Here's a description of how Dad built our family home when I was a kid. The house really did look as strange as it sounds!

Our House


I guess when Dad was younger he thought of himself as something of a pioneer. When I was four we moved to the town where we would stay permanently. On a rural road about two miles outside of town sat twenty-two overgrown acres where an uncle, aunt, and a mess of cousins of Dad’s had lived a couple of decades earlier. They had long since moved elsewhere in the state. Dad bought the land and planned to build a new house for our family there. He would design, finance, and build it all his own way.

The old house place on the property was still relatively clear. It had a concrete slab on a hill where the house had sat, a small barn full of junk, an old cistern, and several handsome shade trees. It also had an apple tree and a scuppernong grape vine. Both were in bad shape and proved impossible to salvage. This was a shame. I recall tasting some of the last fruits of both and enjoying them. The grapes were especially good. The family had once supplied big batches of grapes to all the neighbors for making preserves.

But Dad decided to use that area for a garden site. He would build our new house a couple hundred yards down the road, where the woods had grown up thickly. While it wasn’t exactly wilderness, it did take some clearing to make a driveway and a house site. The driveway led some yards from the road to the site. It continued on into the woods. Dad sold the timber and topsoil from several acres of land further up the trail to finance the house’s construction. The sacrificed land made a barren clearing that we fortunately could not see from the house.

Building the house took Dad two or three years of weekends and evenings. I recall seeing it grow piece by piece. First there were a bunch of ditches that were filled with concrete to serve as footings. Then the cinder-block first story rose from the foundation. Next Dad covered this with the decking for the wooden-walled upper floor. Wall frames, roof trusses, and roofing rose from there.

Dad hired a church member who was a professional electrician to do the wiring. He handled pretty well everything else himself, even teaching himself how to do plumbing. For assistance he mainly had his younger brother who lived in town. Dad later helped him to build his own house. Other relatives also lent a hand now and then. I recall seeing four or five uncles and cousins working on the roof at one time on a particular afternoon. They included a couple of those cousins who had lived on the land many years earlier.

My brother and I were too young to help. We spent a good deal of time on site nonetheless, especially when Mom was busy elsewhere and Dad had to baby sit us. I used to balance on the concrete footings in back of the house, or look for blackberries in the nearby bushes. We never found many berries. One day on the edge of the yard a humming bird startled me. I thought it was some giant buzzing insect that would attack me and fled in terror.

After the upper floor had its decking I loved to climb the ladder up there. The half-completed upper story was a bit like a giant tree house. One day I watched log skidders dragging the trees Dad had sold down from the clearing. On another occasion my brother and I caught a clumsy bird upstairs with our bare hands. We showed it to Dad and then released it. I later made the mistake of trying the same thing at home with a baby mockingbird and learned the hard way that they take care of their young!

The summer after I turned eight we moved in. The house was not yet finished. Dad had intended to make it a split-level—it was the 1970s after all. He decided in the middle of construction that he would have to borrow too much money to build all he wanted. So the foundations for the single-story wing in back of the house went unused. He also did not get the house covered with brick. We had bare cinder blocks downstairs and bare boards above.

Something else that dropped out of the plan due to finances was the sun deck that Dad had intended to run the width of the house in front. Both of the upstairs bedrooms on the front of the house had sliding glass doors that opened onto the sun deck. The doors were installed; the sun deck was not. This left two sets of sliding glass doors opening out over nothing more than a small porch roof. For the first couple of years they did not even have that! My brother and I found as we got older that we could climb up on the porch roof and enter the house through the upstairs doors. This came in handy a time or two when Mom accidentally locked us out of the house.

All in all, the house looked on the outside as though a lunatic had designed it. Mom was terribly embarrassed by it, I’m sure. I actually thought it was kind of cool. We certainly had a house that looked like nobody else’s house! And Dad had built it all himself. Not many people in this day and age can say that they’ve done that.

The inside looked a good deal more conventional than the outside. The downstairs had two big rooms running from front to back. One served as the living and dining area. The living room part was crowded around the front door. Right behind it sat the dining room set. Just behind it Dad located the wood-burning stove that served as our central heating. It was all kind of crowded back in there.

Through a doorway, past Mom’s piano, you entered the kitchen. It had its own sliding glass door in front. The kitchen table and deep freeze were located on that end of the room. At the back end were the washer and drier. In many houses these would have been in a separate “mud room.” We just had them sitting out in the open.

A short flight of steps led past the drier to a landing. A door on the landing opened into what was supposed to have been the back of the house. As it was, it served as a back entrance. A flight of stairs in front of this door led from the landing to the upstairs. Upstairs the house looked quite ordinary—three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a hall, and a hall closet. One of the rooms—fortunately not the one I slept in—had a carpet to which I proved slightly allergic before I grew out of the allergy.

The same room also had a door on which the knob had somehow been installed backwards. This made it possible for someone in the hallway to lock someone in the room. My brother locked me in once while Mom and Dad were gone and then went outside and forgot I was there. When Mom and Dad came home an hour or so later I was as mad as a wet hen!

The water for the house came from a spring located a few hundred yards away through the woods. It ran downhill through a siphon line into a holding tank outside the house. When we did a lot of washing we had to watch the water supply so that we did not run the tank too low and lose suction on the siphon line. When I got tall enough to see into the top of the tank, Dad taught me how to prime the siphon line so that I could do it if we ran short of water while he was gone. One year the old line went bad, and we had to lay a new one. The spring had good water, although Dad did bring in drinking water for some time. It certainly tasted better than our friends’ salt well down the road!

I lived in that house for ten years before starting college and moving to a dorm. Even then I spent lots of evenings and nearly all weekends at home. Not until I graduated college and moved to Tennessee to go to grad school did I really leave home. So far the house still holds the record as the place where I’ve spent the greatest part of my life.

Mom and Dad still live there. It looks very different now. The upstairs sliding glass doors have been replaced by more normal-looking windows. Dad is in the middle of a long-term project to finally finish the house’s exterior. Inside the living room and dining room area looks entirely different since a comprehensive redecoration that Mom carried out some years ago. There is no longer a wood-burning stove. Upstairs the room where I slept now looks like a junk room much of the time. Mom still clears it out now and then for the holidays, when they have two children, two children-in-law, and three grandchildren to host.

For all the changes, it is still home. I still enjoy visiting there more than any place else. Sometimes you really can go home again.