A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

by Michael Pollan

  After the frames had dried, I attached them to their casing with hinges and then attempted to glaze the sash, a process that did indeed require a certain knack, as Jim had mentioned. The windowpane is held in place with a beveled bead of glazing putty, which is applied to the corner where it meets the wood frame with a putty knife that must be wielded at a precise forty-five-degree angle. Move the knife too slowly and the putty blobs up on you; move it too fast and it tears. Turning corners neatly is the real test, though, requiring skill and a bit of nerve. By the time I’d glazed my fourth window, I could manage a respectable straightaway, but my corners remained somewhat bulbous.

  Luckily for me these windows would be twelve feet off the ground, so no one would ever be in a position to observe the gentleness of my learning curve. I took heart in what I’d read about the Arts and Crafts movement’s liberal line on mistakes: “There is hope in honest error,” one designer had declared, “none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” Small mistakes in the finished product revealed the hand of the worker; perfection was opaque. Certainly the mark of my own unhandy hands was visible in these windows, which were hopeful in the extreme. Joe held up one of the finished sashes to his face and peered out at me through its frame. “It’s a window.” This was about all you could say for it, apart from the fact it was the absolutely squarest thing Joe and I had so far managed to build.

  Jim delivered his own rather more accomplished windows on Christmas Eve, and Joe and I had them all installed by the end of an unseasonably warm New Year’s Day, a swift and hugely satisfying process that revolutionized the building both inside and out. Since Jim had already put on the hinges and painted the sash (a deep blackish green), installation was basically a matter of squaring and plumbing each casing in its rough opening in the wall, then securing it to the frame and hanging the sash.

  And on an ordinary building this would have been a snap. But since ninety degrees was not this particular building’s predominant angle (no blaming Charlie for that one), we struggled for a while trying to determine exactly what plane each window should occupy in its wall; our rough openings were rough. After some adjustments and difference-splitting, we slipped the window casings into their openings. Shimming them with scraps of leftover shingle, we’d nudge the jambs a fraction of an inch this way or that and then, after consulting the level and the square, lock the right angle into place with a long galvanized wood screw. It was right here that the ever-widening gyre of oblique and obtuse angles that had bedeviled the construction from the start was finally halted; had it not been, my windows would never have closed properly. Now we lifted each sash into its casing, interlocked the knuckles on each half of hinge, and then inserted the brass pin that held the two halves together. The windows were in.

  From the outside, the building was suddenly much more interesting to look at—because now the building looked back. It had a face. Roused by glass from its long material slumber, the structure now seemed something more than the sum of its wooden parts, as though, Oz-like, it had been inspirited. Especially after we’d installed the two windows in the peak, from which they peered out with a supervisory air, the building looked, if not alive, then at least like a pretty good metaphor for consciousness, with its big awning windows reflecting back the landscape in what seemed almost a form of acknowledgment. Like water in the landscape, which is likewise reflective and transparent by turns, glass has a way of inflecting whatever holds it, quickening what was formerly inert, suggesting other layers and dimensions, depths to plumb. And though I’m sure a big pane of plate glass would have animated the building too, I doubt it would have made it look nearly as, well, smart as my building now seemed. (Joe said the little windows up in the peak had given the building its brains.) Undivided plates of glass often wear a glazed expression, look blind. Muntins wink.

  Inside too, the windows had invested the building with a kind of intelligence, a point of view. What had been a single uninflected horizontal view out over the desk was now divided into six discrete square frames. The surprise was just how much more you could see this way, now that there were six focal points instead of one, and twenty-four edges composing the scene instead of four. Here, top center, was a picture of the white oak, holding a great bowl of space in its bare upturned arms. Below it was a frame of vegetable garden blasted by winter; another of the iced pond, a glistening white tablet pressed into the freezer-burned earth; and, in the third, a trio of slender tree trunks leaning into the frame from offstage, almost close enough to touch. I don’t think I’d ever noticed these particular trees before; they were exactly the sort of ordinary, near-distance imagery we automatically edit out of a panoramic view. For someone not blessed with great powers of visual observation, the grid of muntin bars was a lesson in looking, a little like the graph paper art students sometimes use to break a scene down into manageable components.

  I noticed that any movement on my part would radically revise the content of the six frames; the fixed point perspective of the undivided rough opening (much like a conventional picture window’s) had given way to a shifting mosaic of views. Standing up on the landing, the view was strictly middle distance, looking down to the massive trunk of the white ash rising out of a chaotic, unmade bed of boulders. Only when you stepped down into the main room did the full picturesque prospect, with its deep and orderly space, pop into view. I thought of Charlie’s metaphor of the prescription glasses, because the sensation recalled how putting on a fresh pair can snap the world so vividly into focus. I realized that Charlie had put the central window just where he had—down low over the desk—in order to seduce me into taking my seat, since there is where the prospect was most pleasing.

  I knew this because I’d brought a chair out to the building to get some idea what working in front of this window would be like. It was the same chair I’d stood on back when I was deciding on the site, and now I slid it up to a chalked line representing the edge of my as-yet-unbuilt desk and sat down. This turned out to be the only spot in the room from which I could readily pop open and peer out of the little recessed window directly to my right—yet another way Charlie had deployed his windows to lure me to my desk. We seem to gravitate naturally toward windows (Christopher Alexander says this is because we’re “phototropic”), and Charlie was using this fact to organize my experience of the room.

  This particular window reminded me of the little triangular smoking windows cars used to have up front, or the side window in a prop plane’s cockpit, the one the pilot slides open to receive the manifest from the ground crew. My own cockpit window overlooked the big rock, making for a decidedly unpicturesque view, all jammed up with the muscled back of a boulder not three feet away. This particular frame was like a blown-up photograph, a detail dwelling on the intricate map of lichens and moss that covered the granite skin. The view was utterly bereft of prospect; it told of rootedness and refuge instead, not at all what you expect from a window.

  And yet it was perfectly in keeping with the building’s parti, the two thick walls giving refuge side to side while the thin ones, which seemed even thinner now that they’d been glazed and delicately subdivided with muntins, opened up to prospect fore and aft. Across the room the other thick wall was now pierced by a French casement that opened on no “view” at all but a latticework of cedar. In a year’s time this trellis would be draped in leaves and the casement would open directly on a second and entirely different image of refuge: the gardener’s hedgey green wall, no farther away than your nose.

  Behind me the big awning looked up the hill toward the meadow, which seemed to tumble down toward it, and, high above, the two peak windows on either gable each admitted a paragraph of sky—just enough light to flatter Charlie’s boat-hull ceiling, throwing its rhythms of wood into relief and coloring its fir straps blood orange. Though all the new windows were badly smudged, and the early winter sun was feeble, the little room was awash in a light that already seemed its own.

  Naturally I had to test out the
operation of my windows too. Each of them had its own custom operating system (tracking down workable hardware for these had been almost as difficult as finding the drip edge detail). What came as news to me was the way a particular arrangement of hinges and handles on a sash could call forth a particular physical gesture in the act of opening it, engaging the body in a very specific way. This building now summoned a whole vocabulary of these gestures, and each expressed a slightly different attitude toward the world outdoors. It was something an actor would have grasped immediately, how, say, hoisting one of the big awning sashes and hooking it to its chain (they hung from a chrome chain suspended from the ridge beam) felt like lifting a garage door overhead and heading out into the bright workaday morning, or maybe it was more like propping up the wooden flaps on your root beer stand—another hopeful A.M. gesture that said OPEN FOR BUSINESS. Whereas pushing open the rock window, which was hinged on the side and swung out like some kind of utility door, had something distinctly hatchlike and vehicular about it: You almost wanted to reach out and give somebody the old thumbs-up before shoving off. As for the French casement on the south wall, this window opened in an altogether different and more genteel world—a bedroom, say, or kitchen—and the action of its sash called for a refined, even feminine gesture, two hands drawing the day in like a breath. This window you could open in your pj’s, where the side window called for a uniform, maybe, or jumpsuit.

  However attired, I could see that opening up and closing this building was definitely not going to be a swift or simple operation. For one thing, the procedure had to be executed in the correct sequence, always opening the French casement after raising the awning, lest the swinging sashes collide. It looked like summer mornings were going to enlist me in a skippery ritual of rigging and tacking the various parts of my building, and then at day’s end performing the reverse operation, carefully stowing everything and battening down the hatches, my own landlocked rendition of the seafarer’s rigmarole. One thing this building’s attitude toward the world outside its windows would not be was passive.

  So what story did my windows have to tell, about nature and our relationship to it? The answer to this question eluded me at first, perhaps because the pictures of nature my windows offered were so various that they seemed to defy generalization. One frame might attend to the picturesque while another threw that whole idea into question, making a nice case for nature’s unspectaculars: the anonymous trees and weeds and ho-hum topographies of the middle distance. And still others had little use for pictures at all, preferring instead to snag a northerly breeze or wedge of overhead light. But maybe that was the point, or if not the point (for I doubt Charlie intended it) then at least the effect: to suggest that nature might be more various than any one of our conceptions of it. That any single view—whether it be wilderness or garden, sublime or picturesque, refuge or prospect—is only that, a version of nature and not the whole of it.

  In place of the single, steady gaze, the room proposes a multitude of glimpses, and these are so different one from the next that sometimes it’s hard to believe a single tiny room that wasn’t a vehicle could supply them all. The picture of nature on offer here seems partial, mobile, and cumulative, built up not only from glances and gazes but also from the various bodily sensations that opening a particular window can provide, beginning with the feel of a handle’s grip and ending with a sample of the afternoon air. And every one of them is distinct—not only the view but the grip and even the air, whose scent and weight seem to shift with the cardinal points. And come summer, when I move into full porch mode, throwing the house as open as a gazebo or belvedere to the breeze and rush of space, the picture of nature on offer here will be more layered and complicated still. “Picture” won’t even be the word for it.

  But then what about the word “transparency”? Surely that is part of the story these custom windows have to tell, with their in-swinging sash that can open the better part of a wall to the outdoor air. This is not, however, the transparency of a modernist, fooling the eye with an illusion of framelessness, so much as the qualified and much more sensual transparency of the porch. A porch is always frankly framed, as my building will be, by its thick, heavy walls, the ever-present ceiling, and the wooden visor in front that, like the visor on a cap, is a constant reminder that something’s been edited out, that here is one perspective. Rather than pretend to framelessness, to objectivity, opening all my windows will turn this whole building into a frame.

  The romantics and the modernists were right to suspect the window frame of standing between ourselves and nature, between us and others, but I suspect they were probably wrong to think this distance could ever be closed. It won’t be, not by glass walls, not by flinging windows wide open, not even by blowing up the houses. For even outdoors, even in the pine wood that Thoreau said was his favorite room at Walden, we are still in some irreducible sense outside nature. As Walden itself teaches us, we humans are never simply in nature, like the beasts and trees and boulders, but are always also in relation to nature: looking at it through the frames of our various preconceptions, our personal and collective histories, our self-consciousness, our words. There might be value in breaking frames and pushing toward transparency, as Thoreau and his fellow romantics (the Zen masters too) have urged us to do, but the goal is probably beyond our reach. What other creature, after all, even has a relationship to nature? The window, with its qualified transparency and its inevitable frame, is the sign of this fact of relation, of difference.

  This was, for me, a slightly melancholy discovery, since it had been in quest of a certain transparency that I’d set out on this journey. By building this house off in the woods, and by making it with my own hands, I’d hoped to break out of a few of the frames that stood between me and experience, especially the panes of words that boxed in so much of my time and attention and seemed to distance me from the world of things and the senses. Though I suppose I had accomplished this, it seemed clear now that what I’d really done was trade some old frames for a few new ones. Which might be the best we can hope for, transparency being as elusive as truth. Not that the trying wasn’t worth the effort; it was. Just look at what I had to show for it: this building and these new windows, for one thing, which have given me so much more than a view. And then there were the new and sometimes warring perspectives I’d acquired along the way—that of carpenter and architect, I mean, not to mention apprentice; there were all those new windows too. Maybe it wasn’t as important to see things as they “really” are as it was to see them freshly, scrupulously, and from more than one point of view.

  Charlie had been right all along about going custom. To do so might not be straightforward or cheap, yet clearly it is possible to improve on the standard windows, these ways of seeing we’ve inherited. Some windows are better than others, can cast the world in a fresher light, even make it new. As Charlie said, you can pick up a pair of glasses at Woolworth’s, or you can spring for a prescription.

  Yet there is still and always the frame, even if one has perfect vision and sleeps out under the stars. Transparency’s for the birds, for them and all the rest of nature. As for us, well, we do windows.

  CHAPTER 8

  Finish Work: A Punch List

  Once we’d butted the last course of shingles tight to the window casings and squeezed a bead of caulk along the joint, the building was at last sealed to the weather and Joe and I could start in on finish work. To my ear, the term had a welcome, auspicious ring, signifying as it did that we were moving indoors (it was January now, deep winter) and toward completion. This showed just how little I understood about the meaning of finish work, however, for nothing else in house building takes quite as long. I automatically assumed the primary meaning of the term to be temporal (Hey, we must be nearly finished!), but of course finishing in carpentry also has a spatial meaning, having to do with an exalted level of refinement in the joining and dressing of interior wood. In fact, this turns out to be so time-consuming it’s ap
t to make finishing in the other sense of the word seem like a receding, ungraspable mirage.

  Progress slows. Or at least it appears to, since it is by now such a subtle thing, measured in increments of smoothness and craftsmanship and in to-do lists done rather than in changes at the scale of a landscape or elevation. No one big thing, finish work consists of a great variety of discrete tasks, many niggling, some inspiring, but none you would call heroic. And yet, day by day, each task checked off moves you another notch down the punch list, that much closer to move-in day, when the time of building ends and the time of habitation begins. Joe and I would spend the better part of a year finishing the writing house.

  Framing by comparison is epic work—the raising from the ground of a whole new structure in a matter of days. There’s poetry in finish work too, but it’s a small, domestic sort of poetry, which I suppose is appropriate enough. Building the desk, trimming out the windows, sanding and rubbing oil into wood surfaces to raise their grain and protect them, is slow, painstaking work that seems to take place well out of earshot of the gods. High ritual might attend the raising of a ridge beam, but who ever felt the need to bless a baseboard molding, or say a little prayer over the punch list?

  No, finish work takes place in the realm of the humanly visible and tactile, and it is chiefly this that accounts for its laboriousness. Its concern is with the intimate, inescapable surfaces of everyday life—the desk one faces each morning, with its achingly familiar wood-grain figures, the sill on which an elbow or coffee cup habitually rests—and any lapse of attention here will leave its mark, if not on the land, then certainly on the texture of a few thousand days. Where being off by an eighth or a sixteenth of an inch was good enough when we were nailing shingles or spacing two-by-fours, the acceptable margins of error and imperfection had by now dwindled to nothing. Now we dealt in thirty-seconds of an inch, and strove for “drive fits” in wood joints that take the tap of a mallet to secure; now even hairline gaps rankle, and at close quarters indoors the eye can distinguish eighty-eight degrees from ninety. Fortunately one’s education in carpentry follows a course that makes the achievement of such exactitude at least theoretically plausible. Each stage in the building process demands a progressively higher level of refinement and skill, as the novice moves from framing to cladding to shingling and then finally to finish work, so that at this point in the construction I should have hammered enough nails and cut enough lengths of lumber to know how to do the job right. Theoretically.