Rise: How a House Built a Family(32)
The hollow structure was long and narrow. “It looks like a ship,” I said when we all stood back to admire the work.
“Like a whale, with the ribs and everything,” Jada said. “A whale with his head chopped off.”
“Chop. Chop. Chop.” Roman whacked a spindly branch against the two-by-fours at the front corner.
I held my breath, worried that we couldn’t possibly have done it, built something solid enough to stand up to a two-year-old. But the shop held up to his chopping, and to a strong wind that blew a pile of leaves into a whirling dervish. I closed my eyes and smiled. It was the first time I had built something so much larger than myself.
Roman threw his stick down and rubbed his eyes. A low whine led into a wide yawn. He had been pulled past his endurance point after another day he would have described as one of the best of his life if he had the words. Mud, rocks, sticks, and two-year-olds are the best of pals.
I found a pattern for rafters that night and an example of how to draw a chalk template on the slab so each rafter could be laid out, matched up, and built identical to the last. It was a great method, and it was too bad I hadn’t read about it in time to use it. Our slab was crisscrossed with a network of braces that we didn’t dare take down.
The next morning, Drew and I modified the idea by pounding stakes into the ground for a rough template. I made what felt like hundreds of diagonal cuts for the crosspieces, and he nailed them together. Later I would learn that we’d used twice as much lumber as we needed to, building a roof that would take a ten-foot snow load. It may have been sturdy, but it wasn’t anywhere near perfectly straight.
I eyeballed the surface we’d need to cover with four-by-eight sheets of plywood. “It ain’t no church,” I said. It had been my dad’s saying whenever a project strayed just left of perfection.
“More importantly,” Drew added, “it isn’t my room.”
The next day, I met a guy named Pete at the lumberyard near a mountain of two-by-fours. He was stocky with red hair and cheeks, a fireplug of a guy tucking away a pinch of mint tobacco. He was born right in Little Rock and had never left the state. “Don’t see a reason anyone should leave a perfectly good state,” he said. I learned this and a lot more because he had absolutely no rules about personal space. He was also overflowing with building tips and personal information that crossed all lines of oversharing. We traded project stories and he gave me his card in case we needed a hand along the way. (I’ve no idea what clues he’d picked up on that suggested we might have one building emergency or another.)
I tucked his number away with no intention of calling a stranger in to our family project. But when he explained the ordering error that had made framing our shop a hundred times more difficult because of the shoddy boards, he won me over. Best of all, he was the first person I’d encountered who believed I could build a house without a hint of a loan-officer smirk. In short, I liked him.
“Those eight-foot two-by-fours is for scrap stuff. Like building a frame for concrete, nothing that matters much if you run up on a twist or bubble. Cheap, but you can’t use ’em for framing. No one does that.” He laced his fingers together over the top of his little potbelly, much in the way a pregnant woman might. “Biggest problem if you frame with ’em is they’re near eight-foot long.”
If, he had said. If you frame with ’em. At least he hadn’t said if you’re stupid enough to frame with ’em. Because by my reddening cheeks and averted eyes he must have guessed by now that we had done exactly that. “That’s right though, isn’t it? A ceiling is eight foot; so is Sheetrock and plywood. So the two-by-fours should be eight foot, too. Shouldn’t they?”
“You got a top and bottom plate. Don’t forget. Use an eight-foot board an’ nothing will fit right. Too tall. A dead-on stud is what you use for framing. It’s ninety-two’n five-eighths, not ninety-six. Top and bottom plate make it add up right.”
Well, that was perfectly obvious. At least, it was now. Why I hadn’t thought of it before was beyond stupid. Because I had nothing to lose at this point, and because I was growing accustomed to looking like an idiot, I asked, “So if a person did use them to frame something, like maybe a shop, what would they do to fix it?” I looked at the toes of my shoes, expecting to see my courage seeping out in a puddle right there on aisle twenty-three. “I mean aside from ripping it out and starting over?”
“For a shop I wouldn’t rip nothing apart. You got some extra work though. Need to cut strips of plywood to make up the difference—put it at the top, under the eaves. Siding’ll cover it. But that won’t fall right either, so you’ll have an odd siding piece at the bottom, most likely. Inside’ll be the hardest to make right. Hang your paneling or chipboard, whatever you got planned, then I’d double up some one-by-fours for trim along the base. That’s what I’d do.”
Thank everything that’s holy I hadn’t ordered the lumber for the entire house yet. I also thanked Pete for his help and we shook, though he seemed tempted to hug me like a long-lost relative he’d finally found between the treated lumber and the eight-foot two-by-four not-studs.
“Call me anytime you’re in a bind. I’ve built a house or two, and I’ll help you out for twenty-five an hour. Can bring a buddy who’ll work for the same. Get you past worrisome parts and leave ’til you need us again.”