I couldn’t tell you how it came about that I was convinced that I had to build the little house of my own, but if you think about the circumstances, I truthfully never really felt like the other house in Vermont was my house. It was Margaret’s house and in fact the flower beds were her flower beds. I liked them, I liked the house, I liked the flower beds, but somehow I was left with the desire to do something of my very own. I remember mostly the process. The process was what I loved about it.
I took this class about ecologically sensitive design, and that was fun, taking the class. I think I was the only person in the class who had an actual place they were going to build. Anyway, the whole thing was fun. So I did that.
I think that actually I drew up the plans afterwards. They weren’t too much on drawing plans in the class.
The Plan
I was very strict about the proportions. I decided that the way to get it to be organized is to have a standard dimension, so it was four feet. Everything had to be a multiple of four feet, and the four feet were arrived at because that’s a standard size. It was all four feet or eight feet, take your choice. The four foot module was important, because there were things I couldn’t alter that I should have. Eight foot across allowed you just so much space, and then you had to get in the bed, and then you had to get in the stove, and you couldn’t weasel in another foot in there somewhere.
Then I remember picking the place where it was going to be. We started out by putting up some panels in the place where I thought the house was probably going to be. I don’t remember who helped me. It was some woman, Dee maybe. I don’t remember who it was, but it was another woman friend, and we put up these panels, and then we went down below, to see if this not-yet-existing object would be disruptive in the landscape. I didn’t mind if you could see it a little bit, but I didn’t want it to interrupt the landscape.
So we did that. Then, I remember, there was this huge stone. I can’t remember if we moved it, or if it was just there in the first place, but I always had the idea that I would be able to lie in this little cup of space and sunbathe, unobserved, right? That was my notion.
What else? I remember setting out with a chair, I remember sitting on a chair with the house half-finished; I wanted to figure out how high the windows should be. I did that by trial and error.
Window onto a pool
I do remember thinking early on that Brad would be the person to build it, and I distinctly remember that I had this discussion with him, where I asked him if he would be willing to build this house, and I showed him what I had drawn up, and he was very reluctant, but he thought about it, and he said: “I think I could build that”. So that was very personalized.
Another thing I remember a lot about was the question of the goddamn bathtub. I wanted to get something big, and the place was so small, that I wanted it under the floor, and somebody recommended to me some local person who made wonderful barrels. But I thought it was risky, the goddamn things were going to leak, and then somebody said: “Why don’t you try roofers? They work with copper”. So I went to see some roofers. And I said that I wanted this round thing, and so on, “Oh, no problem”, they said, “Tuesday”. It was very cheap besides. It was just miraculous.
As soon as I started the process, the first thing we had to do was to make an electric line, and to do that we had to get a device which I think was called a “ditchwitch” or something like that, which ran a trench up the hill. That was to me very exciting; I wasn’t even pleased about it, it seemed very disruptive, on the other hand I wanted to have the electric line and the telephone line up there, and they had to be in, they had to be underground, so they had to have this trench in which these lines could lie. It was something I resented, but it turned out it was exactly the thing to do.
So the whole time we had the electric lines running up there, which was aesthetically not good, but on the other hand, you need electricity.
My original idea was to roll and carry the foundation stones up by hand, and then Brad pointed out that you really couldn’t do it. So we mechanically transferred the stones.
It was a great success in its funky way.
The little greenhouse was given to me by my colleagues; I had told them I would like it, so they got it for me.
Doing that house was really wonderful for me. The whole process was marvelous.
Lisa's Life 