Rise: How a House Built a Family(31)

Jada collected large rocks to make a fire ring at the back of the property, and Hope gathered sticks to make a fire. Roman filled a bucket with sweetgum balls to use as kindling. I hadn’t actually made a fire outdoors more than a couple of times in my life, but I had a pack of matches, a thick old phone book, and piles of determination. We needed a warm, central spot for breaks, a place that felt like a vacation, even if it only lasted minutes.

I laid out the first shop wall, starting with a straight run that had no surprises. This phase of the build was called framing. I knew that much even if I didn’t know exactly how to do it. The frame of a house would actually be better described as the skeleton. But skeletoning a house sounds too much like a horror novelist’s verb, so nailing together all the rib-like boards that hide inside the walls is called framing instead. I started with a sixteen-foot-long two-by-four that would become the top of a wall. Every sixteen inches I marked the edge of it with a penciled “X.” Then I made a matching one for the bottom of the wall, laid the two of them on the concrete slab eight feet apart, and ran eight-foot two-by-fours between them. The workshop was large, thirteen by thirty-three, so we’d have plenty of long, straight stretches to practice.

“These two-by-fours suck,” Drew said, helping me line them up with each “X” on the bottom plate. “Look at that one, it’s twisted like a ribbon, and full of knots.”

“Yeah. They don’t even seem to be the same length. Do you think that matters?”

He shrugged. “I think they just gave you the crappiest stuff they could find.”

We nailed the first wall together and found that length did matter—a lot. “We’ll have to take it apart,” I said, “and trim them all to the same length.”

He started measuring and decided on the length we would use, marking each board with his new neon-orange construction pencil. “Are you sure you ordered the right wood?” he asked.

And of course I wasn’t. There wasn’t a single part of this project that I was sure of. “I said two-by-fours. The salesperson asked ‘Eight-foot?’ and I said yes.”

Drew started in with the nail gun, both of us jumping a little with each shot, and me terrified that he would put one through my legs as I knelt on the wall to hold the crooked boards in place with my weight. Even through our fears, we were grinning like fools.

“Looks perfect!” he said.

I held back on the victory dance. “Jada, come help us with the wall!”

She stood at one end, Drew stood in the middle, and I stood at the end that needed to line up with the front of the slab. We heaved the wall up, little Jada pushing with all her might, leaning forward until she was a diagonal line, braces glinting in the sunlight. It was exhilarating. We were powerful heroes who had created a recognizable wall from a pile of mismatched sticks. The wall wobbled and undulated in a strong gust of wind, reminding us that we were human after all. Drew nailed the first brace in place. I put washers over the bolts sticking out of the slab and tightened nuts over them. Then we stood in a line off the slab, Roman on my hip and the older kids next to me, admiring a job well done.

“We can do this,” I said, relieved and energized. “There’s the proof.” As though framing one basic wall was proof of anything more than our determination. But it was a lot more rewarding than the concrete work had been. It rose above the ground like a living thing.

“Can we have a fire now?” Hope asked. “Roman’s pants need to be dried out.”

“Marshmallows!” Roman shouted, a campfire image he’d gotten from television rather than a real-life marshmallow roast.

I knew it took a lot of courage for Hope to ask. When she was five, an obsidian candle holder had exploded on our dining-room table, and the wax pool had ignited across the surface. It had taken only seconds for me to put it out, but it remained part of Hope’s psyche forever. She wouldn’t go to fireworks displays and paced in worry circles if I lit too many candles at once. Before that day, an open fire in an outdoor pit would have been just crazy talk to her.

She had constructed a pyramid of small sticks over crumpled phone-book pages. Any Boy Scout would have been impressed. I lit a match and held it to the “P” page. Prim, Primble, and Prime were licked away by the orange tongue. I had expected to need most of the matchbook for our first fire, but that tiny flame was all it took. Jada handed me branches as big around as my wrist and a thick log with damp fungus along one side.

Hope stuck long branches in the ground outside the fire’s ring and hung Roman’s pants and socks from them. “Poor lonely pants, with nobody inside them,” I said, quoting from a favorite Dr. Seuss story that had always scared my kids into a tight snuggle at bedtime. Roman giggled at the pants and poked the muddy thighs with a stick. They wiggled and danced, making him giggle more. He was already wearing his backup clothes. With all the puddles on site he would be rotating hourly from one outfit to the other. He had plastic bags between his socks and shoes but clearly needed a pair of rubber boots. It was yet another way we were unprepared for the reality of a job site.

We framed the entire workshop by that afternoon, including a thirty-six-inch entry door but excluding the garage door. I wanted to read more about that before we tried to build the heavy header to go over the top of it. In addition to the braces nailed to stakes out in the yard, we cross-braced the walls with long two-by-fours nailed from the top of one wall down to the bottom of the other. I had no idea how sturdy it was without the rafters, so I wasn’t taking any chances.