President Joe Biden: the ‘frustrated architect’
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN regularly spends his weekends at the Wilmington house, often staying from Friday to Monday. It’s a quick hop to the Philadelphia area, the Democratic base in a critical swing state, as he campaigns for reelection. His Wilmington visits are something of a continuation of the commuting schedule he kept as vice president. During his threedecade Senate tenure before that, Biden commuted from Delaware to Washington daily on Amtrak.
The Delaware home is more than a gathering spot for family members and a few of his close friends or a respite from the White House’s prying eyes. Biden aides say he feels grounded in Wilmington, where his interactions with church parishioners, his neighbors, and even his gardener often form the basis of policy questions he asks his team when he gets back to Washington.
The construction project, which was underway when FBI agents searched his home, lasted more than a year, much to Biden’s chagrin. A month earlier, he complained to reporters that, “I have no home to go to” during the construction. Aides said Biden was exasperated with the pace of the renovations. Being unable to go there to see the changes for months at a time made the process even more stressful. He wants to reverse some of those changes out of office.
The home was carefully laid out by the president after he and his wife purchased the property in 1996. “I’m a frustrated architect … you probably saw all those significant numbers of house plans that I’ve drawn,” Biden told Hur, referring to one set of drawers opened by investigators. Biden did some of the work on the home himself, sometimes with the help of his sons Hunter and the late Beau, and his brother Jimmy. The other changes he supervised with a careful eye for detail. He said he had used “so damn many different contractors” who “… busted their ass for three years to build the house.”
Biden furnished the home with plenty of sentimental items, from the desk he used while serving in the Senate to knickknacks picked up over decades in public life. Dozens of three-by-two photographs of moments from his years in office are “hanging on the walls all over the downstairs, the television room, and some in the library.”
A cottage at the top of the driveway now serves as a secure operations center for Secret Service agents and military officials. It was home to Biden’s mother before she died in 2010 at age 92. In subsequent years, as vice president, Biden collected $2,200 a month in rent payments for the guest house from the Secret Service.
Biden’s wood-paneled library is a particular point of pride in the home, with its chandelier and overstuffed leather sofas. It was there that investigators found his personal notebooks documenting key meetings from his time as vice president.
Biden told investigators that he picked out the “walnut tree that got cut down,” some of which ended up inside the home. The room “cost one-third of the entirety of my entire home. Swear to God.”
Pointing to seven different pieces of molding photographed by the FBI in the room, he admitted, “I got a little carried away.”
(Part 1 was published on March 19, 2024).