Her Side Funnies

This post is second in a multi-part series and follows “Slipforming, part 2 – Money, jail and city life.”  For a complete list of my other articles on this project, click here.  Also, this particular post has little to do with actual slipforming, but was a major turning point in OUR home, so I am including it.

So, if you’ve followed so far, we sold the Victorian home after remodeling it to raise initial funds to begin construction of the slipformed house. That, and I did not want to go to jail for raising livestock in city limits.

We took a complete dump and turned it into a lovely Victorian. 

Then, we sold it with the condition that we could rent the property for two years while we built our next home.  To do this, we needed several things, among them a site, a plan and an ability to overcome the biggest obstacle.

Considering negotiation a finely-honed talent of mine, I knew that a neighbor had sold my father a small triangular parcel of an abandoned gravel quarry for two bales of hay.  The neighbor thought the site was useless. It was no good for crops; it would not sustain an animal, and that the odd shape of it, hillside location and abundance of rocks scattered all over it made it useless.  The parcel adjoined my parents ranch, so dad bought the property from the neighbor for two bales of hay. 

(Picture Dani, wringing her hands…) Knowing this site was close to utilities, had a great view and would work perfectly for a house, I offered to double Dad’s purchase price on the lot, (four bales of hay) and Dad called me a crook.  Really wanting this property, I offered to triple his purchase price, but stressed that I was poor, and narrowly avoiding the life of a law-breaker, and that his good deed would be well rewarded when we could keep all our own critters at our own house.  I think the last part was what swayed him.  This photo above shows one-and-a-half times the original purchase price of the site of our home.

It cost us $23,000 to bring the utilities up to the house site, leaving me $16,000 to begin the home.

So you began building a house with $16,000?

Yes, depending on how you look at it, $16,000 is either a lot of money – or, not near enough.  Ken and I looked seriously at taking a loan on a mobile home, using the $16,000 as a down payment.  We even went so far as to put a down payment on one.   Luckily, we had an exit clause in our contract because the next week, as if by magic, I received a Mother Earth News magazine in the mail. The cover story was “The Secrets of Building with Stone!”  I flipped through the pages, read an article by Tom Elpel on slipforming and thought of all the hundreds upon thousands of rocks littering the abandoned quarry.  Then, I went bananas, tearing off to mom and dad’s house to share the good news. 

I was giddy that I had figured out what kind of home to build – a ROCK one.  More exciting was the newfound discovery that if my house was made of stones, I had ample building supplies FREE – laying all over the site!   I couldn’t wait to hear Dad’s response! 

“Great!” said dad, enthusiastically.  “Where will you find someone to build it?” 

I’m going to build it, I said. 

“But you’ve never built a house before,” he said, flatly.  I probably said something sarcastic like, “Well, I didn’t walk once, but look at me now!” 

I thought if he could help me mix the cement, I could set the stones.  He was still back a paragraph re-stating “But you’ve never built anything before.” 

When it was clear that I not only intended to build a rock home, but that I intended to use a method that had not been tried before, Dad was unimpressed and even discouraging.  “Dani, this isn’t some pre-tested plan that’s been proven to work.  Some guy in Montana just thought this up,” he said.  “He’s never even tried it!”  (This is a photo of my father taken in 2007, several years after recoverying from slipforming the house with me.)

Dad stared at me. I stared back. “You know, I’ve always liked stick-frame houses,” he said.  “I’ve got several books on framing, and if you get stuck, you can call one of a dozen local guys who will be able to answer it, or even take over the project if you…(he was careful here)…uh,…well, if you cannot finish it.”  Of course, he didn’t need to finish that thought.  The risk was that if you build something that no one has tried, using a technique no one knows, local builders will be resistant to take over the project, lest it might fail and their reputation would be muddied with some housewife’s bad idea.

“I think I can do it,” I said, undeterred.  “I think it will be fun.  I think it will be exciting, and I think you will want to be a part of it,” I said.  “And even if you don’t want to, I’m going to do it anyway, whether you help or not.”  With that, the real stress began. 

Mom was worried.  Ken was worried.  Dad was worried.  Each tried to talk me out of it individually. When that did not work, they each thought the other should convince me not to do it.   (Picture the three of them standing together flipping a coin on who could best sell me on crashing the project.)  They ganged up in pairs and trio’s, mix-and-matching themselves with every new argument they could present.

From my end, I was incredibly disappointed that no one had faith in me.   

Ken thought it was “Man Hell.”  He said letting a wife, who is a cartoonist, build a home when she’d never done it before was bad, but having a mad wife was worse. 

“What if it doesn’t work?” he asked.  “What if it’s…ugly?  What if,…we spend all our money trying this experiment and it comes out a giant glob of mess - how are we going to start over with no funds?”

“It will work, though,” I’d answer.  I explained that even contractors make mistakes.  And most of the time, they are not as invested in the project as a homeowner.  “I care more about our home than anyone you could hire,” I said.  “Of course, I can go get an ordinary job, making nothing an hour after I pay for the nylons, or, I can save us thousands of dollars by doing the work of a contractor and free laborer.  I’m sure I can trim more off the cost of our house by NOT taking a job, than I can if we hire someone else.” 

“But the rock work will be heavy,” he said. 

“The lightest rock is the weight of a newborn.  The heaviest rock is the weight of a five-year-old.  Do you have any idea how many times I have lifted our kids?  I can do this!”

I’m sure it crossed Ken’s mind that I had recently tried to take up sewing a dress for Heidi and the project had morphed into a monumental headache for all concerned.  To my credit, I finished it – and mom gave it the ringing endorsement that it would be fine on a fast horse on a dark night.  (Photo of my mom, left…smiling that the dress saga was over.)  Heidi, bless her heart, wore it!  But it was a project that went from exciting to dreaded in less than an hour.  I’m sure Ken feared a similar adventure with the house.  Besides, what man in his right mind would let a woman tackle a house when she cannot even handle a dress for a six-year-old?

On a bigger scale, there seemed to be something inherently wrong with letting an inexperienced wife loose with the family wallet and several tons of cement mix.  In hindsight, I’m not sure I know of a single other husband who would have agreed to the arrangement.

As a final guarantee and proverbial olive branch, I agreed that it could be bull-dozed down if it did not work.  As a wife, going this far out on a limb, it was going to work.

And so, the first critical bridge had been crossed.  I had overcome the most difficult obstacle that any of you considering building a slip formed home, or any of life’s other challenges, will face:  doubt.   It surpasses finances, flooring, roofing, electricity, plumbing , and even those ruffle-happy Daisy Kingdom dresses – because all those have solutions.  But doubt doesn’t.  Doubt was the hardest of any obstacle I had to cross.  No other challenge in the entire process came close.  

Furthermore, I can now admit:  My husband was right to be worried, my father was entirely reasonable in his 10,000 reasons it was a bad idea, and my mother was justified to nearly develop an ulcer over the whole affair.  But all that aside, I am incredibly glad I took the chance.  On this project, everyone around me was gambling on failure.  I believe it is possible that sometimes in life, (beyond slipforming and into life itself) it is good to throw the negativity aside and gamble on success.  Our home is now proof that taking that risk can pay off.

To see Slipforming, part 4 – Death and Destruction, click here.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 11:43 am and is filed under On a serious note, Slip Form House posts. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.