ORGANIC HOUSE
“What happened to the old cabin in the woods, the cosmic shack?”
WE TORE IT DOWN. THAT was not difficult. It would have soon fallen apart anyway so we thought we’d save it the trouble. It gave us the next 20 years’ supply of cedar kindling.
“What sort of a house do you live in now?”
WHEN GRADE 8 CAME ROUND and it was time for Kiersten to go to high school in town, we tried several different scenarios, the first of which was renting a small house closer to town on the next island for the school year. So we too were forced to leave our beloved homestead on the outer islands for a while even though we came home every weekend and holidays. Fortunately the house we rented on Quadra had a few acres of pasture and some outbuildings so we were able to move Riskie the horse as well as Sheen dog, Tweedy the cat and the chickens.
This meant I had to take a job as a carpenter building custom houses, which turned out to be fun and enabled me to learn a lot. It also led to a significant improvement in our financial situation. At coffee breaks, on site, I would sit in on discussions about how the next pieces of wood were to go together and I would often do quick sketches with a carpenter’s pencil on a scrap piece of plywood. When one of the builders, called Larry, saw one of these sketches he exclaimed as if surprised,
“Hey! You can draw!”
“Sure, I know how to draw,” I answered. “I just don’t know what.”
“Why don’t you do us some decent drawings then?” he said. “We’ll tell you what to draw.”
Larry talked his clients into paying me to do design and drafting work, and they taught me about the kind of information he required on a practical working drawing. He liked my drawings more than some of the other professional drawings (or sometimes no drawings at all) he was used to working with. To my surprise the clients were prepared to pay my modest fee. In this way, I stumbled across a specialty niche that enabled me to make more money than I was used to. Plus I could do the drawing work at home.
As well as providing an irregular but nevertheless significant cash flow, this new-found interest and skill I had acquired, building, designing and drafting custom homes, made me all the more dissatisfied with our old cabin in the woods. Apart from being altogether too shabby, its roof was starting to leak quite badly and was going to have to be replaced. It had served us well for 12 years, which was not bad for an average cost of $100 per year, but when it came time to replace the leaky roof we decided to scrap it and build a proper house.
To this end, we made a cunning trading deal with two logger friends up in the Homathko Valley at the top of Bute Inlet. They had reclaimed some large old-growth fir logs which had been used by a previous generation of loggers as bridge timbers across one of the big side rivers in the valley. The timbers were now washed up on the riverbank, tangled together by rusty old cables and spikes, and because the company did not want to deal with all the rusty metal in the wood, one of the loggers had permission to take these logs for his own use. He offered a three-way trading deal with me and another fellow who had a sawmill and a tugboat. No money was exchanged and we had enough high-quality wood to build and finish all three of our new houses. I did some drawings for both their houses, in trade for which I received a full logging truck load of old-growth fir logs. I then prepared a milling list that I gave to the mill guy, who bundled the logs and towed the bundles down Bute Inlet with his tugboat, dropping my share off on our beach. When the tide went out, we loaded the wood onto our tractor-trailer and brought it up to our barn, where we stacked it under cover to dry out for a year.
I had a design worked out for our new house that was quite simple and easy to build, but Laurie was inspired by a Frank Lloyd Wright book I had made the mistake of showing her. So as the house went up the design evolved into something more complex and sometimes very challenging to build, especially with primitive tools and my limited skills and budget. As well as getting all the timbers and framing material from local Bute Inlet wood, we made the roof from cedar shakes hand split from nearby forest, and all the external siding, fascias and trim are also from locally grown and milled cedar.
I had seen Larry demonstrate the importance of patience and enjoyment in the hands-on process of building in the timeless way, in the moment, the Zen of building.
“You have to slow down and focus your attention!” he said.
Practising this skill, rather than rushing ahead to get the job finished, was a hard lesson for me to have to learn until it dawned on me that this was an opportunity to apply the attunement that I had learned from the natural environment to the man-made environment of daily life. If there was something about the design or the way I had built it that did not feel right the first time, I learned to patiently take it apart and adapt it so it did feel right. Parts of our house were built three times over. Though not feasible in a commercial context, this way of building is a much more organic process in which the character (life) of our house evolved through a step by step process of experiential feedback from the situation rather than from the pure conceptualization of planning.
We have also made good use of the bluff, with the ocean view facing south, by locating the house directly onto the bedrock and using a split-level floor arrangement that nestles down a series of steps in the rock. The porch and entry area are accessed directly from a short driveway leading out to the bluff from the garden, barn and orchard areas. Our main bedroom and bathroom are also at this level. Half a level up from the entry, the open plan living room, dining and kitchen areas have a fine view through magnificent big fir and cedar trees to the channel and nearby islands below. Because the ground below falls away so steeply the deck, out front, is perched precariously high up in the trees.
A prominent feature in the great room is a stunning central fireplace from local granite built by an old stonemason friend from England. Much to our amusement, he was easily disgruntled:
“This damned granite won’t do what I want it to, especially with these crappy tools.”
He was used to much more cultured stonework in the old country and could not understand that we and everyone else round here just love the rough character of the granite and his work.
A loft, which I use as my office, is very well lit by large prow-shaped clerestory windows that also receive a lot of passive solar heat, and opens down into the living room. A full story below the great room and a half-level down from the entry is a utility basement area with two small guest bedrooms, a laundry area, a root cellar, a wood stove and a central masonry stack that goes right up through the house alongside the stone fireplace in the living room. This works as a heat sink which helps to keep the house warm even after the wood fire has gone out at night. It also absorbs and stores the passive solar heat from the clerestory south-facing windows in the loft.
We have tried to make both the internal and external relationships of the house as strong and varied as possible. Just as the house itself is one part of the homestead that contributes to the life of the whole place, so at the smaller scale each of the parts of the house, while relating to and reflecting the larger whole, is itself a cohesive arrangement of smaller parts (illustrating relational holism). Generous, convenient and open traffic flows connect and unify these separate parts into a harmonious flow of space that adds life and synergy to the whole house. The result feels good and looks like it belongs and blends into the moss-covered bluffs in an opening into forest, with a fine view of the ocean at the front. A strategic driveway connects it to the garden and the barn at the back, to other parts of the property and eventually down to the dock.
All this had to be paid for as we went along because, since our income was irregular, we could not get loans or mortgages from any bank even if we had wanted to, which we didn’t. So it was all strictly a pay as you go, step by step process. This means it’s all paid for once instead of twice or more, as would have been the case with a mortgage, and the house continues to evolve as time goes by. It has a kind of honest integrity that comes from the use of local material and from having the blood, sweat and tears included and interwoven with the great satisfaction of building our own nest within our own means.
One big difference between the old cabin in the woods and our new organic house, and a significant indicator on the upward mobility scale, was the indoor bathroom where the loo gravity feeds out to a septic tank and drain field that’s buried out in the yard. I, of course, scorned the idea at first and swore I’d never use it but would be faithful to my meditation practice in the outhouse. Part of the argument in the bathroom’s favour, which eventually convinced me of its necessity, was for our clients we were trying to attract to our wilderness tours at the time. We had once heard one of them say, with typical English humour, “My idea of a wilderness experience is having the window open when I go to the bog.”
Needless to say, once the bathroom (the bog) was up and running I never used the outhouse again and just like everyone else have come to take the warm seat for granted. I must say, however, that – incurable romantic that I am – I do miss the old outhouse ritual, especially in a raging storm.