Our House

In which Lona reminisces about building a house…

The inktober (where you draw and post something in ink every day of October) prompt for today was “build”, which makes me think about the biggest building project I ever had: my house. It didn’t start out as a personal building project back in 1977. My husband, Gordon, and I picked out a pretty modest plan from a home design book, ordered the plans, and took them to a contractor. He wanted $60,000 to build it, which was a fortune to us, so we went back to the drawing board, literally. The problem with the plans we had was that I didn’t know how to build it so our new course of action was to design something so simple we could build it ourselves. In this case, the government was there to help with a $1.25 book from USDA called Low-Cost Wood Homes for Rural America – Construction Manual. Everything we needed to know was in the book! Following the instructions in the book I sketched out a little house, only 20’ x 24’, before ‘tiny houses’ were even a cool thing. A friend of ours who worked in drafting made official looking copies of the plan so we could get a building permit. We marked out the house corners on our lot with four posts and string and had some foundations poured and some block laid by a local brick layer. We went down to Bryans Road Building and Supply and old man Lund was willing to give us a line of credit because Gordon’s mother had gone to school with him back in the 1920’s. The supplies all came in one truckload. To start building, we enlisted our friend, John Greene, who had been working framing houses, who said he could do ours but he needed $6.00 an hour and we had to hire an assistant, too. We decided to save money by me being the assistant. Gordon wasn’t eligible because he had to keep working to bring home the bacon, so to speak. Luckily my mother-in-law was a very willing and free babysitter to our one year old. Contrary to what one might think, the framing of a house goes up pretty easily and this was done in a couple of weeks. We made one major change when we realized that we could have an attic bedroom just by changing the pitch of the roof. We decided to just do it and hope the building inspector wouldn’t give us a hard time. After that I remember putting in insulation, building cabinets, putting down tile on the floor, and doing the wiring even though it was Gordon, not me, who knew enough to pass the test that you need to pass if you want to do your own wiring. It sounds crazy, but by this time we were seriously into saving money, so I even made our own doors and windows. We hired and fired a drywall guy that didn’t seem to know what he was doing. My sister-in-law helped me with some drywall and showed me how to do it. The worst plumbers in the world tried to put in the bathroom sink by attaching it just to drywall and they also drilled a huge hole to run pipe right through our main supporting beam and they forgot to slope the sewer line! I failed the electrical inspection the first time and had to redo things in a way Gordon said was a worse way to do it – but by this time I was more interested in listening to the inspector than Gordon so I would pass. My brother helped us with siding and painting the outside. (I don’t want to forget that other friends and family had been helping all along! Thanks!) At some point all the tasks seemed interminable, so our mantra became, “it’s just a shack”, which is what really helped us finally call it finished. After some inspection ups and downs, we got an occupancy permit and chased the squirrels out and moved in. (Never mind that some stuff like the baseboards would take another 35 years to finish.) I believe we had spent around $20,000.

That was forty years ago. Over the years we’ve added on, built decks, replaced most of my crummy windows and doors, put in central heat, re-roofed and even added some closets which were egregiously missing initially. In the end, I believe the main qualities that helped us complete this project were perseverance and a certain lowering of standards. It may not be the fanciest house, but after all the work that went into it, it has always felt like ‘home’.