This Last House: A Retirement Memoir

Chapter Ten: Building It Again

Chapter Ten Building ItAgain M ost people who have been through the experience of building a house say “never again.” It’s easy to understand why. Yet even while we were in the thick of it, I knew I’d do it again in a minute. Now we were not only going to build again, we were going to build the same house again. I suppose that is something very few people ever get to do. You hear people say they wish they could live their life over again and try to get it right—an option not available to any of us, and it’s probably just as well. But Loren and I did get to build our house for retirement again and try to get it better. One thing we had learned from the first try was that when you build a house you’re not going to get everything right. You just aren’t. In spite of all our careful planning, there were things we wished we had done differently. The peak of the living room ceiling, for instance, wasn’t centered over the fireplace; the toilet in the guest bathroom was in plain sight from the back end of the living room. None of that kept us from enjoying our home and having a good life there. But as long as we were doing it again, we thought we might as well tweak it a little. So during the busy time between buying our lot in Glen Rose, in January, and pulling out of the driveway with all our possessions, at the end of May, we plunged into another round of planning. Three years had passed since our retirement. They had been three very full and in some ways fairly troubled years, and we both felt that we’d aged more than three years’ worth. Our energy levels had notably decreased. Even so, the pattern of how we lived our lives 197 and of how we wanted to live them had stayed pretty much the same. So our needs and wishes in a house were also basically the same. We wanted two spare bedrooms so family and friends could come visit. We still needed easy chairs in more than one room so if I wanted to watch a baseball game on TV, say, and Loren wanted to read, there would be comfortable places for both. And we still needed our own work areas—because we were both still working. We’d had these needs in mind from the start in planning the house, and it had accommodated them well. There were just a few adjustments to make. The square shape of the living room had made it hard to arrange furniture in a conversational grouping—we made it a foot longer and a foot narrower. This meant making the kitchen a foot longer too. The entry hall had proven to be so shallow that opening the door and taking people’s coats and getting them to the closet (behind the door) was awkward, so we made it six inches deeper. (It ended up not being enough.) The hall bathroom arrangement was put back more or less the way Loren had it in the first place, but a foot wider because we extended that whole side of the house by a foot. Even with all my arranging of cardboard models of furniture, I had failed to realize that there wasn’t going to be enough space to get around the twin beds in the back bedroom comfortably when making them up. Living in a space beats looking at it on paper every time. So we fixed that. The breakfast room that we had already made a foot deeper than the purchased plans allowed grew by another foot, for more ease around the table. The peak of the living room ceiling was centered over the fireplace, and the double windows in our back bedroom wall were moved over a little to center them under the peak of that ceiling. Most important of all, we widened several doors to make the house wheelchair accessible, just in case. Joyce, the builder’s wife, had urged us to make the house wheelchair accessible the first time. We had resisted the idea then. But now, after only three years, we better understood that we couldn’t know what was ahead. So we 198 this last house went to a medical...