Rise: How a House Built a Family(65)
The roof delay was more than just frustrating. It made me feel restless and powerless. We had worked for months to empower ourselves, and now the feeling was unraveling at my feet.
A week later and no closer to having a roof, we were cleaning the job site. Chunks of concrete blocks and wood littered the area around the house, and it had really gotten out of control. I was out front, tossing stuff in a wheelbarrow, when I stopped to take a good look at the house. I looked at it all the time, but this time I looked at it square-on, imagining it with brick covering the front. Something looked very wrong. It was off balance.
It was no secret that we had drawn the plans ourselves with little attention to aesthetics and no mock-ups of the exterior, but I had carefully measured the window placement to make sure that the six windows on the front of the house were evenly spaced—both on paper and when we laid out the walls. Still, there was a huge, unattractive blank spot between the garage window and the dining-room window. On the other side, the front door was dead center between the library and dining-room windows. That was exactly what threw everything off balance. The only way to fix it was to add another window.
“Hope,” I yelled, “grab a tape measure and meet me in the dining room.”
She didn’t ask questions while I measured and marked a rectangle halfway between the two windows. I released her back to clean up around the backyard while I drilled a hole at the top of my three-by-five rectangle in the garage. In the absence of a chain saw, I threaded the large-toothed blade of the reciprocating saw through the hole and cut straight down. The corner turned out sloppy, but I made it and cut through two studs along the bottom, pausing in the next corner, trying to decide if I could make the turn without drilling a hole and deciding I couldn’t.
In the silence between the saw motor and the drill, I heard screaming. “Mommy! Stop! What are you doing! Mommy!”
I turned to see all my kids gathered behind me. Even little Roman was red-faced from yelling, both palms out in the universal stop gesture.
“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
Drew stared at me, dumbfounded. “What are you doing? You can’t just cut a hole in the wall! Have you lost your mind?”
I looked back at what I had done, sidestepping to make sure it looked even. It did. I could already tell it was going to look perfect. “The house was off balance. Needed another window. We’ll just do the same thing upstairs, in Roman’s room.” I pointed over my head.
Hope raised her eyebrows, suggesting that the house wasn’t the only thing off balance.
“It’s too late to just change the plans,” Drew argued. “We’ve already framed this. The plywood is up. You can’t just start cutting holes in it!” He had moved from being scared that I was psychotic to angry that I had ruined a perfectly good wall.
I grinned. “Actually, I can! I can just come out here and cut a hole in the wall and put a window in it. If that’s what I want, then that’s exactly what I can do!” I started laughing then, hysterical laughter. I felt powerful again. In fact, I felt more powerful than I ever had in my life, and I was ready to start cutting again. I picked up the drill and made a one-inch hole in the corner so I could turn the blade.
“Go out front. Look at the house. This window has to be here. I’m serious. Go look.” I waved them away, as anxious to get back to my cutting as I was to prove myself right. They went reluctantly, Roman on their tail with his little hands propped on his hips, mimicking their disapproval. Before they rounded the corner I had the saw moving again, making a mostly-straight line up the wall, and then I climbed on the ladder to make the final cut across the top.
The wood fell out with a lot less grace than the pieces had with the chain saw. This one was a lot heavier with the six-inch studs still attached. I grinned and waved to the kids, sticking my head out. “See what I mean! This is exactly what it needed.”
Jada waved back, nodding and smiling. Roman did, too, because what could possibly be more fun than cutting a peek-a-boo hole in the side of a house?
Hope and Drew finally agreed that I was right: The house simply wouldn’t have worked without the extra window. Drew returned, still red-faced. “We’ll have to build a header for that. And cripples.”
I stood back for a better look at what I’d done. “Yeah, I could have planned that cut a little better. We’ll have to cut the two-by-sixes up higher for the header. It’s actually going to be hard to do with the plywood on, isn’t it.”
He nodded. “But it will look a lot better. I’ll start on the headers.”
We were nearing the end of April without a roof, and the bank loan would close in less than five months. It was going to be impossibly tight to the finish. We couldn’t do the insulation, cabinets, or flooring until the electric and HVAC were in. And of course we couldn’t have the electric or HVAC put in without a roof. Everywhere we turned was a catch-22.
But we did have another window, and there is nothing quite like picking up a saw and cutting your own window straight through the wall to give you a new perspective on life.
The bricklayers showed up later that week. We had done the block ourselves and I knew it was solid, but I also knew it wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as I’d like the finished brick to be. So I hired a crew to put brick up several feet in the back and sides of the house and on the entire front. They would also build brick steps onto the front porch and columns around the porch posts.