“There are still those who would tell you our house got built by guess and by God.”
A Little Better Than Plumb
IT MAY HAVE BEEN because we already owned a log fishing camp, or it may have been because in the last three novels I had written the people had built log cabins and, like drugs, we were addicted to them.
Whatever the reason, when we went crazy with spring fever in 1957 and decided to build a home in the country, we perpetrated the further folly of building it of logs.
We thought for once we were being logical. The history of our married years has been one of valiant but futile efforts to overcome a native tendency in each of us, disastrous when pooled, to be as naive as babes in the wood about all practical matters. No matter how sensible we think we are being, it never turns out that way.
Triumphantly, however, we pointed to the already owned fishing camp, whose purchase had been one of our most foolish acts, and said we would start from that.
Living in town after several years on a farm we had been overcome with nostalgia and in a moment of madness had succumbed to our longing to walk on the earth again and we had bought the dreary thing. Then we were stuck with it.
We could neither sell it nor give it away because it was on a stretch of Green River that the fish avoided as if the waters were polluted, and it was down under a dreadful hill that towered over it so darkly and gloomily that the cabin was like the tunnel of love — without the love. It was also as cold as charity, which should have warned us. Blithely, however, we attributed its refrigerating tendencies to the fact that the sun never shone on it.
“Wait,” we told each other, “until we get it moved to some high, dry, sunny place. It will be lovely. It will be our living room.” Then, we said further, we can buy two or three more old log houses (of which there are a great plenty in Kentucky) and with a little ingenuity we shall have a nice log house. We did not doubt that we had the ingenuity.
The fact that we had paid twenty-three hundred dollars for the cabin, one room with lean-to and loft, and would pay three hundred and fifty dollars more to have it moved, making the raw materials of the living room cost twenty-six hundred dollars disassembled, wholly escaped us. We were being practical. Saddled with a white elephant, we were turning it to good use.
We busied ourselves to find an acre or two of land to move it to. One acre, we said, would be fine. It is typical of us that what we finally bought was seventy-six acres, of which sixty-two are in woods so steeply ridged and hollowed that not even the fireplace wood can be cut off it. Nothing on wheels can get back up those hollows to haul it out. It is sixty-two acres of pawpaw thickets, rocks and inaccessible trees. The other fourteen, immediately surrounding the house, are flat, level valley land.
We had always loved this place. We had driven past it every time we had gone to town for years and it was always beautiful, with its shady grove of trees, its clear little creek running through the front yard, its ancient apple orchard and picturesque old ruin of a barn entirely covered with a huge wistaria vine. The fourteen acres of lush meadow surrounding the tiny farmhouse made a lovely green frame for it. So we bought it, and it was typical of us, also, that we paid twice what it was worth, simply because of its beauty.
Neither of us gave a thought to the fact that the water table of the valley had to be the water level of the creek — to be precise, two feet below the surface of the ground! When we tore down the old farmhouse and began digging the foundations for the log house we hit water, a trickle of it, at sixteen inches. We hit geysers at twenty inches and had to borrow an irrigation pump to keep the trenches dry enough to pour the concrete footings. We daily expect the massive stone fireplace we built to sink out of sight of its own sheer weight. Oddly enough, it has not yet done so. Perhaps a drowned mountain peak supports it. It would be the only thing solid enough.
But I loved the creek and I loved the ancient apple orchard and I loved the picturesque old ruin of a barn and I loved the flat green meadow cupped by the hills in the background. Of course the creek floods the yard now and then, but it has been courteous enough to stay out of the house — up to now. The apple orchard remains lovely, but my husband promptly had the old barn, wistaria vine and all, torn down. He does not admire picturesqueness. Not, he says, at the probable expense of human lives. The barn was ready to fall and he was afraid it would collapse when someone was inside.
We spent that summer driving all over the country looking at and buying old log houses. They were always located in the worst and most remote places. We trudged over cornfields, across blackberry patches, through briar thickets, up snaky ravines, down hill, up hill, to look at each one we were told about.
To match the logs of the fishing camp we had to have poplar, so many of the ones we looked at wouldn’t do. Some of the best, built of oak, wouldn’t do. Others, eminently suitable, suddenly soared in price and wouldn’t do. It was very strange how an old log house, abandoned to field mice, wasps and snakes for fifty years, should so unexpectedly become such a valuable holding. The tears of sentiment and emotion we witnessed! Mother was born in that house. She would have been one hundred years old last Decoration Day. We never saw a log house under a hundred years old, naturally. Every year over that added fifty dollars to the price, so we quit looking at old homesteads. Instead, we looked at and bought barns, about which people seemed not to be so sentimental.
Eventually, enough logs accumulated, three stone chimneys bought, a poplar frame house acquired somewhere along the line (for its hand-hewn beams and excellent boarding), everything was moved to the building site.
It was more than a little overwhelming. You have no idea how many logs are in four log houses. Or how many poplar boards are in one frame house. Or how many buckeye boards are in one ramshackle old farmhouse torn down to make room for the new house. Or how many stones are in three fireplaces. All fourteen acres of meadow were littered with the stuff and I had an uneasy feeling they were never going to be the same again. How right I was! Two years later we are still trying to clear the clutter away!
But, we told ourselves, and all our well-meaning friends told us also, there is always a mess when you build the do-it-yourself way. We still had faith. We still believed we could do-it-ourselves. Chin up, we said. Think how inspiring it is. Think how original it will be. Think how beautiful it will be. Think what satisfaction it will be when we have done-it-ourselves. Everyone knows, we said, how creative it is to do things with your hands. Thirty days later we hired four men to do-it-themselves!
It was a big house we planned, not in the number of rooms, but in the size of the rooms. We could hardly avoid a big house when each log room had been a home for an entire family. The living room, which was the former fishing camp, was eighteen by thirty feet. Ceiling nine feet. Hand-hewn beams showing, naturally. The master bedroom was eighteen by twenty. Same ceiling. Same beams. The kitchen was eighteen by twenty. Ditto, ceiling and beams. Over each of these log rooms was to be a dormer bedroom. Only the connecting rooms, which were not log, the dining room, study, bath and entrance hall, were of normal size. “How are you going to heat those big rooms?” we were asked by doubtful neighbors.
Airily, we replied, “Butane gas, of course. Simple.”
Alas, it proved far from simple.
We began building in September and we got the foundations poured, the sills and subflooring laid and the log walls raised before cold weather overtook us. Further building proceeded by fits and starts.
It blew and rained and snowed and iced and sleeted and blew and rained again, all winter. The roof of the house was to be made of hand-riven shingles. We had crawled over hundreds of acres of timber to find “board” trees, and had bought eight huge oak trees. We had had them cut and hauled to the mill, had had them sawed into two-foot lengths and delivered to the home of the man who was going to rive them out. He had made ten thousand beautiful, old-fashioned, rough-looking shingles for us.
They are exactly what the house had to have, and they are lovely since they have weathered and turned silver, but I suspect they are highly impractical. They double our insurance costs, for one thing, and for another, every time we build a fire we go outside and peer anxiously at the roof to make certain it isn’t burning, too. We talk seriously of putting some kind of water system, a sprinkler or something, on the roof, but we haven’t yet been able to figure out a way to hand-syphon the creek water up to the roof, so I expect we’ll just continue to be anxious.
The roof also caused us a lengthy delay. Because of the moon. A shingle roof must be put on in the dark of the moon. “Why?” we asked. “Why must the roof be put on in the dark of the moon?”
“The boards will curl if you don’t,” we were told. “And your roof will leak.”
Panicky over the thought of a leaky roof we waited for the waning moon. We watched the almanac like hawks. “The moon changes at nine-oh-five tonight,” we reported to our building superintendent. “Get a big crew of men ready and work like fury for the next two weeks.”
A crew of men reported to work the next morning. They swarmed all over the scaffolding and we figured that in two days the roof would be on. Two hours later — rain. Or snow. Or sleet. Crew of men goes home. Every day for two weeks it happened. Light of the moon? Weather fine. Dark of the moon? Dismal.
The building had reached the stage where the next step had to be the roof. Not one thing could be done until the roof was on. So we waited out those beastly dark-of-the-moon times. From Thanksgiving to the Ides of March, we waited. Then, growing desperate, we said, “It’s just superstition. Put the roof on anyhow. The dark of the moon be hanged.”
The crew of men reported and three rows of roofing, the long way of the house, went on. Same thing. Rain. In the light of the moon now. We began to suspect that someone up there did not like us. We were not meant to have a roof over our heads. “All right,” we said, defeated, “go home. We will wait till spring.
“A week later we sadly went to view the temporarily abandoned structure. We felt a fateful fondness for it and could not stay away from it very long. There was some sort of masochistic comfort in simply looking at its gaping, roofless skeleton. The labor bill had now come to almost as much as we had meant originally to spend on the entire house, but we were committed. You don’t turn your back once you have put your hand to the plow. You don’t tear down houses and move them and clutter up a peaceful valley and then walk off and leave it. It was like a great battle that, once set in motion, could not be stopped. With fine bravery we encouraged each other. “This time next year,” we said, “it will be finished, and think how comfortable it is going to be. Think how pleasant and cheerful the log fires in that stone chimney are going to be. Think . . . think . . . think . . .” We didn’t dare think, for at the moment there was no promise that it would ever be pleasant or cheerful or anything but an unfinished, gaping, roofless skeleton.
When we went to look at our puny little three rows of shingles that day, to our horror every miserable hand-riven board had turned up its toes and curled them in contempt of our lack of faith. So much for superstition. The moon is something besides a target for rockets. It is a power and a pull on tides and shingleboards and he who refuses to believe is promptly put in his place. Wiser, and infinitely sadder, we ripped the shingles off and laid them aside for kindling wood.
Finally, in April, the roof went on and building speeded up. The chinking between the logs was finished. The walls of the connecting section were put up. Window openings were measured and windows ordered. Flooring was bought.
We wanted an old, wide flooring and we thought we had it. It came from the poplar frame house. But the planing mill told us that it was so worn that, by the time they dressed it, it would be too thin. As a substitute we chose knotty pine. Knotty pine, we were told, was considered second-grade flooring. First-grade had no knots. But we wanted knots. Very well, knots we got. “Oh, yes,” we were told, “all our flooring is kiln-dried. There will be no shrinkage.” Happily, we ordered thirty-two hundred feet of it and saw it go down with pleasure.
Now, fate began to hit below the belt.
About the time the flooring was going down the internal revenue departments, state and federal, heartlessly took the rest of the money we had allotted for the house. To add tragedy to catastrophe we learned also that something was radically wrong with some of my insides and I must part with more of them than I liked. And then, in a ridiculous climax, we discovered our fourteen acres of meadow had been turned into a tundra.
About the time we began building, the state highway department decided to rebuild the highway through the valley. Fine. We were all for it. The valley being admittedly low ground, Green River bottoms to be exact, the roadbed was built very high. This was good road engineering, but whoever made the bridge and drain specifications must have been insane because all the drains were placed so high that it took a foot of water to reach them. Our lovely fourteen acres, unable to drain off across the dyke of the road, was left standing in six inches of increasingly stagnant water. The highway department steadfastly refused to do anything about it, so that drainage, if ever achieved, became an individual problem to all of us who owned property in the valley, and another drain on our pocketbooks.
We felt bewildered by this series of untoward events, by the dreadful state and federal income taxes, the dreadfully expensive operation I must have, the dreadful fate of our fourteen acres of meadow. These were things over which we had no control. How could even the most sensible people have foreseen them?
We sat one day on the couch in the small rented cottage in which we were living until the house was finished, and looked at each other despairingly. A little frightened now, we got out paper and pencils and began figuring. We had been very proud of the fact that we were “paying-as-we-went.” Free-lance writers do best on that basis, we had learned. With no fixed income, it is best to have no fixed debts, either.
One reason we had determined to build that year was because I had had the unusual, and probably never to be repeated, good luck of having two books in succession chosen by well-paying book clubs. We thought we would be very sensible with the money. This was our chance, our best chance, maybe our only one, to build a home. We had such good intentions. It never occurred to either of us that both those book clubs would pay off in the same year and that Uncle Sam and the commonwealth of Kentucky between them would take the second one almost in its entirety.
And who could foresee a hysterectomy (most aptly named) looming that year? Or idiotic road engineers?
Counting every penny twice and cutting out every beautiful thing we had planned for the house, keeping costs down to the bare bones, it would still take several thousand dollars to finish it. Henry was staunch. “I will do the plumbing myself,” he said, never having held a pipe wrench in his hands before.
“Fine,” I agreed, “while I am in the hospital having my insides put to rights.”
The drainage problem simply had to wait, mosquitoes, malaria and all.
There was nothing to do, of course, but borrow the money to finish the house. Hand to the plow, and so forth. Thank heaven for a banker with a heart, we thought. Some of the borrowed money also had to be used to pay the surgeon and to buy that wing of the hospital in which I was incarcerated for twenty-one days.
When, weak and wan, I came out of the hospital, Henry was fairly well along with the plumbing. He had trouble with the septic tank, naturally, there being no place to put it but in the tundra. He had to borrow the irrigation pump again, but by dint of much sweat and wet feet, well seasoned by an old army sergeant’s particular brand of profanity, he got it sunk. That it rises and peers out at us each time there is a frost does not disconcert us. It subsides the next time the sun shines. “It’s up,” we say today. “It’s down,” we say tomorrow. We don’t need a barometer with a septic tank like a bobbing cork registering every change in the weather.
For some reason Henry did not follow my blueprint in placing the fixtures in the bathroom. Oh, yes, we had a blueprint. I made it on cardboard. Quarter-inch scale. It may have been some aesthetic quality in him that I have overlooked, but he put the “facility” (as it is called in Alaska, and it might as well have been in Alaska — it stayed frozen all winter!) on the outside wall. When you use it, you sit with your head bowed against the wash basin, the gas heater blowing up your legs. But better a gas heater than an icy wind in an outhouse, I always say.
The plumbing works, however. Our one great joy in this whole affair has been our water supply. We have a good, everlasting well of sweet, clean water that runs, with the help of an electric pump, on tap. Gone are the days of the tin washtub on Saturday night, and the eternal waste pails overflowing and the meager little inch of water in the dishpan. We have an unlimited amount of water, even though we have to use a blowtorch to get it to flow when the temperature drops to zero, as it did many times last winter. Still . . . you can’t expect perfection in the country. That’s what we told ourselves when the blowtorch didn’t work and the sergeant had to tear out one wall and thaw out the pipes inch by inch. It could not have been an aesthetic quality that made him put the bathroom pipes in an outside wall, too.
One year from the day the first foundation trench was dug, we moved into our beautiful log house. Kitchen cupboards had still to be built. All woodwork had still to be finished. All tiling in the bathroom had still to be done. A front porch had to be built. A back porch had to be built. They all still have to be done. Moved, we collapsed, mortgage and all.
A constant stream of people come to see our log house. “How beautiful,” they say.
“How satisfying it must be to have done-it-yourselves.”
“How comfortable it looks.”
“How pleasant it must be to sit before that huge fireplace on a cold winter night.”
We smile and agree.
We do not mention the fact that we spent a chilly and expensive winter. That the first gas bill was seventy-nine dollars and that it was for November when we had many warm days. The second one reached ninety dollars. The last four soared to astronomical heights. This was our simple solution to heating all those large, airy rooms! Butane gas!
It was partly due to the size of the rooms, which required lots of heat, but it was also because there were so many drafts. Baseboards, we found, won’t fit snugly against log walls. And even the tiniest crack lets the wind whistle through like a howling blizzard.
We bought hundreds of boxes of a plastic clay caulking that unreeled in long strips like an endless earthworm, and on hands and knees we poked the stuff into every crack.
But there were still the floors. There will be no shrinkage, we had been told. There has been none except all over the house in cracks so wide that to drop a coin is to lose it forever. There is a treasure of fifty-cent pieces, safety pins, needles, pencils and bobby pins down those cracks, and when we missed the cat once I strongly urged we take up the kitchen flooring. And what the wind does through those cracks is almost unbelievable. On a really blustering day the rugs heave and weave like the deck of a ship and even a mild breeze blows like a mistral through the house. All winter I sat at my desk with arctics on my feet and kept a heating pad going on High wrapped about them. Neither of which prevented chilblains.
So we caulked cracks in the flooring, too, and put down more rugs. We put an end to the gas bills by calling the company to come get their tank. We built a central flue in what had been the dining room and bought two of the ugliest wood stoves ever manufactured, but, praise heaven, they heat!
We closed off our charming living room with its beautiful stone fireplace and our big, airy master bedroom. We dismissed them with a wave of the hand and without a twinge. Come summer, we said, we’ll open them up. In winter we will live in the rooms that the two wood stoves will heat. The dining room became a small, snug living room; the study became a small, snug bedroom; and the kitchen, a delight to the heart and soul with its roaring wood fire, became also my study. I took off my arctics and knew warmth and good cheer again.
Also the plumbing was rerouted and no longer freezes up.
Well, so we built an impractical house. The floors in no two rooms are level because the foundations have already sagged a little in the tundra. Doors one day lean in one direction and on another day reverse themselves. None of them will close entirely. There isn’t a window in the house that will open. But they don’t need to. The house is so cool on the hottest day that it is self-air-conditioned. The floors slope only a little and in the kitchen I can skid from the refrigerator to the stove with a minimum of effort. And as long as the outer doors close, who’s going to worry about the inside ones?
On a day when the creek is properly respectful and the sun is warm and bright and the apple orchard is in bloom and the tundra is freshly green, we know that we built well after all. We look at the silvery old logs and the big stone chimney and we know they are beautiful and we know the house speaks for us in a language we understand. We know that some way we’ll pay off the mortgage, and we know that somehow we will lick the drainage problem. We know that cold has no terrors for us and that we need not owe our souls to any gas company. We know that faith and hope and courage still can be summoned up, and that they do count for something. We know that though our heads may be bloody sometimes, they certainly need not be bowed. I’m afraid we would do it all over again, chilblains, frozen plumbing, bobbing septic tank and all.
We don’t, however, advise anyone else to build a do-it-yourself log house. Not, at least, without examining the intentions of the internal revenue department, your state highway department and your local physician. And not, of course, unless you have a fishing camp to start with and fourteen acres of tundra to build on.