CHRISTMAS 2006

I have many memories of building a large house on a steep hill in Saratoga, California. I like to think I can explain the stupid moves I made as the ignorance and over confidence of youth. I had worked my way through Stanford, first as an apprentice and later as a journeyman mason. Concrete, brickwork and other forms of masonry were well understood. One of my cousins, Ross Junior, was a plumber and taught me the plumbing trade. Uncle Tony was a roofer and proved a good teacher for roof work. A close family acquaintance was the union apprentice teacher for carpenters - an excellent teacher for subjects such as complicated roof framing. This gave me the confidence (over confidence?) to tackle any building project.

I was employed full time at NASA, so construction was restricted to evenings, weekends and vacations and took years to complete. I had planned to complete the basic structure in a short time, but the weather and other factors interfered. Robin, our older daughter, was ready for kindergarten. I had planned to have the house exterior completed by the start of school, so we sold our previous house to get the money to buy building materials for the new house. Having burned our bridges we moved in, illegally, just before school started - not only without all of the siding on the house, but no doors or windows or even roofing material on the roof planks. My advance planning failed in a number of ways, starting with late spring rains that prevented bull-dozing a pocket in the hillside for the house. But even before that I ran into trouble getting my plans approved by the building department. The lot was about 2/3 acre, with no property line anywhere near parallel or perpendicular to any other; the edge bordering the road was less than 50' long. No lot line was even remotely similar in length to any other. I had located the house at an angle to account for the extreme slope of the land. One house corner came within 15' of a steep rock hillside with a lot of brush growing on it. It was also one of the property corners. The plans inspector, who I felt had been hired for a summer job, said I'd have to move the house to meet the county setback rules, then used a red pen to show his approved location. After I explained my problem with the steep hill contour and land shape, he told me that I should have no problem getting a variance. But, he told me, there was a 3 month backlog of others requesting a variance. In desperation I “consented” to his change, thinking that if my location were ever contested I'd have plenty of time to apply and get a variance. Any fool could see I'd put the house in the only possible spot. It never occurred to me that the variance committee might say I was stupid to buy a piece of land unsuitable for building a house, and deny the variance. I worried through all 16 inspections - but, amazingly, no location problems ever arose.

The same plans inspector noticed I had a fireplace in a masonry structure that held up the floor joists. He emphatically said I could not do this: no part of a chimney may be used to support any part of the house. I pointed out that the structure was made of highly reinforced 8" wide concrete blocks on which the floor joist would be supported. This structure was about 4 feet wide, so there was a large interior empty space. Two walk-in closets were shown as well as the fireplace that was separated by open space from the load-carrying walls. I told him the UBC code obviously did not apply here. He reluctantly agreed and passed my plans.

Little did I imagine I'd have other problems. On advice of others, I applied for electricity months ahead of time. When the utility layout man finally came, he located a short power pole having a transformer and a guy cable close to the house. He put the stake for the pole about 12 feet from the house (ever hear a noisy power transformer?). Worse, he located the guy cable across the only spot for a sidewalk leading from the parking area to the main entrance. When I came home from work and saw this I remembered my experience with the building department. Without further thought I moved the stake marked POLE and the one marked GUY so both were in a location that I could live with. The next day the utility construction crew dutifully followed my moved stakes. I also applied for a telephone months in advance of need. After the anticipated delay, the telephone company sent a letter announcing they'd be around in several days to install the telephone. Our chosen spot for a telephone was on an interior wall, which at that time consisted only of bare studs. I drove a nail part way into a stud, telling wife Erlys to have the phone installed there. There were no doors on the house, so the installer had a little trouble trying to find the non-existent door bell, but he then ran his cable to the newly installed power pole, and from there directly through the house attic. I came home to find a telephone installed at the location of my nail.

We were living in a large rumpus room in the basement area. I hung a 20' length of 3/4 inch galvanized water pipe across the width of the room at its center, putting it low enough for us to use it to store all of our family clothes on clothes hangers. On one side of this "room divider" was our double bed, on the other the two children's beds. There was no plumbing - instead we had an outhouse made of plywood sheets for the walls but no roof. We visited our parents often for showers and baths. As autumn wore on we worried about rain: old-timers told us we could expect heavy rains anytime after the first of November. Erlys, a compassionate person, finally said, "I don't mind using the outhouse in dry weather but you are nuts if you think that I will sit on wet boards trying to extend an umbrella over my head where there isn't enough room to open it!" I immediately stopped what I was doing and installed a toilet in the downstairs bathroom. But this didn’t entirely solve the problem. There was no sheetrock on the walls and no door on the bathroom, so anyone could look through the glassless window frames and a large doorway opening to see the interior of the bathroom.

Soon I had other problems to worry about. I could see that I would likely never get roofing over our roof planks before a heavy rain, so I hired a roofing contractor to make us waterproof. On the day he was to put on the tar and gravel roofing we were sound asleep when a deluge of water poured onto our bed. We grabbed the children and drove to my parent's house at 4 a.m. Later that day Erlys and my mother went back to the new house to hang out the wet blankets and dry the place out so we could return that evening - this time with a waterproof roof over our heads.

As the autumn wore on we finished the outside siding, installed windows, and were warm enough with two fireplaces and a large amount of construction firewood. But there was one more event, more devastating by far than the others. We were approved for a water heater and a forced air heater that were to use propane from a large tank located down the hill. After several calls to the propane supplier to bleed the long entrance pipe and light our two heaters, they finally sent their salesman to do the job. He said all their working personal were busy. He walked down the hill to the propane tank and opened its shut off valve. Then he went into the basement level utility room and disconnected the 1" metal pipe carrying the propane and let the air and gas mixture flow for several minutes, without opening any outside doors - thus allowing the propane-air mixture to penetrate the entire downstairs area. Then he reconnected the pipe and lit a match to light the heater. A substantial explosion resulted and a flame about a foot high instantly extended throughout the downstairs area. A door and about 25 windows were blown out. Many small fires resulted from the combustible mixture getting into cardboard boxes lying on the concrete floor. Our daughters were kneeling on kitchen chairs making crayon drawings on a kitchen table so they were above the explosive flame and weren’t hurt. Erlys was standing nearby and although her socks and the lower part of her long overcoat were well burned, her skin underneath wasn't badly burned. The salesman, in the utility room, had bent over to light the pilot so he suffered second degree burns on his face and hands. Fortunately he was wearing glasses, so his eyes were intact. Erlys called me at work, saying in a terrified voice to come home - the house just blew up! I shouted to my colleagues that my house had blown up and I had to leave immediately. I sped home faster than the speed limit and hoping a county cop would notice and provide an escort. When I got home the salesman had used a garden hose to put out the fires and he and Erlys were sweeping up broken glass. I took one look at the man and told him to rush to a hospital for treatment of his burns. Within 10 minutes six of my colleagues from NASA appeared. The space heater was working but having no effect due to the blown-out door and windows. They immediately began sweeping up glass and cleaning putty from the shattered windows. I measured the openings, then sent Erlys to the glass shop to buy replacements. The glass shop owner took one look at her and gave us a near-wholesale price on the glass. In about half an hour the NASA crew had swept up the glass shards, deposited them in a garbage can and returned to work. I began gluing and nailing the door which had been split down its length about 1" from its hinges, then Erlys and I spent the rest of the day putting in the new windows. When salesman told the propane company about the explosion, they sent an actual workman to ensure the utility room was o.k. I eventually put several coats of white paint on the interior walls and heaters so the explosion was no longer obvious.

If there were any advantages to living in a house while it was slowly being built, one was we appreciated every improvement. When we took delivery of a stack of sheetrock 4' high, we promised our daughters we'd go to Disneyland when the stack, higher than they were tall, was gone. They watched the pile slowly diminish until when, at the start of summer vacation, the stack was gone and we flew to Disneyland. Other advantages were the progress was so slow we could make improvements to the interior details, otherwise only on our paper plans, from actual living experience; and we could keep up with material costs without having to take out a home loan.