Speaking of building houses, which I do on occasion since I designed and built them for many years, brings back memories. One: somewhat bizarre and very sad. A few: somewhat less bizarre and not so sad.
I had been building houses for about five years when I met Ed and Cindy (not their real names). Ed worked in middle management for a large IT company, and Cindy was his brand-new bride. It was his third brand-new bride, as it turned out, but I’m not judgmental and the budget was very generous. The house, completed on schedule if a bit over budget, was several miles from where Ed worked, so he drove the Interstate, to and from, every day. It was one such day that a drunken driver jumped the median and killed Ed instantly. Soon thereafter, Cindy sold the home she couldn’t bear to live in alone. About one year later, the buyer of the home, a single man whose name escapes me, committed suicide on the outside deck after sipping champagne and watching the sunset. About two years after that, the husband, of a couple whose names I never knew, was found murdered in the master bedroom. I don’t know if the house has been occupied since.
I remember the very first house I built. It was for a young couple, Dale and Alice, who had been trying for years to have a baby. Their attempt to conceive a child was bearing no fruit of the womb (pardon the pun), so they conceived instead of the idea to put the fruit bearing on hold and build a house. The designing went well and the construction went equally well, if rather slowly. All-consuming, the project involved many hours and long meetings that often went into the wee hours. Over time we became good friends; you might even say close friends, very close friends. Of course, a few months into the project, Alice discovered she was, at last, with fruit. After a candid discussion of the events leading up to the discovery, it was concluded that I was responsible (figuratively, not literally: we weren’t that close).
As you might expect, things can get interesting when the building project changes after the design is complete and the construction is well under way. Believe me, they get far more interesting when the project stays the same but the client changes after the design is complete and the construction is well underway. Phil (his real name) contracted me to design and build a house in the style of a old Vermont barn, a popular style at the time. I did him one better and found an actual old Vermont barn that was about to be demolished. We carefully deconstructed it, cataloguing every hand-hewn post and beam, and moved it to his site. We reconstructed the shell and created a truly unique, if rustic, bachelor pad inside. The house was nearing completion when Phil became engaged to be married. Needless to say, Janet (not her real name: I’ve forced it from my memory) did not care for Phil’s bachelor barn. I knew the project was going south when Janet announced that “there was no way she was going to live in a barn.” I don’t know if the house was ever completed; after a few weeks, we all agreed that I was no longer “right for the project.”
Several years after I had completed a lovely house on a lovely, if very severe, building lot, I learned the story of “The Vanishing Ring.” You need to understand that in Vermont most houses have basements. Sometimes people live in those basements and never build the rest of the house (but that’s another story). Sometimes the geography doesn’t allow a full basement, and the house may have a full or partial crawl space. Usually unfinished and un-floored, they can make nice root cellars (look it up), or nice wine cellars, or nice, if somewhat damp, storage spaces. This house had just such a crawl space, but the lady of the house found it ugly, useless and somewhat frightening. For this reason, and as a surprise, her husband arranged to have a concrete floor poured in the space while they were vacationing in Aruba.
Returning from vacation, the wife was pleased at first then appalled when she remembered that she had buried her mother’s wedding ring in the crawl space dirt. She thought she knew exactly where it was. It turned out she didn’t. A week later the crawl space was dirt once again and the front yard featured a lovely pile of concrete rubble. A week after that the concrete contractor, returning from his vacation and hearing the story, related that he had found a jar of unknown contents buried in the crawl space dirt and had carefully tucked it in the floor supports above where he found it: where they found it soon after.
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