The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir Read online

  I used to have a three-bedroom bungalow with a nice yard and massive windows that looked out at the gardens in the front yard. It had a furnace that rumbled away in the basement, thumping, bumping, and popping the ductwork, like it was beating back the cold with a tire iron. I felt very safe from the elements.

  The heater was a tireless companion, willing to work day and night, whether we were home or not; it puffed away on metered gas, blowing hot air into the bedrooms and the bathroom, the shampoo bottles and the kitchen silverware drawers. It pushed heat into our bodies, letting us walk around in boxer shorts and tank tops in the middle of winter; it prewarmed our shoes, the toilet seat, the coffee cups. It worked constantly without needing anyone’s attention and hardly being noticed at all until the gas bill would arrive and we’d all scream “Turn down the thermostat!” and grow very quiet.

  The heating bill usually arrived a few days after the electric bill, which came two weeks after the mortgage and insurance were due; then the water, sewer, and trash bill would arrive every three months, and the property taxes would arrive like Satan on a stick once a year. Somewhere in the mix were my monthly credit card bills, tied to all the other necessary household items: a couch, television, window shades, barbecue grill, new hot water tank, bedsheets, telephone, stereo speakers, flower vases, a shower curtain, washing machine, area rugs, garden hoses, lamps, lights, locks, a spade, mattresses, memory foam pillows, wineglasses, a dishwasher, lawn mower, end tables, two cubic yards of garden compost, scrub brushes, butter knives, a refrigerator, wrenches, pry bars, and an assortment of artwork and wall paint to make things look nice. I worked hard back then, strapped to my debt, but I was hardly miserable; I was happy enough “living the dream” as I raced from one place to the next and spent the weekends cleaning the gutters or reading a how-to book on home plumbing repair.

  Now that I live in my little house, I work part-time and pay eight dollars a month for utilities. There’s no mortgage, no Saturday morning with a vacuum, mop, or dust cloth. I have free time to notice the weather, so if my neighbor asks me how it’s going, I can easily explain how “the barometric pressure took a real nosedive at four this morning, causing a lava flow of cooler air to pour into my house through the open windows. It was like waking up in Missoula in September, when you still have your windows open but know things are changing, and quick, toward winter.”

  All the time I save leaves me free to cavort and volunteer, building other little houses with friends, helping to care for my elderly neighbor, or staring mindlessly at the clouds forming into balloon animals and broccoli spears. The other day I spent a couple of hours packing sauerkraut with my friends, nattering about local politics while we shoved stinky cabbage into little jars. Before that, I collected a load of fruit to be delivered all over town as part of a church fund-raiser, and then I took my dog for a walk down along the old railroad trestle that used to be the shake mill but is now just a massive expanse of busted-up asphalt, blackberry bushes, and Scotch broom. It’s actually quite beautiful down there, loaded with herons, otters, salmon, and seals; stunning despite the shopping carts that the kids have drowned in the mud and the yellow warning signs about contaminated shellfish.

  It’s nice to have time to amble around, or do whatever I want; to drop everything and help the neighbor build a chicken coop, or hop in on a spontaneous game of Pickle-ball in the backyard. A year or so after I moved into my house, I volunteered to show it in a green building fair, an event that included vendors like the ReBuilding Center and Habitat for Humanity, as well as local homeowners who had installed solar electric systems, recycled fir floors, and energy-efficient windows in their houses. While I didn’t have fancy systems in my house, I still figured it’d be helpful if people saw how beautiful salvaged cedar siding can be, and how wonderful a door pulled out of a dumpster (like mine) could be.

  At the fair, I met a teacher who thought it’d be nice to show her students my house, and that’s how a few months later I found myself hosting sixty-four fourth-graders in my yard. They were studying global climate change and asked some very important questions like where do I poop, where’s the bathtub, and why not build a giant slingshot to shoot my dog into the loft instead of having to carry her? They wanted to know if I was happy living without a television, without running water, and without space for a “husband” (whoever he was). I offered a quick “Heck yeah!” and then suggested that we all try to fit into the house at one time; it would be the “New International, Intergalactic, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Hotshot, Full-of-Snot Record!” I screamed. All sixty-four of them raced into the house, stood on the toilet, piled onto the kitchen counter, smashed into the loft, and squeezed into the living room like a jar of human pickles. Everyone was giggling and I was thinking this was a great teaching moment, where they’d finally come to see that even something teeny-tiny can be big enough, and that’s when tragedy struck: Someone “cut the cheese,” as my brothers would say, and the entire class emptied out of the house in seconds like clowns pouring out of a circus car. We all collapsed on the lawn, fake-coughing and laughing hysterically, and intensely proud of the new record we’d set.

  I probably overemphasized how glorious everything is, using the word awesome too many times. I positively gushed about how awesome it was to live debt free, not really considering whether any of those kids fully understood how crushing it is to juggle bills, delicately staggering the payments throughout the month and shuffling money from one credit card to another. And they probably thought I was full of shit when I said it was awesome to live without a television and refrigerator, “free from that infernal, constant humming and drumming so now I can hear the tree frogs at night . . . blah blah blah.”

  If I had been perfectly honest, I would have admitted that I’m happy only 85 percent of the time, roughly three hundred days out of the year. The other days, I wish I had running water or that the house was warmer; or I might want a seventy-two-inch plasma screen television and enough space to invite all my friends over to watch the Oscars. I might want a flushing toilet and an endless supply of cheap beer, and a cutie-pie to play naked Scrabble with me in the living room. I might want more privacy and solitude, and for the city to get new garbage trucks so on Friday mornings I wouldn’t have to listen to all that hydraulic whining with heavy lifting and slamming back down. I might want a lot of things . . . but that doesn’t mean I need them.

  Here’s the raw truth: 15 percent of the time, you might find me grousing while slopping my water back to the house, or pouting about how I don’t like going to the laundromat to watch my underwear occasionally float by in the viewing window of the nearby clothes dryer. My complaining might result in my stomping off to bed, where I’ll check out of my life and watch three or four episodes of Battlestar Galactica on my laptop computer screen. In the morning, I’ll wake up late for work, cuss, and quickly yank rain pants over my pajamas so I can rush off to the office, where I’ll spend most of the day trying not to make loud plastic-pant crinkling and swooshing noises, and hoping that everyone believes I’ve just arrived from doing something important outside.

  Those are the days that most remind me of my old life in my big house where I’d charge around and act like the world owes me more; or where I’d rush through the days and watch television at night, and at the end of the week I couldn’t remember if I’d actually called my mother or simply wished that I had.

  Now, more often than not, instead of feeling pissed at the rain for turning my bones into soggy oatmeal, I’ll walk over to my friends’ house and they’ll make me laugh and feed me warm soup; or, in the case of a particularly hateful moment with my composting toilet, I’ll remember watching the little kids in Guatemala roll up their pants cuffs and walk across the muddy mess that was overflowing from the school’s bathroom, and I’ll realize I have nothing to complain about. I’ll remember like an apple to the head that I’m lucky to have what I have and that I’m not entitled to any more than those
kids, or their fathers, whom we’d see walking along the roads at dawn, carrying their machetes out into the fields for the day.

  “My house is warm enough” is what I might eventually realize as I fall asleep mummified in my sleeping bag, and later I’ll wake up to see that the clouds are sprinting across the moon like a movie where the director wants you to think time is passing very quickly. Nature can be kind like that.

  I chose the 85 percent success rate, starting with the crazy decision to build the house myself, one stick of wood at a time; then the decision to build the house on wheels so I could come and go as I please. I chose this path because the idea of building a house sounded like the old, fun me—the woman who thought it was a total jazz-up to hang by her thumbs fifty feet in the air, scaling some rocky crag to get a better view of the valley below. I chose this because I thought I could be happy living in a one-room house without running water or a refrigerator, and I imagined I’d learn something about myself by stripping myself down to the basics—by living with two dinner plates, three spoons, two pairs of pants, a dress, and my wool skivvies. And I figured I could be happy, at least for a while, living in the shadow of my friends Hugh and Annie’s house, in their old garden plot just off the alley.

  I thought I’d find something in all of this, and I got more than I bargained for. I discovered a new way of looking at the sky, the winter rain, the neighbors, and myself; and a different way of spending my time. Most important, I stumbled into a new sort of “happiness,” one that didn’t hinge on always getting what I want, but rather, on wanting what I have. It’s the kind of happiness that isn’t tied so tightly to being comfortable (or having money and property), but instead is linked to a deeper sense of satisfaction—to a sense of humility and gratitude, and a better understanding of who I am in my heart.

  I know this sounds cheesy, and in fact, it sounds fairly similar to the gobbledygook that friends have thrown at me just after having their first baby. But the facts are the facts: I found a certain bigness in my little house—a sense of largeness, freedom, and happiness that comes when you see there’s no place else you’d rather be.

  I found myself at Home, and that is (as I hope to tell the next set of fourth-graders) awesome!

  Southeast State Park

  (PORTLAND, OREGON, APRIL 2003)

  I was standing in the bathroom of my former house, nervously chewing the inside of my cheek, holding a how-to book in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. This was the fortieth time I’d tried to figure out why the bathroom fuse kept tripping when someone ran the vacuum upstairs or when we flipped on the garbage disposal in the kitchen. It made no sense; the electric lines that ran upstairs and to the kitchen were on different circuits, and according to my book, everything should work.

  I clicked the light switch, and as expected, nothing happened. I set the book aside and climbed halfway up the ladder that I had positioned under the light globe. I unscrewed the fixture to unhinge it from the ceiling and pulled on it to dislodge the wires. I’d seen this at a friend’s house, and the light fixture was supposed to dangle six or eight inches below the ceiling, hanging off the wires like a dinner plate suspended by metal twisty-ties; but my dinner plate only moved a little, allowing me just enough space to jam in the screwdriver and stir it around like a cocktail twirler, which turned out to be a bad idea. There was a pistol pop and a flash of light, and I fell backward off the ladder with a loud “Aaaak!” I lay there for a while, catching my breath and reflecting on my situation.

  It was my own fault, and maybe that’s why I found this particular home improvement project so painful. I had rewired the bathroom years ago, just a few weeks after my friends and I had sledgehammered out the old wall plaster and dragged the ancient toilet out the front door, scrunching up our faces and nearly puking along the way. We’d pried up the curling linoleum and crowbarred the moldy subfloor until we could see, between the floor joists, the basement concrete resting eight feet below. I had hired a friend to retile the shower, agreeing to pay her about half the going rate but still twice what I had in my checking account; then, before she got started, I hired a plumber to install a new faucet. It didn’t seem like much work: running a short piece of copper pipe from the basement up through the wall, then stubbing it out to receive the new fixtures. I thought it would take an hour or so—easy-peasy—and a half hour after he arrived, he handed me a bill for three hundred bucks. I almost cried, and then I got mad. He wasn’t a bad guy, of course. The problem was that I was a new homeowner, suffering from sticker shock and exhausted by the buckets of money I had been handing off to the bank, the realtor, the title company, the IRS, and the City of Portland. Even the locksmith, an older gentleman who reminded me of my grandpa, had gotten a slice of my dwindling pie. I shadowed him as he worked, partially because I was truly fascinated but also because I wanted him to like me, to take pity on me and cut me a deal, but all he did was wink and say, “You’re safe now,” as he handed me a set of keys and a bill for a hundred fifty dollars.

  A few days later, as I was standing in line at the hardware store, I picked up a how-to book that illustrated the best way to fix a drippy faucet, tuck-point a chimney, sheetrock your den, build a deck, replace window glass, install insulation, and repair a door latch. It was amazing, like the book was made for me and my old house and my puny bank account. If I’d had this earlier, I probably could have soldered those pipes myself, I thought, and I can certainly rewire the bathroom!

  This is what happens to people who grow up believing that books perform like tiny life rafts, saving students from having to take the GRE blind, rescuing cooks from bland, overcooked dumplings, and keeping homeowners afloat by reassuring them that they can do it all on their own.

  I suddenly grew cocky as I stood there with that book, positive that I could figure out the electrical work, which should have been a piece of cake (based on the fact that there were only three pages dedicated to this extremely simple activity).

  After a few weeks and several long, confused conversations with the men at the hardware store, I was able to connect new lights, a fan, and outlets to the fuse box in the basement. I closed my eyes the first time I turned on the system, clicking the breaker in the fuse box, worried that a giant spark would lunge out at my head, but nothing bad happened. The thing worked; the lights came on and the blow-dryer clicked on, and I got a little dizzy with the success of it all. “Oh my God.” I laughed at my little electricity pun. I rewired the bathroom; I achieved 100 percent success! I did a little victory lap around the living room with my hands over my head like I’d just kicked a winning field goal.

  The electrical system worked perfectly for nearly a year, until, by chance, I turned on a vacuum cleaner upstairs while Holly, my housemate, was blow-drying her hair in the bathroom. There was a small pffft at the wall outlets, and we both lost use of our appliances.

  At first, I tried hard to solve the problem, working from memory to draw a picture of the wires and splices that were now hidden in the walls. I consulted with an electrician friend, and stood with him in the basement, staring up at the squirrel nest of pipes and wires that ran below the kitchen, bathroom, dining room, and living room. The previous owner had done most of the work himself, leaving my friend shaking his head and sighing, “This is sadistic.” More time went by, and then, as the edges of my interest got picked apart by other home repair projects, I let go of the need for perfection and resigned myself to occasionally stomping down to the breaker box to flip the blown bathroom fuse.

  No one had explained the challenges of home ownership when I went to the bank for a home loan. I was thirty-four, and perhaps the unspoken assumption was that I was old enough to understand that this was a complicated investment. The bank loan would have to cover more than just the house; I’d also need cash for a ladder and several how-to books, and an assortment of other necessary objects to make things right. I would need to buy paint and devote several hours to picking ju
st the right color—not green or orange, but Winter Sage and Tuscany Sunset.

  My loan officer didn’t bring up the other costs; there was no mention of his first house, and how he spent a small fortune on coffee because he stayed up late worrying about the way his roof leaked—a leak that persisted even though he’d dared himself to shimmy up onto the roof in the middle of a rain storm, hanging onto the roof shingles like a cat on a screen door, so he could caulk the roof vent. It was a leak that he had finally “fixed” by shoving a plastic pan (an old kitty litter tray) in just the right spot, so all night long he could listen to the rain plink-plink-plink in the pan. “And that noise was worse than the leak itself!”

  He didn’t say that at the time, though he would tell me all this later. Instead, he encouraged me to fill out some paperwork for a loan, and “If you qualify,” the loan officer said, “we’ll help you get into the best possible house.”

  The “best possible” sounded dreamy. Even though I didn’t recognize it, I was drawn to living just like my parents, in a reasonable house, with a beautiful family, where we’d have a Christmas tree in the living room, and every Sunday we’d have pot roast. On some level, in some unspoken, undefined way, I imagined that, by buying a house, I would finally arrive into my adulthood; my parents would begin calling me for advice, and my inclination for doing stunts that began with the words “Hey, watch this” would fade. I’d settle down and fall in love responsibly, instead of sacking impish rock climbers who lived on their boats or in their parents’ basement, or in their old pot-soaked Volkswagen van tricked out for camping. Home ownership would bring me credibility and respect, and approving nods from all manner of respectable, responsible adults.