This Old House

Once upon a time, a long time ago, 1969 to be exact, a young woman built a house from scratch. She didn’t call a contractor.  She got a pick and dug a trench for a water line to bring water up to the mountainside lot. She tied the rebar for the footings, called the concrete truck, and finished the concrete. She did the electrical wiring and called for the inspections. The house was built for cash out of pocket and never had a mortgage.

That young woman was me, although when I look back I can barely believe it. I did this with no previous expertise other than the ability to read and a sense that I would get it done because after all I had gotten a PhD. If you can do that, building a house seems like nothing.

I didn’t do the house

all by myself. I did it with my boss, who later became the father of my children. The two of us were the contractors, the subs, and the labor. The house consisted originally of two geodesic dome kids assembled by a man named Bill Woods who lived in Deer Valley Arizona. We found Bill and the kits in the Whole Earth Catalogue. The kits cost $2000 each and consisted of 2x4s and metal connectors, fiberglassed plywood panels, and blown in insulation that created a fiberglassed plywood sandwich. Each kit was a 26 ft in diameter room. Between them was a breezeway, which we used as an “Arizona room.”  Around the whole lot was a rock and concrete wall reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture. 

The lot on which the house was situated is a mountainside in Sunnyslope, now part of Phoenix. Behind it was a mountain and nothing.  I helped to prevent anyone building further up the mountain from  us by serving on the Citizens Bond Committee that designated all the neighboring land as Mountain Preserve.

The year was 1969, but more important, the season was summer. It was the summer of Woodstock, but I was not at Woodstock because we were building the house.

We could only build it during the summer because we worked as professors at Phoenix College. Summer was the time you had off when you were a professor. I'm sure it was hot then, as it is now in Phoenix in the summer, but I don't remember noticing it. It was just when we had free time to build the house, that's all.

It took about five years to complete the house, but we moved into it much sooner than that,  because one of us became pregnant with our first child. And each child caused another addition to the house. By the time it was finished we had the two domes, a rock and concrete-walled bedroom, and an upstairs master bedroom with a killer view. And two daughters, who grew up under these strange circumstances, with solar hot water and a garden. And a handmade solar oven for baking bread.

 We lived together in the house for 10 years, and then I started a business. Our marriage collapsed, and I moved out. I couldn’t do a startup and the house, which still required much maintenance.  My former husband happily kept the house and lived in it for about 30 years before selling it to remarry a woman who lived in Chandler.

After the house was sold it was never occupied again. My daughters and I think it was used as storage until 2015, when a very nice man bought it and turned it into an AirBnB. At the time the house was 45 years old and needed quite a bit of work, which he undertook. 

He was very interested in the house as a piece of history, and found me to ask me questions about the original construction. When he finished renovating, he had a launch party for the AirBnB and invited me. I attended, and it was surreal.

I hadn’t thought about the house again, until last week I got a phone call from a friend of mine in Phoenix. She was taking a staycation with her husband to celebrate her 20th anniversary, and she decided to book this strange house she found on AirBnB. While reading the guest materials, she found out she was staying in my house!

She, too, asked me many questions, all of which returned me to the time in my life when I felt all-powerful and able to do anything. 

What is the moral of the story? It’s 100% true that a New Yorker who had never even lived in a house, armed with a Ph,D in English, can build one. I was right about that. I only had to know how to read.