The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (10 page)

When I got stuck with something, like trying to trim out a window, I’d collect RooDee from her hiding spot under Camelli’s rhododendrons, and we’d go for a walk through the neighborhood, examining various window sashes, rafter tails, roofing details, skylight flashing, the size and spacing of siding, and the way pointy roofs have a piece of wood on the eave so a gutter can be hooked on.

At night, after I’d tuck into bed, I’d pull from a stack of books one telling me how to wire the electric lights and install metal plates on the studs so I wouldn’t pound a nail into the electric wires. I’d flip through the pages while my dog snored nearby, while my housemates made popcorn and watched a movie downstairs, and while the rest of the world whizzed by at a billion miles an hour.

During lunch at work, I’d read about how to seal up the siding and tuck tar paper around the doorjamb to keep it from leaking; I’d learn about gable roofs, overhangs, and the best way to install cedar siding. At dinner, I’d read about alternative insulation, advanced wall framing, and how to install corrugated metal roofing; I’d read pamphlets with glossy photos of cork flooring, bamboo wallboard, and environmentally friendly paints available at the local eco-building store. And all the
while, I’d put my faith in these books, hoping they would set me straight and show me how to keep from sparking my shoes on fire while using a circular saw to cut into the metal roofing.

Book learning was always big in my family, with both my mom and dad having gone to graduate school and slogging through doctoral programs. All my siblings went to college, and we all called ourselves “middle class,” which doesn’t really mean anything to me anymore. Does it mean you’re a blue-collar worker like my nephew, who went into the Air Force right out of high school and now operates dirt-moving equipment with tires bigger than my car, or a bureaucrat (like me) who went to graduate school but makes less money than her nephew? Does being middle class mean you can relax, that you’ve arrived because you bought a house you can barely afford, but no matter, because you are now a part of what some people call the “owning class”? In any case, whatever you call me, my parents encouraged me to go to college and become a book lover, and to trust that I could do nearly anything if I could find the right book at the library.

It was true; books had saved me in my home remodeling projects, but they fell short in teaching me how to trust my instincts, and how to stop thinking with my educated brain and more with my kneecaps and butt cheeks. There was no book that could teach me how to use my spine, quads, and lats to squat-thrust and pick up a stack of wood that weighed nearly as much as me. Most of my building education came in the form
of my right hand learning how to best hold the drill while my left hand was discovering how to simultaneously grip a piece of wood and maintain the proper angle for driving a screw through it.

When I was close to being done with the house, someone asked me what the hardest part had been, and I found myself staring at my feet, wishing they could speak for me, since they likely knew more than me after taking so much abuse. I looked at my arms, the torn skin and scrapes, and I wondered what my wrist muscles would remember long into the future.

And then I thought about the day I glued my hair to the house. It was early on in the project and I was working alone. I was using my head to hold a piece of plywood true as I screwed it to the wall, a technique that had been relatively effective so far. But this time, part of my ponytail got stuck behind the plywood and glued into the skin of my house. I stood there, trapped and twisted at an angle, imagining that I might have to slowly chew through my hair to free myself. I ended up screaming at Camelli to come help, hoping she was home and that she’d hear me. All the while, my hands were looking for a solution, scanning with their fingertips, palms, and pads to understand my hair-pinned predicament. Now that I think of it, maybe my hands were secretly in on that practical joke, tired of the way my hair was always swooshing around like a Barbie doll’s, tired of constantly attending to the hair . . . putting it up in a ponytail, pulling it out of my eyes, picking sawdust out of
it at the end of the day. My hands probably secretly disliked the neediness of my hair; they were the real workhorses of the project. They were the real power tools that had stepped up (so to speak) and thrown themselves into service, and it looked like it. Even though I was only a few weeks into building, I had developed what my friends and I called “man hands”: scarred, knobby, muscled hands with square palms like slices of bread. They were working hands. Strong hands. “Man hands” stuck, in my case, to a lady’s arms. Recently, when I got together with my father, we both casually reached for the same cup of coffee, both of us extending the same blackened fingernail toward the mug. I’d smashed mine under a load of lumber, and he’d smashed his trying to fix his lawn mower.

Maybe my hands didn’t care about my hair because, in reality, they were just my hands—my powerful man hands doing man things, getting stuff done, operating power tools, driving the car, using a hammer one minute, doing something delicate the next, like feather-dusting fingertips along a freshly sanded piece of wood as if they were stroking the soft peach earlobes of a baby.

As it turned out, Camelli was home and could hear me; she came out and saw what had happened, raised one finger and smiled, disappeared, and a minute later returned with a camera.

While she snapped photos, I screamed about my hair and how my head was turned at a bad angle, and “I might have
cranial fluid draining out my ear soon.” I spit out this information while giggling so hard I thought I’d pee. “Holy shit, Camelli,” I screamed and cackled, “this is serious!” Camelli looked at me and again said nothing, but disappeared once more into her house. She returned a minute later, smiling, with a pair of scissors to release me.

We both laughed and laughed and laughed, and later that night, as I assessed my new lopsided haircut, I cried. I had been working to grow out my hair for a long time. I say “working” because I really wanted long hair—the sort of hair that would blow back in a giant fireball of sexiness—but so far I hadn’t had the patience to get there; instead I’d respond to a certain siren call where I’d get annoyed by my bangs flopping in my eyes and bothered by how I couldn’t puff them out of the way. It was exhausting work, puffing away at my bangs, so typically at some frustrated moment, I’d grab a pair of scissors to trim my bangs, then the sides, then the bangs again, and then the sides, till all that was left was someone who looked like Friar Tuck of yon forest.

Somehow, distracted by months of reading, planning, and building, I had survived those critical junctures that previously led me to the scissors, leaving me with locks that landed mid-spine. So, late that night, after lopping off three inches of hard-won hair, I cried. I stared in the mirror, and then suddenly out of my blubbering, I started to laugh.

After that, I worked with a zip knife in my pocket.

As I continued to shop for wood and parts, I probably made things harder for myself than they needed to be by trying to pin down the story behind the materials I was using. Ever since I’d gotten out of the hospital, I felt that everything had a story. I knew some of that story because I’d done inspections at mills and factories—at the places that make cold-rolled steel into snap-lock roofing, and fir into preserved wood that was cooked in a concoction of copper, arsenic, and chromic acid. But there were volumes that I still didn’t know. I remember standing in front of a salesclerk at the lumberyard, asking where their lumber came from, what forest and who logged it, and what mill turned it into the two-by-fours and plywood that I was about to purchase. She looked at me like I had a fake axe sticking out my head; momentarily horrified and then simply annoyed. She didn’t know, didn’t want to find out, and I ended up buying the wood anyway, hoping that I was making a good choice.

As often as possible, I shopped at a local place called Mr. Plywood. It was in my neighborhood, the guys there loaded the wood on my car for me, and they chuckled when I asked them to come home with me to unload it. (I really did just want them to unload it. I fantasized about them saving my sore muscles by unloading the whole lot, and instead of helping, I’d just smile, say thanks, and hand each of them a cold beer.) I also shopped at the local hardware store, buying drill bits and tools,
sandpaper and saw blades while shooting the breeze with the grandpa-owner and his grandson—choosing their goods even though the prices were higher than they were at the nearby retail chain store.

Also in the interest of doing the right thing, I tried to use up every bit of wood, probably spending as much time slowly pawing through the scrap pile as I did actually building the house. I meant well; I knew the landfills were chock-full of construction debris—something I’d learned by sorting through dumpsters at construction sites, and also from work. A few months before I started working on my little house, I had investigated why birds were dropping dead in the fly zone that existed inches above a landfill’s surface, a problem that was eventually attributed to ten thousand tons of chicken feathers, beaks, and feet (courtesy of the local meatpacking plant) that were decaying along with acres of construction debris. Somehow the chemistry and placement of those wastes had generated a poisonous concentration of hydrogen sulfide, a rotten-egg gas so toxic that anything flying over dropped dead.

Besides my obsessive, possibly neurotic focus on minimizing my trash, I also found myself completely infatuated with second-use materials: old floorboards, sinks, light fixtures, and windows. I swooned as I stood on the curb, looking at a pile of building debris, or while I palmed my way through a box of old faucets at the salvage yard. I’m not sure why I loved the old stuff so much. It seemed heavier—weighted down with lead
instead of aluminum, and layered with time. It was beautiful to me and I’d imbue it with some sort of past life; a bit of fiction that I’d make up when, for example, I’d find an old doorknob, worn down to expose the copper plating beneath the bronze finish, and suddenly I’d imagine that some old couple had turned that knob day in and day out for fifty years, coming and going to work, the grocery store, their kids’ piano recitals, and later (much later) their kids’ weddings. That knob was the first thing they’d touched after their trip to Paris, a trip they’d planned for decades, saving money and trying to find time between grandkids and a hip replacement and a big scare with cancer. The music that wafted along the Champs-Élysées and the click of the front doorknob, followed a second later by “Sweetheart, I’m home,” would be playing at the back of each of their minds as they drifted into sleep and then later into death.

Years later, the door (knob and all) was replaced in a big home remodel, and luckily the unit would find its way to the salvage yard and into the hands of little ladies like me looking for a bit of sweet history.

I liked building my house out of materials that could tell a good story, like this: The whole front of my house is sheathed in old-growth cedar, trees that were likely at least five hundred years old when they were cut down in the 1940s, milled into long tight-grained beveled boards, and sold to a guy who lived in Portland, Oregon. After he got them and sheathed his own house, he stored the leftovers in the attic of his garage, where
they sat until the summer of 2004, when I was building my little house.

He walked over one day as I was finishing the roof of my house, and cooed over the way I’d doubled up the metal sheeting near the ridge so it offered a nice weighty cap. I didn’t have the courage to tell him that I’d measured wrong when installing the roofing and had to tack a short piece near the ridge like a toupee.

I had known this guy for years; he lived a few houses down from me, and we hardly ever exchanged words other than “Hello” and “How ya doing.” He always walked by with his small pug-faced dog in one arm and a short piece of metal pipe in the other hand “to beat back any big dog that tries to take a bite out of Henry here,” he’d explained while nodding at his mutt. He struck me as a gruff, quietly mean old guy, but there he was, standing below me with his pipe and dog, admiring my roof.

“Think you could come see what’s wrong with my garage roof?” he asked, and I obliged, walking down the street in my flip-flops, and wondering at this new, kind guy—my new best friend. He explained along the way that the roof had started sagging in one spot, and he wanted to know how to best fix it.

I crawled up a ladder into the garage attic, and that’s when I noticed the old cedar siding stacked up to the rafters, covered in dust. I squirmed past the bundle, balancing on the collar ties that made up a makeshift floor, and was able to diagnose
his roof problem: “You got a busted rafter up here, but we could likely jack it back into place and sister another rafter alongside.” I said all of this with a bit of swagger, like a member of the Flannel Shirt Club.

“Humm,” he huffed as he squinted up through the dust floating in the sunlight between me and him.