Published: August 19, 2008 11:27 pm            

Metal home’s owner says project misunderstood

EDMOND — Wayne DeShazer said recent criticism by Edmond Mayor Dan O’Neil regarding DeShazer’s 2,400-square-foot home under construction made him feel like somebody was critiquing his canvas before he finishes the painting.

The Edmond artist is using steel to build a green energy efficient home for his parents at 20 E. Blanch St. When completed, the two-story home will be covered in brick, rock and siding.

DeShazer has been constructing the home since October. Its current appearance might mistakenly lead one to think it will permanently appear as a metal warehouse.

The construction in a downtown Edmond neighborhood prompted O’Neil to ask the Central Edmond Urban Development Board to accept more responsibility for reviewing the development of the downtown Edmond residential area. DeShazer said he learned about the mayor’s displeasure about his project by reading The Edmond Sun.

“I wasn’t mad. But I feel like they didn’t know my intentions,” said DeShazer, creative director for DCA Services. “… My wife just kind of asked, ‘Why didn’t anybody ever come to you and ask you. Surely, they wouldn’t think it was your intent.’”

The City of Edmond has not set criteria for site plan review for downtown residential areas, O’Neil said. So he discussed the idea with the Urban Board last week in order to protect the identity of Edmond’s Downtown Residential District.

“We have a home … that’s being built in Edmond that expands your definition of what residential homes would be,” O’Neil said at the Urban Board meeting, while an image of the building under construction was projected on a screen.

“I’m on a quest. I no longer want to point fingers. I don’t want to say what went wrong. I don’t care,” said Wayne Page, city councilman, who supported the mayor at the meeting. “I want to see to it this never happens again. I got the mayor started on this. And I’m real adamant about this because there’s no reason this should exist. We started in ’03 a permitting process with a house as a residential accessory building, which is approximately 2,000 square feet.”

DeShazer broke ground on his home last October. And he’s doing most of the construction himself, he said.

“What delayed us was the wind,” he said of a period between February and June. “If you’re putting these sheets up it’s like razor blades. You cannot put them up in the wind.”

DeShazer said City Attorney Steven Murdock e-mailed him two months ago asking his intentions with the property’s visual appearance. DeShazer said he told his former neighbor the home would be covered in rock, brick and siding.

“He had commented he had seen some of the stuff I had done at my house on Chelsea Station, that I do really good work,” DeShazer said. “I take a lot of artist pride in my work and I thought that was the end of it.”

At first, DeShazer was supplied with multiple colored recycled steel being placed on the building.

“It looked like something out of Sanford and Son,” DeShazer said. “It just had multiple colored steel up here and I thought, ‘Man, I can’t have this.’”

So DeShazer ordered new steel to replace the old steel and hopes to have the home completed by January.

DeShazer said he recently delivered his artist renderings of the finished home to the mayor’s office and Planning Department. “He said, ‘It’s not about you. You’re just being made the scape goat. We are going to do what we need to do,’” DeShazer said.

O’Neil told The Sun later Tuesday morning, “It’s hard to say if we would have approved a home like this or not.”

The mayor said the city has an obligation to review single family homes. He said it’s important for the community and the residents to know what to expect when a home is being rebuilt.

“The Urban Board was charged as part of their charter with an obligation to review housing and they’re not doing so now,” O’Neil said. “Had this been in place, we would have had an opportunity to know what he was doing and this wouldn’t have been a problem.”

O’Neil said the structure is “an over-built building” and he still wasn’t sure what DeShazer would do with the property. City Planner Bob Schiermeyer said DeShazer’s property was approved for a 2,540-square foot home.

“Some of the things he’s proposing isn’t typical,” O’Neil said. “The roof lines on this thing are unusual for a metal building.”

O’Neil said the artist rendering appears a lot nicer than how it appears today. “We have encouraged him to do something to make his product a lot nicer,” O’Neil said.

Other than Murdock, DeShazer said no one from the City of Edmond had approached him about his building intentions. DeShazer said he previously took his construction plan to the Planning Department.

“I said, ‘Do you guys need a rendering. Do you need to know what it’s going to look like?’” DeShazer said. “They said, ‘No. All we need to know is the height, the width and the depth of it.’”

DeShazer originally purchased a dilapidated 700-square-foot house at the 20 E. Blanch property in 2002. DeShazer’s parents, Betty and Wayne DeShazer, were moving back to Edmond from Colorado, so he let them live rent free in the home. But the floors were rotting so they chose not to live there anymore.

“I had told them, and I had always wanted, to build a home for them,” DeShazer said.

He had worked with builders in the past in constructing wood homes but had not worked with metal. DeShazer decided steel would be his best option to produce an environmentally friendly and energy-efficient home. Such homes are built in Florida to withstand 180 mph winds, he said. An engineer modified DeShazer’s original plans for efficiency.

“In the paper they were kind of talking about ‘how could this happen?’” DeShazer said. “I’m sorry, I take pride in my art. And then they think it was a mistake.

“Like I said, it didn’t make me mad but it kind of hurt my feelings.”



jcoburn@edmondsun.com | 341-2121, ext. 114

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.