The House That Jack Built

We brought baby Primero home to our apartment above the converted store in the tiny village (population 500 on a good day) of Herbert. (You won't find Herbert on a map--this name, too, is fictitious).

Herbert sits on Saskatchewan parkland--the great swath of broken meadow and poplar bluff that separates the true prairie from the northern shield's rock, lakes and muskeg. Herbert is thirty-odd kilometers outside of Saskatoon--easily commutable. The road shoots straight as an arrow's path, except for one lazy S-curve that usually keeps drivers from falling asleep at the wheel. Luckily the ditches are shallow.

We wound up in Herbert because it had cheap housing. Our apartment was huge--we could never afford that space in the city. Also, our dream of home ownership was equally unlikely in Saskatoon. We had one meager income and no savings. We were, as the phrase says, "just starting out".

And so, with a kid on our hands, we began looking for a house. Herbert had fewer than two hundred of them, so the search wouldn't take too long. Most of them were small--that was fine with us--our income was small, too.

One day, our friend Rollie asked Jack to go along to see a house. Rollie and Dee, his wife, were also searching for a house to buy, but they'd actually taken the step of contacting a real estate agent about a small house on the edge of town. (Actually, in Herbert everything was on the edge of town--the town centre was on the edge of town). Rollie was a sculptor who was working on his graduate degree in Fine Arts. Herbert's cheap housing made commuting economical, but Rollie wanted studio space, so he was looking to buy.

Rollie wanted Jack's advice on the house's structure. Jack was working as a carpenter in Saskatoon and so had some knowledge. I didn't go along--I was at home with ten-month-old Primero. Having a child at home meant I had to carefully calculate whether an outing was worth packing up kid, diaper, bottle, wipes, spare clothes, blanket, etc. Unless the trip was really compelling, I stayed home.

Life with Primero had blurred by. He was developing a personality--I was amazed at how quickly this showed up. He was cheerful and sweet-natured, a fairly low maintenance baby, except for the trips to the Emergency Room. It was during his first months that we became acquainted with this activity. I had no experience of this, but Jack was an old hand at Emergency Room visits, having racked up an impressive number of these as a youngster. Apparently there is a gene for trips to the Emergency Room--it travels along the paternal line.

Primero's first months yielded two trips to Emergency--one for croup and the other for a nasty hydrocele ("water on the bulbs" as my friend's Baba called it--you can look it up--hydrocele, that is--I very much doubt you will find anything for "water on the bulbs", but you never know--you're welcome to try).

Little did we know that trips to Emergency were to become a life-long habit for Primero. Adulthood has not slowed him down. For a while, it was a race between Primero and Cuarto for the Emergency Room championship. Cuarto led for a while. Primero, however, has emerged as the all-time title holder in the "Childhood and Beyond" category.

Back to house-hunting with Rollie and Jack. I know the story from both accounts and came to know the house itself intimately. Given that both Rollie and Jack are inveterate story-enhancers, I have edited it for believability.

The house was a repo that had been moved some years before from a farmyard to its present location in town. It was tiny--one bedroom with a windowless shed addition along the back--this apparently was listed as a second bedroom. The inside was hideous--dark paneling everywhere and orange shag carpet everywhere else. It perched on a shaky foundation over a basement of three cracked concrete wall and one dirt embankment that had crumbled all over the floor. The basement was filled with junk and mud and, as we later discovered, a wild kingdom of spiders and assorted amphibians. (We actually caught a salamander down there when we were cleaning up. We named him Bing and kept him in a goldfish bowl. Bing escaped after he bit Jack, or so Jack claimed.

Back to the house--after the showing, as Rollie, Jack and the real estate agent were leaving, Jack asked Rollie if he was considering buying. Rollie looked at Jack and said, "Are you kidding? This dump? Why?"

Jack said, "Because if you don't buy it, I'm going to."

Rollie was sure Jack had turned insane. Being a good friend, he refrained from pointing this out. Years later, we found out that all our friends thought we'd turned insane when we purchased this hovel, but never let on. Where would we be without friends? I have asked myself more than once in this particular case.

I never saw the inside of the house until after we'd purchased it. I had peeked through the smeared windows. The decor looked terrible, bit I thought with a bit of paint and some new flooring, it could be quite cozy. And we could always pop a window in that second bedroom for luxuries like light and air.

The house cost eleven thousand dollars--1980 dollars, which we didn't have very many of. Somehow we wangled a mortgage from the local Credit Union and the house was ours. Thus began our lifelong affair with renovating.

Once the house was ours, I thought I'd better have a look before we moved in. As Jack led me from room to room, my heart sank. The living room ceiling was just over six feet high and covered with the same dark-brown paneling as the walls. It was like being inside a chocolate--a very small chocolate with no headroom. The bathroom was crazy--the tub stuck into the dining room and had been clumsily boxed in with more paneling. The bathroom door was a folding closet door that stopped a foot shy of the floor--you could check out what socks the person on the toilet was wearing. As our friends objected to this kind of scrutiny, Jack had to put a proper door on before people would stay longer than twenty minutes.

The kitchen counter was covered with stained linoleum. Bent nails held shut the cupboard doors (and I use the term "doors" loosely). The only real bedroom had a broken window covered with cardboard. The second windowless bedroom housed the fuse-box. This had a giant dent in its cover, as if someone had driven over it, and it would emit buzzing and sizzling noises from time to time.

And then there was the basement. As mentioned, one floor was mostly dirt that had collapsed all over the floor. The other walls, cracked concrete, leaned ominously. All kinds of thinks lurked in the mud--we identified a moldy mattress and a sodden bag of garden fertilizer. The ceiling joists were completely furred in spiderwebs. It smelled like a swamp.

As we emerged from the depths, I whacked my head on the stairwell opening. Pain, you will remember, makes me mad. Shock made it worse. Clutching my noggin, I burst into angry tears and howled, "What have you done with our money?"

Jack didn't answer--he might have said "What money?" as it was the Credit Union's money he'd squandered on this piece of crap. However, we were on the hook for it. Jack looked hurt. I realized that he didn't see the house's many deficits--he saw its potential. The house would become his canvas and he would create something wonderful. Jack has always been, and will be, a visionary builder and renovator. Over the decades of our marriage, we have lived in many houses that Jack built, renovated, added on to, or changed in some marvelous way. Currently we live in a house that Jack built from the ground up--it is unfinished, of course, but it will be finished if and when we sell it. In the meantime, what is completed makes it a house of beauty and comfort.

We moved in--we had to--we'd given notice and were into the Credit Union for eleven thousand 1980 dollars that we would have to fork over in monthly installments. Thus began our twelve-year renovation project.

TO BE CONTINUED