Rise: How a House Built a Family(59)

Dad gave us some great suggestions, but he wasn’t going to be able to lift as much as he would like to. He was still unsteady and tired easily. I dubbed him the project supervisor. A lifetime of yelling instructions at Green Bay Packer coaches through his television screen had primed him for the job.

“Can’t we hire a crane?” Hope asked. But she knew we hadn’t budgeted that. Paying for the joist construction and delivery had put us at the red end of our budget.

“This is an old-fashioned build. Like the pyramids. All hands on deck. We can do anything.”

“I wish we had more hands,” Jada said under her breath.

So did I.

Drew called a couple of friends over for a few hours on Saturday. In exchange for some sandwiches and sodas, Taylor and Bret spent the day hauling lumber. I could tell by the look in their eyes that they wanted to flee, but I made the best use I could of their help for the day. The boys had spent precious few hours in the sunlight away from their computers, so introducing physical labor was a shocker. I kept Taylor on the ground with me, hoping his exceptional height would be useful. We slid a four-by-eight sheet of tongue-and-groove plywood off the stack and lifted it so we were left holding a four-foot side. Drew and pasty-white Bret each grabbed a corner and pulled it up, making a stack up top. We tacked a couple of boards in place so they would have a safe, elevated work space, and then carried on moving nearly two-thousand square feet of plywood up to the elevated platform.

The boys were eating a mountain of turkey sandwiches and dreaming they were done working for the day when I remembered the bathtubs. We had my oversize garden tub and a traditional bathtub-shower combo to move upstairs, and I had been wondering how the kids and I would get them there on our own. They had to be framed in the rooms where they would live because they were too large to fit through finished doorways. Getting them up before the walls were framed was essential. I kept an eye on the three sandwich-vacuuming boys and waved them over when they stood to leave. “We have just two quick things to move up and could really use your help before you go.”

To their credit, both boys smiled politely. They weren’t quite as good at hiding their true feelings when I led them to the shop and pointed to the final two things. But they dug right in and moved the tubs to what had become known as our launching point outside the garage. It took nearly an hour to get the garden tub properly tied, and we ended up using a couple of long boards that would later be part of the roof as a ramp to pull the tub up. The smaller tub-shower combo was much lighter, and since we had the ramp system in place it took only fifteen minutes to get it up to the second floor. The tubs looked like an odd art project balanced on the ceiling joists before the floor was even in place, but this build was nothing if not odd.

By the time I turned around, Taylor and Bret had made a remarkably fast and quiet escape backing down the long drive. I waved, but I’m not sure they ever looked back.

We had nothing left to lift for the day, and it was a good thing. I couldn’t stand fully upright for the next two days and could barely sleep through my back spasms, which strengthened whenever I thought about all the lumber for the walls we still had to lift after the basic plywood decking was in place.

Screwing down the tongue-and-groove plywood for the subfloor was actually a lot of fun. It was fast progress once we got a system going, and it felt good to be up in the sunshine. But before we could move the rest of the lumber up, the spring rains picked up again. Work gave me a new project writing software for the city parks and recreation department. It kept my mind too busy to go mad with restlessness and guilt over lost time on the job. Dad made endless plans on scrap pieces of paper and cardboard, writing figures and prices in the margins. I offered him whole stacks of brand-new paper, but he is a recycling king all the way through. The rain gave him the time he needed to rest and rally for another round of work.

Pete called on a rainy afternoon. I hadn’t heard from him in so long that I had worried we’d lost him for good. “I can come out and frame the stairs tomorrow. That work?” Pete asked. “Buddy of mine can help. Twenty-five an hour, each.”

“Okay, but only if you can both work really, really fast.”

He laughed like I was kidding.

The pair showed up the next day right on schedule, which was a surprise. The friend, who was introduced as Reggie, quickly became known as a Re-Pete. Pete and Re-Pete were the biggest love/hate paradox of my life, both my saviors and my downfall. Re-Pete had clearly spent a lot of time lifting weights and no time lifting a hammer. He eventually figured out what Pete needed him to do, but I was paying them both a lot of money for on-the-job training and explanations, not to mention dozens of Pete’s famous anecdotes. I was a big fan of stories, but Pete couldn’t walk and talk at the same time. Not a hammer was raised while he dished out tales about the cows and puppies of his youth. “Know what I mean?” he would ask for the tenth time in a short conversation, and I would nod vigorously, which he promptly mistook for enthusiasm when what I meant was I’ve already paid thirty dollars for this story, get on with it!

When we finally had the two-by-four rough staircase built, it was a double-edged sword. We could easily haul supplies—and my aching back—upstairs. But Roman could also go up to the enormous, empty floor where any two-year-old would love running laps. The front corner was nearly twenty feet off the ground, and that was heart-attack height for any mom.