A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

by Michael Pollan

  With his cabin “so slightly clad,” Thoreau wrote, “I did not need to go out doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather.” It’s almost as though Thoreau’s dream house keeps wanting to dissolve itself back into the landscape; he cannot make his walls thin enough, and has nothing but scorn for the whole hypercivilized distinction between inside and out. What he calls his “best room,” in fact, was no room at all, but the “pine wood behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.”

  However whimsical, Thoreau was giving voice to a concept of American space that others of a slightly more practical bent would eventually pick up on. Indeed, it could be argued that Thoreau’s crude hut by the pond, or at least his account of it, has had a profound impact on the course of American architecture. Certainly Thoreau was militating for a transparency to nature and an open plan—for “a house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest”—long before American architecture attempted to build these things.

  The modernist glass house eventually fulfilled Thoreau’s dream of transparency—and brought its inhumanness to light. For although the glass house was a brilliant conceit, the material embodiment of the American romance of nature, it proved to be an inhospitable shelter. It fell to Frank Lloyd Wright to realize Thoreau’s dream of a centrifugal house without forsaking the satisfactions of shelter that Bachelard describes. Wright designed houses with strong, compelling centers (“It comforted me,” he said in accounting for his love of massive central hearths, “to see the fire burning deep in the solid masonry of the house itself”) that nevertheless unfolded outward, pushing into the surrounding landscape and dematerializing their walls—metaphorically scraping off Thoreau’s regretted plaster in order to admit nature once again, though on our own terms now. Outdoor nature for Bachelard is something the archetypal house girds against, or offers refuge from. For Thoreau and Wright and generations of American house builders, the land is what the house wants to embrace.

  It must have been some such sense of American space that compelled me to situate my dream of a hut out in the woods, first as a child and then, some thirty years on, as a parent-to-be. Being the most literal people the world has ever known, it’s hard to imagine any American possessed by such a dream contenting himself for very long with the sort of imaginary hut-within-the-house Bachelard describes. Or even, for that matter, with Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own, since her room is not a built thing so much as an agreed-upon thing, a consensual space located within a house still under the control of others. We Americans have always taken our metaphors very seriously, ever since we first decided it would be a good idea to site and actually build the “city on a hill” that generations of less literal-minded people had been content to regard as a nice figure of speech. But giving form and an address to our most abstract mental constructs—to our wildest dreams—seems to be what we do here. “Build therefore your own world,” Emerson urged, and we have tried.

  This doesn’t, however, quite explain how my own grown-up dream of a hut expanded to include the improbable idea of building it with my own hands. Any number of qualified general contractors could have rendered my dream perfectly literal with no help from me, and I’m sure it would have turned out a lot more square and true than it did. This was the part—the do-it-yourself part—that I could not have foreseen. Judith suspects that the prospect of a house vibrating with the howls of an infant—our son, Isaac, was born shortly before construction began—would have made any time-consuming outdoor project look attractive just then. Maybe, but you’d think I could have come up with an easier and more socially acceptable avenue of escape, like taking on paid work for which I had some acumen.

  At least some of the blame for this unlikely turn of events should probably go to a captivating if slightly irresponsible book that Charlie lent me soon after our fateful exchange before the bedroom window. The book was called Tiny Houses, and had been written, or drawn (since it contains very few words), by an architect by the name of Lester Walker. Essentially a pattern book, and very much in the American grain, Tiny Houses presents photographs and architectural drawings of some forty one-person structures. The book includes plans for most of the tiny houses I knew about—Thoreau’s cabin; Jefferson’s honeymoon cottage (where he lived for several years while Monticello was being built); George Bernard Shaw’s writing hut—and a great many others I didn’t. There are ice-fishing shanties built on top of frozen lakes; a handful of funky prefab cottages; a forty-two-square-foot “rolling home” built in the back of a 1949 delivery van; several minuscule vacation cabins (including an “inside-out” summer house in which everything but the bed is arranged along the exterior walls of a tiny sleeping hut—perhaps the ultimate centrifugal house); a self-sufficient mobile home modeled on a space capsule (!); a two-hole outhouse that a painter had converted into a meditation hut, and, the tiniest house of all, a wooden bus shelter that measures two feet four inches square and can hold two children “but only if they are standing.”

  As Charlie may very well have hoped, I found myself spending a fair number of my insomniac hours in the company of Tiny Houses, marveling at the ingenuity of their designs, the enterprise of their builders, and more than anything else, the distinct and exceedingly quirky character of these structures. The best of them were houses cast in the first-person singular, each the precise material expression, in wood or canvas or aluminum or plastic or simple tar paper, of a single individual. By studying the plans and snapshots of these houses you felt you understood something essential about their builders, as though the building were a second face, another window on the self. After paying a visit to his friend Daniel Ricketson’s vine-tangled Gothic Revival shanty in Brooklawn, Massachusetts, Thoreau wrote in his journal that in the building’s architecture “I found all his peculiarities faithfully expressed, his humanity, his fear of death, love of retirement, simplicity, etc.”

  I doubt that a big house could ever offer quite so intense a distillation of a single character or voice, so tight and uncompromising a fit of space to self. George Bernard Shaw’s writing hut, for example, an eight-by-eight pine shack at the bottom of his garden, was constructed on a steel turntable that allowed him to single-handedly rotate the building during the course of the day, in order to follow the arc of the sun. What could better suit a playwright than a house that looked at the world not from any one angle, but from every possible angle in turn?

  Books like this have a way of gently interrogating the reader’s imagination, provoking the kinds of questions that can only be answered by way of a daydream. One cannot skim Tiny Houses without wondering, What would my first-person house look like? Would it be fixed or mobile, and what should it be made of? Where’s the best place to site it, and what would I want its windows to look out on? And yet there is one fairly obvious question the book plainly doesn’t want you to ask, which is, Who could I hire to build it for me?

  “One of the great thrills in life is to inhabit a building that one has built oneself,” Walker writes in his introduction, neatly closing off that particular avenue of speculation. “My goal was to inspire people of all ages and degrees of carpentry skill…to take hammer in hand and build themselves a little dream.” There was something intrinsically do-it-yourself about the best of these buildings. You could see how their character was part and parcel of the work that went into making them, work that bore all the marks of the amateur. And one of those marks, as that word’s root reminds us, is love.

  A house in the first person did not seem like something a third party could build. To hire the local Goeltz, to knock the thing off from a picture in a catalog, was to miss the point, or at least, the possibility. For besides getting his son off his back for a while, what had my father really gotten out of his hut-building projec
t? What had he learned from it? Not nearly as much as he might have, or as I stood to were I to build my house myself. I began to see how there might be a connection between the kind of mental life I hoped such a place might house and the kind of work I’d have to learn in order to build it, a connection hinted at in words such as independence, individual, pragmatic, self-made. To build a house in the first person, a place as much one’s own as a second skin, would require an exploration of self and place—and work itself—that simply could not be delegated to somebody else. The meaning of such a place was in its making.

  And anyway, this Lester Walker made building sound so easy, so roll-up-your-sleeves doable, as he chipperly introduced his plans for “very, very inexpensive small dwelling projects that would take a week or two to build.” Obviously Walker had neither my proficiency nor Charlie’s architecture in mind. If I strung together all the days I ended up working on it, my own first-person house took closer to six months to build and cost somewhere on the far side of $125 a square foot. (Thoreau famously claimed to have spent only $28.12½ building his cabin, but no construction cost accounting can ever be believed.) Yet, not having any way of knowing these things in advance, I began to entertain and then actually to believe that perhaps I could build such a building myself, and that doing so could prove not only economical and interesting but necessary in some mysterious way.

  For someone as attached to words and books and chairs as I am, gratuitous physical labor wouldn’t ordinarily hold much appeal. Yet I had lately developed—in the garden, as it happened—an appreciation for those forms of knowledge that seem to yield most readily to the hands. Different kinds of work, performed with different sets of tools, can disclose different faces of the world, and my work in the garden had revealed a face of nature I’d never seen before, not as a reader or a spectator. What I’d gleaned there was a taste of what the “green thumb” has in abundance, this almost bodily sense of plants and the earth that comes from handwork, sweat, and a particular quality of attention that involves very little intellect, but all of the senses. It reminded me just how much of reality slips through the net of our words, and that time spent working directly with the flesh of the world is the best antidote for abstraction.

  Of course I knew something about gardening. And while it seems to me building has some striking things in common with gardening—both are ways of giving shape to a landscape; of joining elements of nature and culture to make things of usefulness and beauty; of, in effect, teasing meaning from a tree—the intellectual and physical abilities each discipline calls for could scarcely be more different. In the garden a casual approach to geometry, a penchant for improvisation, and a preference for trial and error over the following of directions will rarely get you into serious trouble. Building a house is another story. It seemed to me that the difference between gardening and building was a little like the difference between cooking (which I like to do) and baking (which I can’t), a difference that has everything to do with one’s attitude toward recipes. Mine has always been cavalier.

  Yet after a while the sheer improbability of building something myself became the most important reason for attempting it. Just because I hadn’t come by the necessary skills or habits of mind naturally (and certainly not genetically) didn’t mean I couldn’t cultivate them. During the renovation of our house I’d spent enough time observing the intricate discipline of the architect and wondering at the carpenter’s fluency with the things of this world to have acquired an admiration for these alien habits of mind, and over time my admiration blossomed into envy. Watching the carpenters patiently translate Charlie’s sheaf of abstractions into the reality of a habitable and meaningful room, I realized that what I beheld was the very foil of my own impatient and disorderly brain.

  Straight and plumb, square and level, right and true: To someone like me, who can always see at least two sides of every issue, who spends his days in the company of words he dearly loves but knows better than to trust, these concepts glistened in the light of an obsolete but still longed-for certainty. Staunch, dependable, beyond the reach of argument, they were qualities you could actually build a house with. I envied all that: the deliberate, first-this-then-that of architecture, the old reliable syntax of carpentry, the raising of nonmetaphorical structures on the nonmetaphorical ground.

  Writers sometimes like to draw glib parallels between building and writing, but it seemed to me nothing could be farther from the truth. Did the writer inhabit a world where “true” and “right” were things you could ascertain, where abstractions stood or fell of their own weight, where the existence of something didn’t depend on a consensus? At the end of his day the builder alone could say—and yet didn’t need to say, because there it was—he had added something to the stock of incontestable reality, created a new fact. It sounded too good to be true. This might not be a universe where I’d feel even remotely at home, but it was one that I resolved to visit, in the hope of finding something I needed to know.

  I was in no hurry to tell anyone about the do-it-myself part of my plan, fully expecting a cold shower of skepticism, if not outright ridicule. Judith especially, who was already armed with many excellent reasons to be dubious about the project, had to be approached carefully. As she pointed out the first time I broached the idea to her, over dinner one evening, she’d never once seen me try to repair a broken chair, let alone build anything from scratch. But I was ready for this, and the notion that I was proposing to build the thing myself precisely because I was so ill-equipped to do so proved to be a deft rhetorical stroke, a jujitsu move that effectively disarmed her skepticism by embracing it. By the end of the conversation Judith could fairly be described as supportive, though she strongly, and as it turned out wisely, urged that I look for someone who could help me—someone, as she put it, “who at least has a clue.”

  When I finally decided to call Charlie, we’d been living in the house he’d designed for nine months, and already the place fit us like a set of familiar clothes. We were almost whole again financially, and the bruises of the construction process had all but healed. For now, I was working in the loft of the barn where Judith paints, and that was tolerable—as long as I didn’t mind the turpentine fumes rising from her palette in winter, the atticlike heat that collected up there in summer, and the yammering drizzle of her talk radio all year long. Painters and writers clearly use different sides of the brain when working, which makes sharing a sound system, if not a space, virtually impossible. The barn loft was a room to work in, but it certainly wasn’t a room of my own.

  Since moving back into the house, I’d gotten into the habit of dressing in front of the bedroom window, a fine vantage from which to assess the daily progress of the seasons, the weather, the garden. This is the window where I’d stood with Charlie a year before, and every morning I’d find myself drawn to the same spot, daydreaming my way down the garden path, a shirt button at a time, in the general direction of that notion of his, which by now seemed very much my own. I still wasn’t picturing anything terribly specific, not yet. But no longer nothing, either.

  And so on one of those mornings, in the spring before the summer that brought Isaac, I called Charlie first thing to tell him my plan. I told him that not only did I want to go ahead with the building we’d discussed, but that I was thinking of building it myself. I expected a protest, and probably would have backed right off had I detected any sign of one. But Charlie didn’t even inhale hard. He acted as if my being a builder were the most natural thing in the world. Which was daunting.

  I told him that, much as I appreciated his offer of a free design, I intended to pay him for it. But he needed to understand that whatever plan he came up with, it had to be simple enough for someone like me to build.

  “You mean idiot-proof,” Charlie said; he hadn’t asked.

  “I won’t take that personally.”

  I launched into a rambling monologue about the little temple I envisioned. “It could be like a…with a desk looking
out on…and we can’t forget to…”—this long flight of long-pent words straining to capture this still dreamy room of my own. Charlie let me go on like this for a while. And then he broke in to ask a perfectly straightforward question to which I had no answer.

  “So where do you want to put this building?”

  Aside from someplace in the landscape framed by that window, I had no idea. Much as I’d been daydreaming about the building, I’d neglected to settle on a spot for it. I hadn’t even ventured out those three hundred feet to walk the land yet, at least not on foot. I realized I’d flunked my first test in Concrete Reality.

  “Look, there’s no point talking about this or any other building in the abstract,” Charlie explained, “because the site is going to dictate so much about it. This thing is one kind of guy if we perch him on the edge of the meadow looking back toward the house, and something completely different if he’s sitting off in the woods all by himself. So that’s the first thing you need to do…”

  Charlie was trying, gently, to bring me and my daydreamy notion down to the ground.

  First this, then that.

  The time had come for me to site my building, to fix this dream of mine to the earth.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Site

  Settling on the site of a new building is a momentous act, at least if you stop to think about it. That not everybody does is obvious from all those buildings that crouch like strangers on their own land, looking out of place or simply oblivious. Yet it may be that you can think too much about site selection. Because deciding on the right place to build is also uncannily simple, a process in which the advice of the senses and intuition is often your most reliable guide. I of course came to this realization very late, and only by the most roundabout path.