The underlying reason I bought the Kubota was not the fact that I needed one (which I surely did), but that in buying one it would be understood by everyone that I would have a perfectly good justification for building something to house it. Under normal circumstances, a structure somewhat bigger than the tractor itself would seem like a sensible course of action. I ended up designing something more appropriate as a Zeppelin hanger. Further condemnation from head-wagging neighbors was also deflected when Donna Sapolin of This Old House legitimized my folly by expressing interest in documenting the building process of this wooden Collosus . Donna had done an article on my Vermont home for Metropolitan Home years before and was a sucker for a trip to Vermont. These city folks came up from distant urban places to take pictures of me felling trees, me and the Kubota harnessing wild Rhinos, me and Carl Moser milling the lumber and me, Corin, Matt and Gabe cutting a very traditional post and beam structure with mortise and tenon joints and oak pegs to hold it all together. THIS OLD HOUSE is usually, as the title would suggest, about old houses. This building, while new, was being constructed in a way which was so archaic that THIS OLD HOUSE felt it had to be documented. If you're interested in witnessing the tragedy of building addiction, the sheer beauty of the Kubota and a lot of sweaty guys slamming chisels with enormous wooden mallets into beams the size of airplane wings, you'll get your chance when THIS OLD HOUSE magazine brings out the article in April 2002. On the other hand you can go to to www.winchestermysteryhouse.com if you want to witness the efforts of a real whacko."