This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [3]
Their sixty-some acres made a nostril in the moose’s snout, about a mile from the ocean and two hundred feet in elevation above it. A dirt road wound up from Nearings’ Cove to curve along the southern edge of the property before heading back out to the sea on the other side. Across the way were the undulating rock and scrub of a blueberry barren, and beyond that stretched the uninhabited head of the cape at the tip of the moose’s nose.
The site of my future home was only a rise in the forest surrounded by spruce and fir, a cluster of birch, and the large ash with its healthy crown of branches. “This seems like a good place to begin,” Papa had said, standing beside the tree. “We’ll have to start building right away before winter.”
“A home of our own, at last.” Mama sighed, and that image alone soothed her. She felt a twinge in her stomach, like a feather stroking the inside, and hugged her expanding belly with her arms. She hadn’t realized how homeless she’d been up until that point.
While Mama’s father was Harvard-educated and her mother descended from a passenger on the Mayflower, they never aspired to be part of wealthy Boston society or had the money to become so. Papa’s parents, Skates and Skipper, though not rich, were in the Social Register and part of the beach, tennis, and country club circles of Rumson, New Jersey. “Fonsy people,” Mama liked to joke with a blue-blood affectation. Young and in love, my parents hoped to make their way without concern for the Social Register and Harvard degrees and to leave behind their respective family affairs—shuffling off the shell of the past to grow a future of their own making.
During the last two weeks of October, Papa shoveled out a hole eight feet deep, six feet wide, and ten feet long—where the root cellar would sit beneath the house—and laid the foundation with rot-resistant cedar posts. A self-taught carpenter and woodworker, Papa learned from odd jobs and projects, including renovating the interior of the hunting lodge where they lived in Franconia. Though he’d never actually built a home before, he had a book, Your Engineered House by Rex Roberts, that broke down the process into an easy-to-follow plan.
He sketched a layout based on the blueprint in the book, eighteen by twenty feet, slightly longer than wide, with south-facing windows in the front. A shed roof rose from the back at an angle and extended past the face to provide an overhang for the front porch. Reverse board-and-batten construction would be used for the exterior siding, as Roberts suggested—meaning the inner wall studs made the seal beneath the exterior boards to save on wood. After the $2,000 for the land and other expenses, their $5,000 savings was dwindling quickly. Papa wished he could have cut and used the trees from the property, but there wasn’t time to let the wood cure, so the lumber came from the local sawmill—cedar posts, planed pine boards, and two-by-fours. Regardless, they were able to keep the cost down to $680 to build the house we called home for the next ten years, at a time when the national average for a home in town was closer to $20,000.
Papa’s tools consisted of a handsaw, hammer, level, measuring tape, and carpenter’s square. On top of the foundation he laid the beams that supported the floor, then the corner and roof supports and wall studs. He nailed on the floorboards, roof, and walls, leaving breaks for windows. Rock wool insulation was unrolled between the studs, and black tar paper served for exterior roofing. The easy part was that there were no electrical wires or plumbing to worry about,