This Last House: A Retirement Memoir

Chapter Five: Planning Our House

C hapter Fi v e PlanningOur House P lanning a house isn’t just a matter of drawing walls and the location of doors and windows on a piece of paper or a computer screen. These basics are important, of course, as are floor coverings and paint colors and all the other things that go into making a house, and any botched choice along the way will be a disappointment for a very long time. But a house is more than that. It reflects who we are, shapes who we are. We move from house to house, repainting here, remodeling there, fixing up or scarring up, mowing or littering, and as we do, we remodel ourselves. Planning a house means planning a life. But that’s not easy to do when the house you are planning is for retirement and you haven’t yet lived retired. We were trying to guess how our time would be spent in a future of days we were only beginning to imagine. It was entirely different from any of the home looking and home buying we had done in the past. Not only was it harder to plan from the ground up, but we had to give more thought to our personal values and think about our wishes for the future more carefully. Flo o r Plan s Rationalists that we are, we went about planning our house in much same way we had gone about deciding where we wanted to live: we first defined a set of basic requirements as guidelines. It must be a single-story house; arthritic knees don’t enjoy stairs. It must have three bedrooms, so we could sleep children and grandchildren who 89 came to visit, provided they didn’t all come at once. Accommodating these visitors also meant two dining areas, which we wanted anyway because that’s what we were used to. There had to be two good work places for desks and computers. A tub and a shower in the master bath. And no matter what, it had to have lots of windows, both for looking out and to provide ventilation. We wanted to live without air conditioning on our mountain ridge. It needed a kitchen big enough that we could work in it together and it needed a variety of comfortable spaces for us to sit together and talk—or sit alone and read or just reflect. Governing everything else was an assumption that in building this house we would not be trading up but down. In choosing to retire we were choosing to reduce our incomes. We weren’t going to be on Social Security alone; we would also have the retirement annuities we (and our employers) had been paying into for years. But the two together would be less than the salaries we’d been getting, and we expected to live accordingly. We weren’t exactly planning something on the order of Thoreau’s cabin in the woods, but we did expect to observe Thoreau’s principle of “simplify, simplify.” We would build, we thought, a house of about 1,200 square feet. At first Loren had his heart set on a log house. Whatever we built, he meant to do part of the work himself, and he knew there were kits available with pre-cut logs and the other basic materials needed for model number so-and-so. He was actually thinking he could put one up all by himself. I think in his heart of hearts that was what he truly wanted to do: build a log house with no help from anybody except for the detailed finish work that requires special skills and the things like plumbing and wiring that have to be done by licensed journeymen in order to pass inspection. I suggested that we might be able to persuade our sons and son-in-law (the aptly-named Angel) to come out and work on it during summer vacations, but he said no, he wouldn’t want to impose on them. Anyway, he thought he could rig up hoists to get even the heaviest logs into place without help. 90 this last house So we got magazines and brochures about log homes and started studying them. I quickly became disenchanted. For one thing, the plans we saw all seemed to run to extremes—either plain little cabins, closer to Thoreau’s than we cared to...