well, i have been writing on blogger for 15 years now ...
below is an early post from october 2007. short and sweet!
it is time to go on in a bit more depth about some other stuff in an effort to
fill out my 'old man project', mostly inspired by a john mcphee
he has since written two more volumes, all about things
he didn't write about in his long career ... so here i go now,
writing about some things i didn't write about for the last 15 years ...
settle in, it will be a bit wordy, but i am having fun reliving this stuff ..
click the photos to enlarge them ...
on July 6th this year it was 51 years
since i stepped off the bus in arlington, vermont, to visit my sister.
through a friend of hers, she had gotten me a job at The Roundhouse, a
local bar that has, after being alfies, and the eagles club,
reopened again as The Roundhouse!, drinks and live music ...
i met my wife Kit in september of 1971, which ended my previous
travels around the country, (key largo, washington, d.c., montauk,
palm springs, europe ... and started the journey that i am still on today.
this journey, along with carpentry and furniture building, involved
raising two boys, building 3 houses and three workshops,
all processes similar to building furniture, but definitely different.
after living together for a couple of years, and hanging out with some other
folks who had also arrived in manchester in 1971, 8 of us, 3 couples
and two singles decided it was time to build ourselves some houses!
5 of them actually! what did we know about building houses?
not much, or actually anything at all really !!!
but, optimism in the early 70s back to the land movement knew no bounds,
and everyone working together on everyone else's houses eventually got us
to the point where two of us became full time carpenters, and
one of us built up a substantial earth moving and recycling business ...
it was, as one of our friends noted recently, our personal 'habitat for us'
aka the LIA .. Land Improvement Association ...
first i needed some knowledge ...
i had another book that i think was called maybe 'practical house carpentry'
that better explained the basics, but that one is lost somewhere ...
then, of course, we needed some money, and some plans ...
the bank where we had been banking for two years turned us down
without even looking at my yellow legal pad 'plans'.
i wish i had the letter from the then bank president who told me, as i recall,
that "this project was too ambitious for your abilities" adding,
" you know nothing about building things" ..
the younger president of the other bank in town told us
that if we got married, and actually had some real, like, architect drawn
plans, he might talk to us. so, november 10, 1973, we got married,
and got an architect, who was a neighbor
to draw some 'plans', and, miraculously, that bank gave us $25,000in the spring
of 1974. we had a little money saved, (we were both bartenders, and
bartending was a good gig back then) and borrowed $2000. from my
father to buy our 2 acre, ($7000.) lot with power and a driveway.
once we paid that back, and drilled a 600' deep well for $5000.,
we had about $18,000. left to build our house.
it was a bit of a stretch, to say the least, but sometimes miracles happen, and we
spent our first christmas there in 1974, with the tinfoil on the insulation
still showing around the tree! we later learned the one fact that
was extremely helpful for our mortgage approval was that the bank
president's mother was Kit's brother's 5th grade teacher in brattleboro,
and she had 'vouched' for kit's family as 'reliable' folks.
my future brother in law, peter moore, who is Kristian's father,
is to my right, and the others are two of the many Walls, david on the left
and beriah on the right. the building at that time was called
the Wall Family Gallery, where the now famous beriah, had his pot shop
(both kinds), before moving to NYC a few years later. david introduced me to paddle
tennis and i thank him often in my thoughts for that when i am playing today ....
so, this is the house that was/is immediately north of the wall family gallery,
the one i sketched on my yellow legal pad, and the one we liked ...
if you click on this one, you'll see the architects window
that he used to 'draw that house' for us. the architect had never
seen our lot so we had to redesign of few things on the inside to suit the lay of the land.
we got pretty close on the outside.
originally, in 1974 we built only the 4 window cape part,
adding the master bedroom addition to the right, in the mid and late 80s.
i was starting to take on 'side projects' to my by then carpentry job
and decided we needed a garage and a small workshop to
get the sawdust out of the basement.
post and beam work was becoming popular, and there was
a handy sawmill down the road where i could get
6x6s and other rough lumber at a really reasonable price.
so, off we went on that ...
in the photo above, it is 1976, and i am working as a carpenter for mark breen, in the foreground in the white t shirt. the others in that photo, left to right are bill hermann, one of the founders of high tech plumbing, paul roberts, and the late michael morris, one of the original settlers of dogpatch and one of the five mentioned above that we built our houses with.
one of the interesting things about our building lot was that it
was located on an 'esker'. there were no surface stones and
according to the well driller, it was 400 vertical feet to the first ledge, hence 400'
of casing, and the pump mounted on 400' of 1" galvanized pipe in 20' sections.
1/2 a gallon a minute was all we got til fracking came along in the late 80s.
there were layers of stratified sand with a layer of the purest whitest sand
several feet thick anywhere from 4 to 6 feet under the surface.
i dug the 4' deep, 9 holes for the sono tubes in one weekend.
we didn't need a sandbox for the boys, they just dug a big hole in the lawn
by the driveway and had fun there.
this takes us up to about 1976 on red mountain road.
my full time furniture making started january 1st, 1980.
for more photos of the construction process, land clearing,
first floor house plan, the other garage, tree house, and landscaping,
... TO BE CONTINUED ...
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