CAREGORY: CENTRAL OREGON
PHOTOS: ORIGINAL AND PLANNED FLOOR PLANS, 1963

After living with Mary and Oliver for about six weeks, Howard told me he would help me buy a house.  I found a house and barn on 40 acres seven miles from Bend and two miles north of Tumalo for $12,000.00.  Howard paid half for a down payment, and I paid the rest in small monthly payments.   Eric and Jari and I moved there and I started doing dressmaking for a living.

What joy!  This was my second house and all my own, a real fixer-upper–another house to get my teeth into.  It was 28 feet square with a pyramidal roof.  It had two bedrooms and a bath on one side, a living room and kitchen on the other.

There was electricity but only a wood burning cook stove.  There was water that came from the Deschutes River, through irrigation ditches and into a cistern behind the house.  The ditches ran through cattle pastures where the cows drank out of it.  The only filter we had was a piece of screen where the water ran into the cistern, I suppose to keep out dead rats and water snakes.  The water was always wonderfully fresh.  I never had it tested since others in the area had the same arrangement and none of them had died from it.  This house even had its own owl: a Great Horned Owl that liked to hang out in a large old Juniper outside the living room window.

Shortly after our move, Mary also moved to Tumalo, but south of town into a large new home on Tumalo Creek near her husband’s paving company.  She and I loved to explore old country roads, and had made several jaunts into the country east of Bend.  On a trip into the Maury Mountains, we found an old, long-deserted homestead.  It had a beautiful old heating stove in it that was partially rusted and full of rat nests and rat droppings.  There were two other stoves as well in separate out buildings.  They were what are called “Bachelor cook stoves”–little cook stoves that are about two feet square with a tiny fire box and an oven that opens on both sides.   We cleaned them out and hauled all three back to my place.  I took three trips.

I built a raised hearth out of 2×6’s and plywood and glued flat shale rock onto it and on the wall behind it.  I used real mortar for the joints.  I say this because it was not sand mixed with glue as I had used between the fake bricks in the Metzger house.  The heating stove was ornate, with a chrome skirt and a chrome trophy on the top.  I cleaned it thoroughly, blackened the black part, polished the chrome, and put it on the hearth.  The hearth wall was back to back with the kitchen stove and the two stoves shared a wall hung chimney: a chimney arrangement that was typical of many older houses.  I added an antique copper boiler on the hearth to hold wood, a black cast iron kettle for kindling and cushions for sitting on the hearth beside the stove.  Part of the rock-faced hearth contained an invisible drawer for newspapers and matches that popped out with a touch latch.

I found used furniture for the house, made slip covers and draperies, put sea grass matting on the floor.  As in our Metzger house I hung a basswood screen behind the living room sofa and hung paintings on it, plus a worm-eaten gray board I had found.  It too was a piece of art.

Just like our original Metzger house, this one had only posts and post bases for a foundation.  I later added one of concrete block.

Right away, I made a plan of the house and designed two additions.  One was an expansion of the kitchen for an eating nook with banquette seating under corner widows looking out at Smith Rocks, and Gray, Grizzly, and the Powell Buttes to the northeast.  It was a wonderful view with cloud shadows playing over the buttes all day long.  I started on this addition almost immediately and actually finished it before we left there.

The second addition I planned was for a living room with a view of the Cascade Mountains to the northwest.  The house had a wonderful view of the Three Sisters, but the bedrooms had been placed on that side of the house.  Just as in our Metzger house, I placed the prospective living room at an angle to take best advantage of the view.  It was two steps down from the rest of the house.  The floor was to be a concrete slab with 2×6 floor joists over it and heat passages between them so the floor would be warm.  At the end toward the house the wood floor ended leaving the concrete slab exposed to form a sunken hearth for a stove.  Cushions would be placed on the wood floor so one could sit with their feet in the pit facing the fire.  Between the pit and the new entry hall was a wall of ranked stove wood, so the round ends of the stacked wood would form the back wall of the entry hall.  The other side of the wood faced the fire pit.  If this living room had ever been built, the original living room would have become a dining room.