The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir

by Williams, Dee

  The library included plenty of information for weatherizing the house too, so I planned to construct a little air gap behind the siding so the house could breathe; any rain that penetrated past the exterior cedar (driving rain created by dragging my house fifty-five miles an hour down the highway) would have a chance to evaporate inside the gap between the siding and the underlying house bits. It was an extra step in the construction, a step that would delay my ability to call the project finished, but it seemed worth the effort, especially because the front end of the house would face oncoming rain on the highway.

  Of course, all this engineering led me to question why on earth I’d want to build a house on a trailer in the first place; it added such a limiting and complicating factor—a “real pain in the ass,” as my father had put it—to an otherwise straightforward construction project. But I wanted my house to roll from one place to the next so I could be at home wherever I went, and I also wanted a little pointy-roofed house that looked like home—like Jay’s cedar-clad house, like a Norman Rockwell vision of vacation, like the mountain cabins that I’d stumbled upon while backpacking. That’s where I wanted to tuck myself in at night.

  It wasn’t all drudgery; I came to appreciate the hours at the library, smuggling coffee in under my coat and getting to know the “regulars” who slept in the big overstuffed chairs while they pretended to read. The library made me feel safe, as if every question had an answer and there was nothing to be afraid of, as long as I could sort through another volume of abstracts by the American Plywood Association. I imagined that if I read enough of these books, I could summon the courage and know-how to make a well-built house that wouldn’t blast apart like a box of toothpicks when I first pulled onto the highway. I could do this. It could work!

  The first step was a trailer, and after poring through the phone book and talking to men who thought I was looking for an over-the-road trailer that I could use to haul lumber, I found a metal fabricator—a welding shop—that could make a utility trailer for my house.

  The shop was a smoky, dusty place just outside my neighborhood, in an area where the houses met up with pawnshops, bars, and businesses that sold used washing machines, hubcaps, and metal trailers. When I walked in, I was directed to talk to the owner, a short, swarthy Russian man. He reminded me of the teddy bear my dog had chewed—the one with the stuffing spewing out along the shoulders and neck like chest hair.

  He seemed to speak very little English, so I launched into an overly loud explanation. “I need,” I shouted, gesturing like I was pulling something out of the air toward my heart (the international sign for “I need”), “a trailer.” For emphasis, I pancaked my hands together and pretended to drive a flat trailer (my palm) over the flat road of the other palm. The guy gave me a big smile as I made little revving sounds like a small truck. “Pratty lady,” he said, laughing, flashing me his gold tooth. I missed the joke but laughed along like this was part of the discussion. I pulled a picture of Jay’s house out of my pocket. “I build now,” I hollered as I pointed to the photo and handed it to him.

  He held the picture up to the ceiling like he was trying to see through it, and I added: “House on trailer, I make!” He suddenly looked at me with a sort of wide-eyed excitement (perhaps out of concern that I was yelling at him and using baby talk, or perhaps because he had finally realized what I wanted), and instantly I felt insecure. I crossed my arms, shifted my weight, and gave him a look like I knew precisely how deep the shit would get, like I was seasoned and savvy and had been building things my entire life. But I hadn’t, and he likely knew that, so he chewed on his cigar and chuckled, and then yelled at another guy in Russian, saying something that made the other guy laugh.

  A few seconds later, another younger man walked in and intervened. He was the teddy bear’s son, a few years younger than me and dressed like a 1970s porn star (polyester shirt unbuttoned one too many buttons, and a pair of rayon pants that were tight on his ass and then flared to huge bell-bottoms at the ankles). He spoke something in gibberish to the other guys, and then looked at me and smiled. In broken English and with what seemed to be true sincerity, he offered, “Heelo, leedy. How can we be to heeping yours?” I instantly liked this guy, simply because I could perhaps stop yelling.

  “I need a utility trailer,” I explained smiling, “so I can build a house.” I pointed to the picture of Jay’s house, and the son nodded his head and motioned that I should follow him past the men who were now taking a break to stare at me, leaning against the wall in their baggy coveralls, smoking cigarettes and smiling.

  He walked me to a parking lot in back of the building where we strolled around, looking at trailers. Over the next half hour, I was able to communicate that I didn’t need sticker pockets, ramps, or tie-downs (various bits of metal that dangle off the trailer frame itself). I told him I simply needed the usual trailer “package” of metal side rails, cross braces, lights, brakes, and the ability to hold at least 3,500 pounds on each of two axles.

  Through all of this, I tried to sound smart and well reasoned, but halfway through the discussion I realized I was all balled up inside, which is why I felt compelled to kick the trailer tires and knuckle-rap the metal side rails. At one point, I even kneeled down and peeked under the trailer at the metal springs strapped to the axles. “These look great,” I exclaimed without knowing. I swaggered and tried to appear calm, but inside I was a mess. And all the while, the young Russian nodded his head in agreement, smiling and offering sympathetically, “You make good hoose with most kind trailer of me.” It was just the confidence boost I needed, and just like that, I handed over six hundred dollars as a deposit on the trailer. “You peek her up seeks week,” he said, smiling.

  I walked home from the trailer place, nervously chewing my lip. Suddenly, the idea of building was real. I was all in, as they say in Vegas; I had coughed up six hundred dollars and it scared the crap out of me.

  Up to that point, in my arrogance and naïveté, I’d imagined I was perfectly suited for building a house. I just needed the right how-to books and the proper tools. But walking home from the dingy trailer place, after pretending to be something I wasn’t, it finally sank in that I was planning to build a house. I was going to try to build something one thousand times bigger than me, capable of rolling down the highway, never leaking, never lighting on fire, and never falling apart under the weight of all my worldly possessions. What was I thinking?

  I’m certain I’d have felt less intimidated if I’d been a carpenter instead of an office worker and inspector; my ability to locate oil drums hidden in the blackberry bushes wasn’t necessarily going to help me see the subtle twist in a stick of lumber—the sort of curl that could throw everything off in the roof. But I understood there had to be something innate about building. It had to be in my genetic composition; something from my ancestors who struggled to make thatch and bog mud into a workable roof. Some part of me had to know how to build, just like you know how to blow on hot food before popping it in your mouth.

  Early in life, I’d felt drawn to building, pinching little blankets to furniture and erecting forts made out of hay bales. I have a vivid memory of being about four years old and my dad wrapping his big hand around mine as we held the saw. Together we would cut boards, his body doing all the hard work, and my determination believing it was all me. Decades later, I remember doing the same thing with my niece and nephew, as we built little A-frame birdhouses for their mom.

  In middle school, I drew floor plans of the tree house my dad and I would build. In high school I took woodshop, where I made my mom a lovely set of salad tongs, and in college I studied architectural engineering. I was fascinated by building, but rarely had a chance to practice the craft. It wasn’t until I owned my own house that I was finally able to learn how to feed wood through a table saw, operate a nail gun, and figure out how to handle a Skilsaw.

  I learned by working with real carpenters, people like my
friend Katy, who seemed to know what a piece of wood was thinking. Our first project together was making kayaks—the boats that I had set up in my unfinished living room, and the project that would teach me to trust my eye when it came to hand-planing the rails and putting the finishing coat of varnish on the shell. Katy taught me how to operate a Sawzall, a pointy power tool that you hold like a machine gun and use to cut open the walls of your house when you want to install new French doors, and she showed me how to look for corkscrews in the wood that you’re culling from the lumberyard.

  My friend Peety taught me how to watch for rot or beetle bores when you’re picking through wood at the salvage yard. He and I worked together on a plumbing project, and I ended up with a fairly fantastic crush on him because of the way he’d giggle when he was pissed; like when he got pinned in a weird position in the attic, in just such a way that he had to jam his head between the rafters right where the spiders had stowed their eggs, and then he chortled and said, “If I die from spider bites, you can have the fifty-seven cents in my pocket.”

  I had a first date once that involved making a kitchen countertop. We worked together as we fed wood through a table saw, with me catching the freshly cut lumber as it exited past the blade and cooing over how much fun this was (and it really was). That was the nature of my education—helpful friends and hot dates—which wasn’t enough to make me a carpenter.

  As I walked home from the trailer shop, I wished I were a carpenter. I wanted to walk along and shake the sawdust out of my pants cuffs, and to contemplate the pros and cons of a compound miter saw versus a simple chop saw (they look an awful lot alike). I wanted to feel confident, like my future was in good hands . . . not my own.

  I was chewing my lip and staring into the small window of space directly in front of my eyes, when a movement across the street caught my attention. It was a lady and a little boy handing sheets of plywood up to a guy on the second story of a newly constructed house frame. It looked dangerous; the lady had a skirt on (a definite tripping hazard that made her look even less like a carpenter than I did), and the little boy was too short and small to do much other than keep the plywood from flipping backward. The guy above made an audible grunt as he pulled the plywood up from below.

  “You want help?” I yelled.

  They all turned around and looked at me, and instantly the guy said yes and his wife said, “No, we’re fine.”

  I walked over anyway and spent the next hour lifting plywood, helping to stack it on the second floor, and leaning back to drink iced tea while I swatted the flies out of my face. They were building their own house—the three of them, but mostly the guy who reminded me a lot of my dad in his younger years: long sideburns under blond-red hair, a white T-shirt tucked into his jeans, and sweat soaking his back and chest like he’d gone swimming when we weren’t looking.

  “I’m building a house too,” I offered. “Smaller than this but, y’know, with plywood and stuff.”

  And just like that, presto chango: It became real. I was going to build my house no matter what.

  Anthropology 101

  Now that I had my trailer on order, I needed to fully flesh out the design. I took the plans that Jay had sent me and manipulated them, switching the location of the kitchen and bathroom, the sleeping loft and living room; envisioning what it would feel like to wake up in a space the size of my backcountry tent and which direction I would face while sitting in repose on the toilet. I wanted to design the house around my body and my needs, instead of following the pattern that I’d fallen into in my big house: picking paint colors and finishing the woodwork with some future owner and salability in mind. This was going to be my house.

  I started examining the way I draped clothes over the chair in my bedroom as I undressed at night, and how I automatically reached for the light switch just below shoulder height on the right, no matter what room or building I entered. I noticed how much space I needed to chop an onion or make a peanut butter sandwich, the height of my existing kitchen counters, the cabinets and chairs. I measured the height of the toilet, the depth of my closet, and the amount of room my torso consumed when I sat up in bed. I felt like Jane Goodall, observing my behavior and wondering at the mystery of why I always brushed my teeth starting with my right bottom molars, why I always double-checked that the coffeepot was unplugged before I left for work in the morning, and why I always leaned forward with my left ear cocked when trying to define the odd sounds that I heard outside the window late at night.

  The more I took note of how my body and brain clicked along through the day, the more I realized that I spent a considerable amount of time banging around with a brain full of chatter; a rush of things to do, bills to pay, telephone calls, text messages, e-mails, worrying about my job or my looks, my boobs or my ass; I rushed from thing to thing, multitasking, triple-timing, hoping to cover all the bases, avoiding anything that might disrupt the schedule or routine. At times, I was so caught up in the tempo and pattern, the predictable tap, tap, tap of each day, that there was no time to notice the neighbors had moved out, the wind was sneaking in from the north, the sun was shifting on its axis, and tonight the moon would look like the milky residue floating inside an enormous cereal bowl. I wondered when I had become a person who noticed so little. I had no idea that the distance from the floor to the top of my knee was twenty-four inches, which seemed to explain why I was always popping it on my car bumper.

  Things had changed for me after I landed in the hospital. I truly seemed to be seeing the world in a new way, but I still needed to challenge myself to try to tune in, to notice the connections between what things were (the toilet paper holder, light switch, doorknob) and how they were connected to me, so suddenly I understood how the height of the bathtub made it easy to get in and out of the shower, and the way the handle of the front door was low enough to grasp even when my arms were full of groceries.

  The overall size of my house was limited by the DOT restrictions; so it could be no taller than thirteen and a half feet from the pavement to the peak, and no wider than the wheel wells of the trailer. That meant I spent hours and days trying to sort through the pros and cons of a lower ceiling in the kitchen to accommodate a taller ceiling in the loft, and to figure out how could I cram everything I loved into a house the size of an area rug.

  The bathroom and kitchen seemed to absorb the greatest amount of time, leaving me wringing my hands while I considered all the things I wanted (a small oven, three burners, pantry, refrigerator, freezer, food prep area, cupboards for dishes, drawers for tea towels, silverware, pots, pans, toaster, a shower, toilet, bathroom sink, and a place to store all my grooming tools and “boo-boo dust,” as my sister and I called our lotions and potions). But there was only so much space. I made a list of the pros and cons, and argued with myself like a nutter, trying to imagine what the future me might want and what she would say about the old me’s choices.

  Ultimately, because of the tight quarters, I settled on imagining what would be necessary if I was staying in a remote cabin. I focused on how my friends K and Sal “glamped,” as they called their form of glamorous camping when we vacationed in Hawaii. With them, it was all about the little things, so even though we each had our tents nested in the trees by the beach, complete with flying cockroaches, stinging centipedes, and an endless supply of gritty sand, we also had little grass mats outside the tents—makeshift porches where you could easily remove your flip-flops, wipe off your feet, and minimize the amount of beach that found its way into your sleeping bag. We had a tablecloth for the nearby picnic table, and at night there were candles scented like flowering plumeria and Hawaiian music to infuse the meal; and it was amazing food—Sal would take camp rations that by all rights should have tasted like salted cardboard and turn them into a gourmet affair complete with sauces and fruit slices, “candied what-cha-hoos and pickled hum-de-doos,” as she named them. It was fancier living than I had most of the time at home, and
that’s the image I had as I argued with myself about what should or shouldn’t be included in the little house.

  I landed on a decision to install a small one-burner stove called the “Princess.” It was a marine stove suitable for the types of meals I regularly cooked: small, elegant, and poised for something more . . . just like a princess. I had to be brutally honest with myself: I rarely used my existing four-burner stove and oven, an appliance that was labeled “Magic Chef,” a mismatch for my particular flair, which was opening up soup cans and pouring the contents into a waiting pot. The Princess left room for the ceramic sink that I’d found in the crawl space of my big house, a beautiful hand-thrown bowl fitted with a tiny pipe that instead of draining to the city sewer would dribble into a giant Ball jar to be dumped in the garden. To complete my kitchen, I designed a small drop-down table that would be connected to the kitchen counter with wood hinges—clamps that would allow me to detach the table and set it on the floor on the nights that my friends and I would gather up in the tiny living room, sitting around the small table as we ate sesame noodles and listened to Getz and Gilberto jazz, and imagined nothing in the world could be more perfect than now.