We didn't have an impressive house growing up--but there wasn't another one in the world just like it!


There's No Place Like Home (Such As It Is)


Dad was 29 years old when he decided to build a house for the family with his own two hands. He already had some years of experience doing masonry work. But he had never framed walls, built a roof, or put in plumbing. Dad figured he could just learn what he needed to do while doing it. Mom, who in ten years of marriage had never yet known Dad not to accomplish anything he set his mind to, assumed he could do all this as well.

He started by buying 22 acres of land from some cousins who had not lived on it in many years. Most of it was covered with scrubby timber growth. Dad turned part of what wasn’t into a large garden patch, and cleared a spot for the new house site. He sold the topsoil from several acres to raise starter money for construction. This had the effect of creating a large, barren clearing out behind the house. Much of the land remained wooded and fertile.

Dad also borrowed money from a local bank. The head of the bank was an old friend of the family who recognized Dad as a good risk. Since he would be doing most of the work himself Dad did not need to borrow as much money as a new house normally requires for construction. He also economized by designing the house so that it could be expanded later. He would build a two-story main block first. The sun deck, brick veneer, and single-story wing that would turn it into a split-level (this was the 1970s) would all be added as money became available.

Constructing the house took about three years of summer evenings (Dad worked full-time laying bricks), Saturdays (Dad pastured a church on Sundays), and holidays. Sometimes when the bricklaying work was slow he could take more time to work on the family house. His brothers helped him some; he would help them build family houses of their own in turn. As far as I know the only hired labor was an electrician to do the wiring and a laborer to help Dad lay the blocks for the ground floor.

The cinder-block ground floor was no great challenge, of course—Dad did this sort of work all the time. Framing the upstairs walls and the roofing trusses put him to the test. I don’t know how he met all the challenges. I’m not sure Dad quite sees how he did it with hindsight either. Only recently he spoke of his hubris in undertaking such a project. It was as if he just hadn’t known any better than to try it.

Though my brother and I would later help Dad with assorted other projects, we were much too small to be of any help during the building of the house. I don’t even remember very much of it. Now and then Mom or Dad would carry us out there in the evening or on a Saturday, and there would be more there than we remembered seeing before. At first it was just a bunch of ditches dug for foundations. Later there were cinder-block walls. Then there was decking over the cinder blocks, with a ladder going up to it (I loved climbing that!).

Then we had the frames for upstairs walls. As we played in this forest of wall studs my brother and I managed to catch and release a young bird. Not too long afterward I tried the same thing back home with what turned out to be a baby mockingbird. That was a big mistake….. But it’s also another story.

At some point we had water in the house, piped in from a spring elsewhere on the property. It would remain our main source of water for many years. We never had any problem drinking from or washing with the untreated spring.

One of my most vivid memories of the construction was the day the roof went on. Dad had several brothers and cousins up there helping. They raised quite a racket with their hammers. It sounded like a real, commercial construction site that day!

We moved in early in the summer of 1976, the Bicentennial Year. Some guys from our church helped. I was still too young to do much besides get in the way.

The house still wasn’t really complete—and it looked it. The walls were bare cinder blocks below, wood and tarpaper above. Two sets of sliding glass doors opened onto an upstairs sun deck that didn’t yet exist. The two sets of doors in mid-air gave the house a distinctly eccentric appearance. We never did have anything below the sliding glass doors except a small porch roof. Once in a while, when we were feeling daring, my brother and I would climb out onto it. We also broke into the house on at least one occasion when accidentally locked outside by climbing up onto the porch roof and entering a fortunately unlocked upstairs door. The sliding doors also gave good ventilation, if you remembered to leave the inner screen doors closed so as to minimize the chances of somebody absent-mindedly trying to exit.

The downstairs had only two rooms. The kitchen was very spacious and served also as a laundry area. The other downstairs space served as a living room in front and a dining room in back. It also contained the wood-burning stove that was for many years our only central heating. During winter power outages we could always be sure of having heat. On top of everything else, we made space in there for Mom’s upright piano.

A short flight of steps led past the washer and dryer (where my brother once shot a mouse with his BB gun) to a landing. A door in back of that opened onto a small back yard surrounded by cinder blocks. This was supposed to be the split-level wing. It was finished at around the same time as the sun deck. From there the main stairs led up to three bedrooms and two bathrooms. One of these served as part of a master bedroom suite. The bathrooms were back-to-back and directly above the kitchen sink and laundry area. This enabled Dad to save on piping by concentrating all of the plumbing into one corner of the house.

The house might have looked odd and a bit raw on the outside, but inside it made as roomy (about 1,600 square feet) and comfortable a home as a family our size could ever truly need. The latter part of my childhood and my teen years were spent there. Since I attended college only half an hour’s drive away, I did not truly move out until I went away to grad school in my early 20s.

Mom and Dad still live there, and I still spend nights there sometimes, in the room with the carpet that caused me to have an allergic reaction when it was new. Over the years Dad has periodically done some remodeling work on the outside. The house no longer has those upstairs sliding glass doors. Part of it now has siding. For all that it has never stopped looking like a work in progress—which, essentially, it remains after nearly four decades. At least Mom has had a chance to get mostly new furniture and decorating on the interior over the years. You’d hardly recognize much of the inside now.

It’s a funny-looking place even now. Nobody would ever confuse it with the product of a professional housing developer. For all that it’s unique, it’s distinctive, and it’s our home. I’ve always been rather proud of it, and of Dad for having built it.

I love this story!

Glad you liked it, Simon!

The land the house sits on is interesting as well. Although it's only a couple of miles out of town the house is in a hilly, wooded area out of sight of the nearest neighbor. The family property includes a very small old barn, the foundation of an earlier house, a cistern, a little pond, the ruptured levee for another pond, and a little stream. If you went through the woods upstream you could eventually come to the back of a neighbor's house. The woods also included the spring we got our water from and a brick barbecue pit my grandfather had built.

A natural gas pipeline cut running across the property provided a walking trail that I used to follow for miles in either direction. It went up and down some very steep hills and crossed several streams. You could actually use the pipeline itself to cross one of them. A side trail my brother discovered led from there to an old house site with a stock pond that a beaver had repaired and turned into a beaver pond. We found the beaver's den but never quite caught sight of the beaver. Also up the pipeline was a high-tension powerline cut that gave us additional trails to follow. I used to spend a lot of my time walking in the woods with our dogs.

Across the road from our house was a large timber clear-cut with a network of logging roads that we used to walk on. When we got older we rode four-wheel ATVs as well. There were logging trails everywhere that we could follow. Down the road toward town was a little wooden bridge over a creek. We could go under the bridge and follow the creek. Eventually I discovered that it was the same creek we found near the old house place with the beaver pond! Up the road was a very steep hill with a cemetery on top. I guess you could say the inmates of the cemetery were our closest neighbors. They were always quiet and never gave us any trouble....

Over the years we--I was made to help--cleared brush to expand the yard, raised large vegetable gardens, and built sheds and workshops. We put up a lot of our harvest for the winter, although we didn't come close to growing all of our own food. When we or the wind felled a tree Dad cut it up for firewood and we kids helped him haul it and split it. Since I was the oldest he had me drive the little tractor we used to haul the cordwood.

It wasn't until later that I realized that not everybody got to grow up like that.