The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (9 page)

(MAY 2004)

S
ix weeks after being laughed at by the Russian welders, I got a call that my trailer was ready. Suddenly, I felt like a seven-year-old girl, standing at the far end of the high dive at the public swimming pool, my arms wrapped nervously around my chest and my wet swimsuit crawling into my butt crack, with the big kids in the water below yelling, “Go on! Do it! Jump!”

There was no more time to sit around reading books and twirling my architect ruler like a sword. At this point, I needed to believe in
me
; that my design was good enough and my skills were fair enough, and I could pick up the trailer and get cracking! I took a little warm-up lap around the living room, popped
my head side to side, and shook out my legs like I used to do before a race. It was time to get started.

I borrowed a truck from my friend Barb, who had borrowed it from another friend, and together we drove over to the trailer place, giggling with excitement. I raced into the office feeling like an expectant adoptive mother and settled up the bill in what must have been record time. I was sweating so intensely I could feel the salt landing in my bra, and a moment later spilling down my stomach into my jeans, and then finally we marched out to the back parking lot. My jaw dropped. The trailer was perfect, with shiny black side rails, heavy-duty axles, deeply treaded tires, and taillights that seemed to twinkle and spit cute bubbles out of their mouths as we walked up.

I don’t remember saying anything other than a strong “Got it” as the foreman showed us how to connect the lights and brakes and explained in broken English that the cross-hitch chains were critical. “They are for keep trailer,” he said, pointing at the trailer hitch, “from go to bye-bye.” He offered this last part as he pantomimed me supposedly waving good-bye to my house and the trailer as I drove up a hill.

“Got it.” I smiled. Over the next ten minutes, I proceeded to spit out the same thing another fifteen or sixteen times, saying it with a nod, like a genius, like I had grown up around trailers and had studied metal fabrication at university; but in reality, I was so excited it was impossible to track all the
information. All I could hear was the rabble in my head saying “Wow, wow, wow-wow-wow!” as we walked around the trailer, and all I could say in the end was “Lug nuts, got it.”

The library books never said anything about checking the lug nuts every so often, or minding the cross-hitch chains to avoid a runaway load. I summoned my courage and looked at my friend as we pulled into traffic, both of us grinning nervously and leaning forward into the dashboard. We arrived at my house twenty minutes later, after motoring along slower than five miles an hour, waving other vehicles around us, and collectively screaming “Whoa!” as we went over a tiny neighborhood speed bump. I turned off the ignition with a big “Woo hoo!” and then noticed that I was four feet from the curb, still sitting in the street. “Whatever,” I told Barb, “let’s go get a cup of coffee to celebrate!”

I positively swaggered with adrenaline as we walked around the corner to the coffee shop. Barb and I spied a neighbor who lived down the street, and he gave us a nod and said, “Saw your trailer a minute ago. Sweet!” He was a building contractor, a short, stocky guy with a thick neck, and the sort of man who in the dark might be mistaken for a badger. By his comment, I immediately felt that I’d been accepted into a special club where everyone wore flannel, was successful in a shovel-in-hand sort of way, and often said things like “Hold my beer” before doing something powerfully dangerous.

“I hope to start building tomorrow,” I said, holding my crossed fingers up in the air and looking skyward like I was praying for rain, and instantly feeling that this gesture placed me well outside the flannel shirt crowd.

He nodded. “Nice. Can that trailer fit up the driveway? The city won’t let you keep it on the street . . . fascists.” He said this shaking his head, like a piece of gravel could fall out, and if it did, he would have given it to me to throw at City Hall.

“Ya. Right. I know,” I said firmly, while inside I screamed,
Shit, shit, shit-shit-shit!

There was no way I could back the trailer up the steep rampart that defined the front of my driveway. And even if I could drag it up and over the steep slope, the drive was so narrow it would be impossible to pull ladders alongside. There was barely room to open a car door, let alone set a ladder and maneuver plywood up over your head to the roof. I needed another solution, and in the meantime maybe it could just sit on the curb, looking cute.

Later in the day, I mentioned the driveway conundrum to my friend Camelli, who lived across the street. She was an engineer for the city, so I figured she’d know the inside scoop and would set me straight. We’d met years ago, in college, when she was a freckle-faced freshman with the driest sense of humor on the planet; she would play wry jokes on her housemates, as when one of them was grilling a chicken and she stole it from the grill while he wasn’t looking. When he returned and found it
missing, he thought he was crazy, and he headed for the kitchen, scratching his head, at which point she returned the chicken to the grill. She repeated this process twice, each time returning to her spot in the living room, where, when her housemate stormed past looking for his lost chicken, she’d tuck her hair behind her ears and adjust her glasses, flipping a page in her book like she’d been studying the whole time. “What do you think the city would do if I parked the trailer on the curb for a month?” I asked her. “Fine me? Tow me?”

After a bit of thought, she invited me to build in her driveway, explaining that she wasn’t using it or her garage. In retrospect, I wonder if she knew what I didn’t: There was no earthly way that I could build a house in a month, working alone and only on weekends. It would take at least three months, and in that time, working in the street would not only be illegal, it’d be dangerous. Leave it to Camelli to be logical and generous.

The trailer fit perfectly in her driveway, and I spent the next hour measuring everything: the trailer’s width and length, the depth of the side rails and wheel wells, the height from the pavement up to the top of the trailer, the distance between ribs, the size of the tires, the location of the lights, and the distance diagonally from the front of the trailer to the back corners. I used this information to redraw my plans for the floor frame and walls, and then I pulled together a list of every stick of wood I’d need to start things out.

The list looked small and suddenly beautiful, like I was
studying a list of pieces that I hoped would grow from my wishful thinking into something called “floors,” “walls,” “roof,” “little house,” and “home.”

“Here we go,” I whispered to RooDee. “We’re gonna build a house.”

The next day, I ventured off to the lumberyard with my Post-it note in one hand and a tape measure in the other. I started by culling through a giant pile of “studs” (a word that totally made sense given the fact that these were the strong pieces of wood that would hold up the roof, define the walls, and keep my little house in shape), pulling sticks of wood from the pile and searching each one for the slightest hint of a twist or warp, just like Katy had taught me. Almost immediately, while lifting one stick of wood off the other, I slammed a sliver into the palm of my hand, causing me to twirl around in pain, clutching my hand like I’d rammed it into a wood chipper. I stood in the center of the aisle, staring and probing at the meat on my hand, and then chewed the sliver out, biting it because my fingers couldn’t do the job—an act that made me feel clever and brave.

I was thinking on my feet. Injury number one: no big deal.

Over the next half hour, three different men offered to help me, making me wonder if someone had made a secret announcement about a skinny blonde who was sucking her fist in the lumber department. I was too proud to accept their help, offering a quick “Oh, that’s sweet, but I’ve got it” as I continued
to sort through the wood alone, gingerly picking up each stick like it could be tethered to an electric prod.

I loaded the wood on a small pushcart, with two twelve-foot sticks balanced in the center and poking out in front like a lance. The cart weighed a ton and I had to really put my weight into it to roll it toward the cash register. Seconds into the haul, I realized things weren’t going well. I was headed for a display rack, so I grabbed the back of the cart, but too late. The lumber slammed into the rack, knocking it over and ramming the lance backward into my pelvis, doubling me up like I’d swallowed a tire iron.

Injury number two that day was a sadly placed goose egg, which paled compared to injury number three: my pride.

Things had gotten off to a bumpy start, but soon enough I was working my way through a stack of lumber, building the floor frame, and then attaching aluminum sheathing to create an undercarriage. I felt like a woman learning to swim, awkwardly paddling over to my drill and then slowly treading water as I tried to get my bearing around a piece of wood; daring myself to dunk my head underwater as I measured, then remeasured, and finally cut the floor joists to length. It was exhausting and exhilarating.

During the workweek, I entertained my coworkers with stories about sunburning the inside of my mouth as I panted, openmouthed, over the aluminum undercarriage, struggling to fit it in place; and oddly, I found myself calmer than I’d been in
a long while. Maybe it was simply because my muscles ached or maybe because I felt that nothing was more compelling than the stack of wood that was waiting in Camelli’s garage, but whatever the reason, I was relaxed as I discussed problems with a factory worker, and less overwhelmed when I realized there was nothing I could do about the way “acceptable levels” of radioactive mud were being deposited in a pond at the edge of town.

After my second or third weekend of consecutive twelve-hour days, I realized that I might have underestimated how long it would take to finish the house. I had the floor framed, complete with metal undercarriage, rigid foam insulation, and plywood deck; and I also had the walls framed out and resting on the ground nearby. But that was it . . . hardly a house. At the rate I was going, it would take me no less than a year to have a livable structure, and by then my back, arms, legs, fingers, and earlobes would be reduced to nubbins. Every part of my body ached: my scalp from walking with plywood balanced on my head, my feet from dropping wood, tools, boxes, and bins on my unprotected flip-flopped feet (the reason real carpenters wear steel-toed boots). My shins, elbows, armpits, the webs between my fingers, my cheekbones, knuckles, hip sockets, and the tiny hairs above my kneecaps—everything hurt, but I kept at it, and finally the floor was in place and the walls were prefabricated, sitting in a neat stack near the trailer. Now it was time to wrangle my friends to help me lift the walls into place, square them up, and secure them to the trailer.

I called as many friends as possible, luring them with beer, pizza, and the idea of a good old-fashioned barn raising, right in the heart of the city. “It’ll be more fun than an Amish rake fight,” I’d promised, and sure enough, my friends arrived, carting their tools, food, pets, and children. I remember looking around at one point, and someone had pulled a red wagon full of beer over to the house, food was sitting on a table made out of the tailgate of someone’s nearby truck, dogs was lounging under the trailer, and a couple of my friends’ kids were having a sword fight with long, skinny balloons, chasing each other around a picnic blanket that had been thrown on the ground in the nearby yard. I was so happy standing there, seeing what was happening around my house.

In a single day, my friends and I stabilized the trailer, jacking it up onto cinder blocks to level it, and then we hoisted the walls into place on the platform. Now, where there had previously been an odd-looking trailer and a few piles of wood, there was something that was starting to look like . . . well, like something. It all went faster than I thought it would—a million times faster than if I’d been working alone, instantly going from a two-dimensional drawing to a colossal enclosure. I stood on the platform and pointed to a couple of two-by-fours on the wall and stuck my head through like I was taking in the fresh air on a spring day. “Check out my perfect view of the night sky,” I called. My friends stood on the ground two feet below me, and miles away from understanding why I would want to sleep on a
trailer platform. They gazed at me with big smiles and unfixed eyes, their eyebrows raised expectantly; things got quiet with a giant pregnant pause settling between us, and then Steve-o (my trusty climbing partner and a former housemate) screamed out of the blue, with a massive smile on his face and his eyes trained on me, fists pumping wildly in the air: “Deeeeee Willlllllliams!!!” like I’d just head-chipped a soccer ball into the goal with two seconds left in the game.

I loved Steve-o more than ever for that. I couldn’t possibly begin to explain what was only beginning to bud inside me: I wanted a home. I wanted to
be
at home, in the world and in my body (a feeling I had been missing since I’d woken up in the hospital) and somehow, in some as yet undefined way, I knew that windows in the great room and a skylight over my bed were going to help with that.

Over the next several weeks, I discovered a nice rhythm for lifting, schlepping, drilling, cutting, fitting, refitting, and re-refitting. It wasn’t a perfect process; I was learning as I went. For example, one day, I spent an entire morning putting up rafters. After screwing in each and every one, squeezing between them and balancing on the skeleton of the house, I took a break and went for coffee around the corner. On my way back, I finally had a chance to see the roof for the first time. Along the peak, every rafter had been screwed left of center, resulting in a shift to the left that made my roof look like a Nordic ship,
lunging forward like an Olympic diver headed over the bow into the water. I stood there staring, trying not to cry, and then I crawled back on the roof to redrill, rescrew, and reset the roof.