A constructive experience Posted on November 19th
Dan Marrazzo Jr. is no stranger to large construction projects. Before he was even old enough to drive a car, he built a garage for his father. And as a contractor, he has directed crews of 50 workers on big jobs.
But when Marrazzo decided to renovate a 9,000-square-foot, fire-damaged mansion in Langhorne Manor with two teenaged Boy Scouts, even some of his colleagues thought he was being too ambitious.
“It was horrendously damaged, to the point where tradesmen who I knew my entire life looked at it and said, ‘What are you, crazy? You bought this?’ ” Marrazzo recalls.
He hired his 15-year-old son, Dan Marrazzo III, and Dan’s friend, John Kepner, to help him restore the place, eight hours a day for three summers. In an era when apprenticeships have all but died out, the two young men got advanced lessons on all the ins-and-outs of working on a house, starting with hauling out three dumpsters full of rubble.
“It’s an overwhelming situation when you come in and there’s trash on the stairway piled as high as your shoulders,” the elder Marrazzo says. “It took us a good two-and-a-half to three weeks just to clean all the trash out of the house.”
Before he could get a loan to cover the costs of fixing it up, Marrazzo had to get the house to a state where a bank could see that it was, indeed, repairable.
Fortunately, he says, the building was structurally sound, and some of its best features were undamaged. The only windows not broken, for example, were the house’s stained-glass windows and a magnificent double-wide front door surrounded by more stained glass.
After scrubbing and cleaning smoke-damaged artifacts, the teenagers learned carpentry, masonry, plastering, and electrical work, among other trades. Their duties included demolition, laying mud, hardwood, mosaic and ceramic-tile flooring, and installing wiring and air conditioning.
Much of the old mansion’s wiring was original, and there was evidence of shoddy electrical repairs by earlier owners.
“I’m surprised this place didn’t burn down sooner,” says young Dan, now 18 and a film major at Temple University.
Finding some replacement materials, such as the chestnut wood used throughout the house, proved difficult - chestnut trees were all but wiped out by disease by the mid-20th century. But Marrazzo found a solution.
Because the mansion had been designed so servants could move freely without being seen, there was a system of doors throughout the second floor. Marrazzo removed the chestnut doors and used them to repair damaged wood.
To replace a section of the old slate roof, he used a portion of the roof from the carriage house.
Buying cabinets for the large rebuilt kitchen would have been a costly proposition, so Marrazzo read a book on kitchen installations and built them from scratch in his basement.
“Everybody I entertained here had prices for cabinets and assumed that I had an unlimited budget based on what I had already done. But by that point,” he says, “I had no budget to speak of.”
As he worked and worked, Marrazzo says, he often found himself reflecting on the remarkable job the original builders did.
“With the technology that exists today, we can put things together 10 times faster,” he says, “but the guys who built this at the turn of the [20th] century, they did their job and they did it right. It was a tough act to follow.”
Of course, not every part of the house could be restored using original materials. Last summer, Kepner and young Dan replaced the wrap-around porch’s entire ceiling with new hardwood. Together, they installed more than 1,000 boards.
When friends and colleagues stopped by to check on progress on the house, Marrazzo says, he’d take them aside and ask them not to point out how much his apprentices had learned.
“I never made this something where [the boys] thought it was a big deal,” he says. “They just did what they were told to.”
Since completing work on the house, Kepner and the younger Marrazzo have used the skills they learned to assist other scouts on service projects, and both have attained the rank of Eagle Scout.
Word of their technical prowess has also made its way to their friends, who call on them for slightly smaller jobs. While at a party recently, Kepner found himself replacing a light switch before a captive audience, and was called in to fix an electrical problem at a friend’s house.
“He plugged a microwave in in his room,” says Kepner, an 18-year-old Montgomery County Commumity College student. “I told him he tripped a breaker, and he asked me, ‘How much does that cost to fix?’ “
Though neither envisions a career in home renovation, each is now capable of taking a junk house and making it habitable. Kepner says he plans on making his first house a project house to save money.
Marrazzo says he never intended to push his apprentices into following in his footsteps. He just wanted to give them a background in the building trades, in addition to their formal education.
“Whether they liked it or not, when they walked out of here, they walked out of here as young mechanics,” he says. “If there’s something that requires a mechanical skill, these guys can do it now.”