Most of us have, at one time or another, entered into projects which, had we known what we were actually getting into, we would never have begun in the first place. So it was with my first home.
I had worked as a carpenter on Cape Cod for several years when I decided I had learned enough to design and build a house of my own on a lot in West Brewster. I had always admired the hexagonal, pagoda-like shelters and visitors centers that dotted the Cape Cod National Seashore and I decided to base my own house on them. Their shape seemed to lie gently on the land, and their post-and-beam construction posed what seemed an attractive challenge.
When I began to draw up some tentative plans for the house, I discovered that the hexagonal shape was less than ideal for a living space. Octagons, I realized, were a better choice. I also realized that I needed to relearn trigonometry in order to figure out the complex compound angles this design would require. So I went to the Brewster Ladies Library and asked the reference librarian if they had any trig tables. She gave me a bewildered look and, in an apologetic voice said, “I’m sorry, I don’t think we have much on furniture.”
Like many young people who built their own houses in the 1970s, I was a purist. My plan was to have the main house as a single open space with a cathedral ceiling built around a massive central chimney with a six-foot wide Rumford fireplace. I not only learned the basics of masonry myself, but screened the mortar sand I gathered from the local beach. After six weeks I had only gotten as far as the fireplace flue, and my fingers were sore and bleeding from the coarse beach sand. I gave in and hired two local masons to finish the job. When they arrived, their pickup was full of the finest, creamiest sand I had ever seen.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Mason’s sand,” they replied.
“Mason’s sand! Why didn’t somebody tell me?”
They finished the chimney in two days.
Because of the idiosyncrasies of the design and my Puritanical, purist approach to every aspect of the house, the interior was largely unfinished when my wife, our two small children and I moved in. The walls were exposed plastic-covered pink insulation, the kitchen had temporary plywood counters, and the bathroom had a blanket for a door – this last feature was only remedied when my mother-in-law came for a visit. My daughter, then three, has memories of following me around the floor that winter as I laid the wide-board beech flooring. I screwed down the planks and filled each screw-hole with a handmade half-inch maple plug that I then hand-planed down even with the floor board – some 1700 of them.
Looking back on it now, I’m amazed that I thought I could take on such a project, and even more amazed that – for the most part – I did. Though I haven’t lived in that house for years, I still take satisfaction in every detail of it whenever I visit it. It was solidly built, made to last –and when I walk down the hall toward the more traditionally-shaped wing, I still feel, as I did some forty years before, the great relief of once again encountering right angles.
