Flash Memoir: A House Made of Sticks

How does anyone build anything?

Welcome to another installment of Loss + Finding Home, a real-time flash memoir of the complete gut and remodel of our 1950s California ranch-style home. Answering the questions: What does it mean to be home? Who makes up a home? How do you build a home when someone is always missing from the dinner table?

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Hundreds of sticks, 2” x 4”, placed 16” to 24” apart, and somehow that makes a house? That’s me standing in my very own walk-in closet.

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Previously, on Loss + Finding Home, I talked about foundations- building them first and strong- today, I’m talking about a house made of sticks, a.k.a. how does anyone build anything?

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There are parts of this project that feel agonizingly slow —an 18-month permitting process comes to mind —but framing is anything but. It’s also the most transformative and, therefore, the most satisfying, and for my husband Nick, it's the most personal.

Last week, when I wrote about the foundation,

Isabel Cowles Murphy

left a comment that has stuck with me ever since. “I am in awe of people who can BUILD ACTUAL THINGS.”  Yes! How does anyone build anything? How do you know that when you nail one piece of wood in a certain way into another piece of wood in a different way, it’ll be strong enough to hold up a roof? 

In a few days, we went from a few posts sticking up from the foundation to real walls with rough openings for windows and doors. The second image is taken from the kitchen looking at the primary suite.

Framing also meant a shift in energy. The sound of a table saw, and nail gun was constant, but rather than erratic chaos, there was a quiet hum of activity. 

I saw six or seven guys with toolbelts working in various parts of the house, and one man bent over a table studying the plans. His name was Carlos.

Now and then, one of the crew came to ask him a question. He answered, and immediately, the crew member understood what was expected. I watched him work for several minutes and thought, “That’s a boss.” He directed his crew with precision, and they all seemed to move confidently and with purpose.

Maybe it’s just this crew or this company. Either way, Nick and I were impressed. 

This image was taken while standing in the backyard looking at the chimney and into the livingroom. (I lobbied hard for a double sided fireplace, but in the end, Nick was right to say that when lit it would be beautiful, it would look like we had a whole in the house.)

We didn’t hire a general contractor, as that would have added 25% - 30% to our cost, and decided to act as an “owner-builder” instead. All I can say is, “Kids, don’t try this at home.”

I’m always thinking about how impossible/ expensive this would be without someone with Nick’s expertise. From hiring the right people and actually getting them to show up,¹ to understanding what questions to ask and troubleshooting structural, plumbing, and electrical problems to doing the actual demo and building himself… I wouldn’t know where to start!  

Good thing I’m the writer and Nick’s the construction guy. 

The morning the framers started work, Nick met them early to get the crew familiar with the project.

“Your house is out of level… It’s out of square².” The contractor said.

“I know, the foundation is from 1959.” Nick said.

The concrete crew made the same comment. The house slopes about three inches from the back to front, but it’s not anything you’d notice and to make it perfect we would have to demo the entire foundation and that’s not going to happen. So we settled for flat over level.

To solve for the square problem the framers “cheat” the edge of the wall to sit a few inches “proud” of the foundation. That way, from the inside the wall will be square, even though the footing of the foundation is not.

As much as I wish it were, construction is not perfect.

You have these pristine plans, the idea being that if you just follow the plans exactly then everything will work out. (I can almost hear Nick laughing through the computer.)

“You have to take things from a two dimensional world to a three dimensional world.” and I would add… “And try not to freak out when that proves to be more of a challenge than you expected.”

When Nick came home that first moring, just as the sun rose, he looked like he’d just returned from Disneyland. He has a big job as a hospital administrator, but in his heart, he will always be a carpenter. 

In the early years of our courtship, Nick used to sing me the opening lines of “If I Were a Carpenter” by Jonny Cash. 

If I were a carpenter

And you were a lady

Would you marry me anyway

Would you have my baby

Mind you, he isn’t a singer; it was just sweet pillow talk from an uncomplicated time in our lives.

We were living in Portland, Oregon. I was in culinary school, and after graduating, I got a job managing a Chilli’s bar and Grill.³ Nick worked for a framing contractor. I loved how he came home smelling like sawdust and sweat. He built a lot of back decks off tract homes in Forrest Grove, a suburb of Portland, and came home with hours of entertaining stories that I won’t repeat here.

A few months before we moved back to Santa Barbara, they picked up a huge job framing a massive house right on the banks of the Willamette River. Nick regularly saw people catching salmon while eating his lunch on the top of the roof.  

The plans called for some really cool features, including a separate arts and crafts room and a domed copper roof over the primary suite, but the thing he talked about most was the exposed wood trusses.⁴ For weeks, he described these beautiful wood beams made out of center-cut Douglass fir.⁵ The beams were 10” x 10” and 30’ long, and he built several of them for different areas of the home. He walked me through the project on weekends, showing off his handy work. Looking back, I find myself nostalgic for the days when we worked so hard to impress each other.

Nick sent me a picture of a forklift raising one of our hip beams that will form the hip, or slope of the roof. They aren’t 10” x 10” or 30’ long. The wood is engineered Parallam⁶ and designed to be strong and cheap rather than beautifully exposed. But they are ours; they shape our home. 

This is where I am today. Thank you for listening.

xoxo,

Emily

Coming up… I’ve got a couple of ideas in mind for next time but I’d love to hear from you! So consider this a sort of Chose Your Own Adventure Poll.

Do you want to hear about the interesting and weird things we found around the property during demo or do you want to hear a story about the a a roof and he rain and how obsessive I was as a new mom?

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My footnotes are my “darlings” in that they are the narrative tangents I find interesting and are related, but don’t necessarily serve the story.

1. The roofers flaked on us Wednesday, and we had to race to get the roof ready before the rain Wednesday night.

2. You want a house that’s compleatly level front to back and corners that meet at 90° angles. When a house slopes or is lopsided or the interior corners don’t quite match up a settling foundation is likely the cause.

3. One of these days I want to document all of my resturant stories. There is so much one can learn about living by watching people break bread together. Also, having $300 in cash burning a hole in your pocket with a bunch of people just as crazy as you are often leads to some very interesting situations.

4. A truss is a triangulated system of straight, interconnected structural elements.

5. Center cut is when the wood is cut without a “heart” or the circular rings that you might use to tell the age of a tree. The finished product is a clean vertical grain pattern.

6. Parallam are often used in open floor plans. They are made using long thin strands of wood and a super strong adhesive glue to give you perfectly predictable beams and columns.