"I'm sorry, Ken," I cried, "but we have GOT to have another room." I was pregnant again at 40 and had begun to be unreasonable - a normal state during pregnancy and only made slightly worse by my age. What's more I was NOT to be mollified and Ken knew it.
"Ok, ok," he tried to calm me down, "but what do you want me to do?"
"Build something!!!" I was adamant. "The landlord won't care. He told us so when we first came here. As long as we pay the rent and he doesn't hear from us, he's happy."
"Alright. Come help me decide where and what to build," Ken held the door open and we both stepped outside.
We surveyed the house from every angle. Years before a wing had been added to the original farmhouse making it an "L." The attic of the wing was not as high as the original roof line. That shape made it impossible to add onto the back side of the house because it would be too difficult to integrate three roof lines. It would also have eliminated the window in the kitchen. The actual back of the house already had an attached, dirt-floor shed with barn-siding. My washer and dryer were on a stoop in that shed just outside the back door along with the freezer that didn't work. The shed had been intended as a woodshed but housed, for us, all the "stuff" that didn't fit in the 647 sq. ft. of the house itself. Roped in the rafters were Ken's elk racks and my bentwood rocker. The cane seat of the rocker had worn out and we couldn't afford to replace it. A non-working refrigerator and an old wood/electric range filled the shed almost to capacity. The only possible place for an addition was to put a room outside the small dining area where a window existed at the side of the bottom of the stairwell.
I sat down and took out a pad of graph paper, drawing plans for a two-story addition. The longer I drew, the better I liked the plans. After a week they included a den, a sewing room and a bedroom downstairs and two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. It would be wonderful. It would preserve the charm of the small, original farmhouse yet provide beautiful, spacious rooms for our family. Maybe we could expand the kitchen out towards the back at the same time and create a pastry island.
"Pastor Weisman asked me if I would take down the old outhouse behind the church to clean up the yard," Ken informed me a few days later with a gleam in his eyes. "The siding on it matches the house so I think we could use it on an addition." It was true, both the house we lived in and the outhouse were of about the same antiquity and at the same stage of rot. It should match perfectly.
"Well, isn't that just great!" I was less than pleased, "And what, prey tell, do you propose putting the siding ON?!" My humor was spiraling downward in direct proportion to the expanding size of my belly. I was thinking of my beautiful plans and all those glorious glossy pictures in the women's magazines I had checked out at the library. They were full of ideas for increasing storage space and roomy additions. My plans now included a family room downstairs and a playroom upstairs for the kids. In the back of my mind was a picture of me sitting placidly in an oak rocker in front of a stone fireplace right out of Architectural Digest. I had a chubby, contented baby in my arms and my beautiful, well-dressed, well-behaved children were quietly and happily playing games together at the other end of the arena-sized room. It must have been a pregnancy-induced hallucination. Either that or a new family came with each new addition.
"I'm working on it, OK?" Ken's sharp answer broke through my daydream. He was a little tired of my peevish behavior and went outside to relieve some of his frustration by splitting wood. Each day after work he stopped by the church for a while. Small bundles of siding began stacking up under the tin which covered our woodpile.
The following week, while I was penciling in solar panels and an indoor greenhouse of sorts, Ken intruded upon my plans again. "The farm got their new tractor today. Gordon says I can have the shipping crate from this one. The last one they had to use to return a tractor for repairs." I looked up blankly, still contemplating the merits of tile on the floor for the solar room. Maybe I could design the tiles myself. What fun.
"What do we want a shipping crate for?" I asked since I couldn't figure out why Ken's boss would be giving us one.
"For the lumber. It's kind of non-standard size, but I'm sure I can frame a room with it." he seemed happy about this development.
"Frame a room?" there seemed no relationship between my new reality and Ken's words.
"Yah, you know, for your precious addition," he looked at me quizzically as if there might be something wrong with me other than the obvious pregnancy.
"Oh," was all I could think of to say.
The siding in the woodpile was now enjoined by odd lengths of lumber. I wondered if non-standard lumber would work for the built-in storage wall in the family room or the walk-in closets in the kids' rooms.
"Come look at what I've got," Ken pulled me away from my graph paper and magazines and led me outside. Pieces of wood in strange triangular and small rectangular shapes were carefully stacked in the back of his pickup.
"I got them from Bud's cabinet shop." he sounded pleased.
"What's it for?" I asked. I didn't have a clue.
"For the floor in your addition, of course. It's all oak," he was pleased and handed me several pieces. "Come on and help me stack it with the rest of the stuff." Taking my armload and following him, I had to admit that his stash had grown considerably in the last few weeks. I noticed also that he had carefully scraped all the old paint off the siding. It looked really awful now.
Over the next few weeks, both Ken's plans and mine grew. I stopped at a shop in town and ran my fingers over several grades of carpeting. I figured out the amount of sheetrock we'd need and dug out the handy, dandy Reader's Digest Do-It-Yourself book to estimate joint compound and nails for that much rock. I began choosing paint colors and wall paper.
Ken, on the other hand, had found left-over sheet insulation from a chicken ranch where they had just built a new brooder house. He added it to his pile of treasures and weighted it down with firewood so it wouldn't blow away. He managed to earn a couple of small, used, aluminum-frame windows from a local dairy farm by doing chores and added them to his stash.
"Paul gave us an old roll of roofing he had in his barn," he told me one night over dinner. Ken did odd jobs for Paul, an elderly gentleman who owned a farm not far from our home. Just that day, I had been thinking of split cedar shakes. "You probably won't like the color, but it's free," he continued.
"What color is it?" I asked, thinking of the gold house and brown roof we lived in.
"Red. It's from his chicken shed. I know I can't match the paint on the house, so white will have to do for now. Mom's giving us her left over stuff from the last time she had her house painted. Maybe we can paint the whole thing next year." I knew he was right about the color of the house. When we moved here and it needed painting, we had simply collected everyone's left-overs and mixed them all together. That's the color our house was. A rather odd sort of gold, but at least all the same.
The next day I actually went out to see what was under the tin roof. There were sheets of chip board on top of everything else.
"What's the chip board out there for?" I asked when Ken got home from work.
"The walls," was his curt and defensive answer. He looked me squarely in the eye, defying me to object. For some reason he thought I was not fully in agreement with his plans. He glanced at the pile of magazines on the dining table, scanning the pictures of the rooms captured so exquisitely in their pages.
That summer he built an addition. A bedroom for us and the newest, but not the last, baby. It was 7x9 with a sloping shed-style roof which made the outside wall about four feet high. I did the electrical work. The room had a unique oak parquet floor and corduroy-textured wallpaper to mask the chip board seams. I also papered the ceiling, a project I will never repeat. The room contained a double bed, two dressers, a shelf with clothes rod attached and a port-a-crib. It was filled to capacity but it increased the size of our house by about 10%.
There are all kinds of creativity. Mine sometimes spiraled out of control, encouraged by women's magazines which have little similarity with reality. I bundled up all the magazines and trucked them back to the library. The graph-paper sketches were tossed in the wood-burning stove. Ken's kind of creativity was prompted by necessity and an ability to make do with what he had. Our addition may not have made the pages of Better Homes and Gardens, but I think overall that it provided us with a lot more entertainment.
I was curled up in the big overstuffed chair, a cast-off from Paul, in front of the wood-burning stove with a chubby and contented baby in my lap. I could hear Ken outside splitting kindling. Our older girls, who spent most of their time bickering, burst in the door and laughingly recounted the latest house tale.
"But how can you all live in such a small house. Where does everyone sleep?" a new acquaintance asked them, somewhat aghast. The girls exchanged a glance. They considered this a rather personal and invasive question. One suitable for a "mind-your-own-business" type of response.
"It's not as bad a you might think," Sarah informed her sweetly. For anyone who knows her, sweetness during her teens years was always a bad sign. "The house is called the Gibson house because the Gibson's who built it had ten kids. We've only got four so far." She let that bit of information sink in and then continued, "Besides, mom and dad have a new room. We girls have the attic and mom and dad share a tractor crate with the baby."
The girls' timing was deliberate and practiced. Delivery was well-planned and executed at precisely the right moment.
"She's only kidding," Karen comforted the newcomer, easing the shocked expression on her face. "The tractor crate was much too small. Actually, we girls have the attic and mom and dad sleep in a two-holer outhouse. It's roomier than the crate would have been."
