CATEGORY: METZGER
PHOTOS:
1) HOUSE
2) ORIGINAL FLOOR PLAN
3) REMODELED FLOOR PLAN
4) PLOT PLAN
5) HOUSE WITH CARPORT AND LANDSCAPING
6) HEARTH IN FAMILY ROOM
7) PLOT PLAN. PRINTER WOULDN’T PRINT THE WHOLE PAGE
8) ADDITION
9) ELEVATION OF COMPLETED HOUSE. I HAD TO TURN IT SIDEWAYS BECAUSE IT WOULDN’T PRINT THE OTHER WAY
10) LIVING ROOM SOFA
11) LIVING ROOM SHOWING HANGING BOOK SHELVES
12) LIVING ROOM SHOWING DIVIDER MADE OF CRIB SIDES

When Howard and I were first married in 1950, his father came out from Wyoming and helped us buy a very small house on an acre of land in Metzger near Tigard. The house cost $4,500.00.  It had a living room, kitchen with dinette, one bedroom with closet, bathroom, laundry room, and an attic accessible through a trap door in the ceiling. 

I was ecstatic, because of course I could see it needed remodeling, redecorating and additions.  And those were my favorite things to design.  Those were the days when I was an energetic, if not always knowledgeable, carpenter, and not always knowledgeable designer .  I knew how to use a hammer, nails and saw, which I thought was all I needed to know. What else was there?!  Howard even got me an electric skill saw and an electric drill.  What could I do except proceed at full-tilt ahead?

However, I did not start work on this house without a plan.  At least I knew that much.  First, I measured everything and drew a scale plan of both the house and the lot (we had decided to keep only the quarter acre on which our house stood and sell the rest).  Then I designed our future house just as if I knew what I was doing.  This plan got changed from time to time, but basically I had the whole dream intact from the beginning.

Somebody asked me once, “Didn’t you even get a permit?  A PERMIT?  What was a permit?  I had grown up on a ranch next to a small town in a sparsely populated part of Oregon.  Whoever heard of a permit?  My young years were during the depression and, if there was any building done at all, people built what they wanted to build the way they wanted to build it.  My father had built an addition on to our kitchen using boards that he had torn from the floor of the hayloft in our barn.  Had he gotten a PERMIT?

The street in front of our house was up a short steep bank from the level of the house and had no shoulder, so there was no place to park our car except on the side street, which was 200 ft. from the house.  Therefore, a driveway was first on the list.  I dug, filled and graded it by hand using a shovel, wheelbarrow and a rake.  It became an abstraction of a U shaped drive so we could exit without having to back onto the street up a slope.  Doing the driveway entailed building two rock retaining walls.   I discovered I loved rolling and placing rock.

Next, I built a shed-roofed, 18 ft. wide carport.  I used 2×4’s for the roof joists attached to the house wall just under the eave.  This new roof had a pitch of about 1 to 12″.  I put cedar shingles on the roof just like we put on the chicken house at the ranch when I was ten .  I knew how to shingle a ROOF, after all!  It not only sagged, but leaked backwards.  I was incredulous!!  How could that have been possible??!  I tore off the roof and built a new one using 2×8’s with their upper ends over, instead of under, the eave.  I very carefully removed the shingles, saving as many as I could.  I removed the 2×4’s, pulling every nail.  I knew that 2×4’s were the magic ingredient of all good things.  I was 21 years old.  I was 21 going on 12.

After that, I built a large walk-in closet off one side of the house using my precious 2×4’s.  In anticipation of turning the bedroom into a family room, I tore out the two-foot deep by six foot wide closet between the bedroom and the kitchen and connected the two rooms with a pass-through.  It felt friendlier right away.  Getting on a roll with friendliness, I tore out the wall between the bedroom and the dinette end of the kitchen, and then the wall at the other end of the bedroom opening it to the large laundry room.  The laundry room was large in proportion to the other rooms in the house and occupied the best location in the house, having south sun and a view down over farm fields toward the Tualatin River.  I continued removing that wall so the laundry room was also open to the kitchen.  I moved the washing machine (an automatic Bendix!) into a remodeled bathroom, and put a large south window where the washing machine had been.  Now the laundry room became an eating area with a view of our pretty back yard, and the afore mentioned fields and hills.  The kitchen could then be expanded into the original dinette at its opposite end.  The bedroom was now, with the addition of a sofa bed, a combination bedroom/family room just as I had envisioned.

Next, I built two bedrooms in the attic, with access by a very steep step-ladder-like stair that ascended eight vertical feet in four and a half horizontal feet.  It was only 18” wide and very good looking.  I rabbeted grooves with a chisel in the vertical-grain-fir 2×8 side rails, inserted the 2×8 treads and wrapped them in carpet.

I built a raised hearth where the closet had been, covered it with quarry tiles, and backed it with white painted brick.  The “bricks” were cut out of tempered masonite, glued to the wall and mortared with a mixture of sand and glue.  I put a little pot-bellied stove at one end of the hearth.  I got it for $30.00 at Sears and Roebuck.  I had to have a wood burning stove; it was just part of good living.  Now Howard and I could lie in bed at night and see reflections the fire flickering on the ceiling.  Little did we know it was prophetic!

There was a chimney, but it was in the wrong place, so I had to build a new one.  I put up a stove pipe the way I had seen it done in sheep herder cabins in my out-back youth.  I did have a Metalbestos chimney installed in the roof, but I failed to bring it down to the first floor ceiling.  Instead, I put up four 2 x 4 corner posts in the attic with a bare 6” stove pipe in the center.  I wrapped the stove pipe in sheets of asbestos all the way out to the 2×4’s.  As a result, I set the house on fire.  Thanks to the easy access stair, I was able to put it out.  From that I learned that asbestos may not burn but it can transfer heat almost instantly, and in full force.

It took me a few years to turn a whole small house into half of a larger house.  I had drawn every detail of the remodel and of the addition I hoped to do later. The addition was bigger than the original house.  It was one story, at a 45° angle to the original, and three steps down.  I even staked it out and leveled the ground.  It had an entry hall, a living room, three bedrooms and a compartmented bathroom–all under a low pitched roof with wide overhangs.  It was a modern look in the Frank Lloyd Wright style—that is, before being modern meant a white plaster, chrome and glass box.  This was 1950 after all.  On paper, I blended it in with the original house by removing the existing attic and extending the pitch of the carport roof over the house.  The addition had lots of glass looking out into our beautifully landscaped back yard.  It even had an indoor-outdoor bathroom with a walled garden.

Meanwhile we slept in the dining/family room.  Our dining table, for special occasion dining, was a drop-leaf coffee table which I had made from a whole drop leaf table purchased at a rummage sale for $2.00.  I sawed off and hinged its legs so they folded under and zapped on to the upper part of the leg with magnets.  It could be turned into a dining table in a jiffy with the kind of fasteners used on tool boxes.

You may wonder where my husband was during all this.  I will tell you.  He was stunned into immobility–in shock at what he had married: a human buzz saw in the shape of a woman.  He came home at night both in dread and anticipation.  Anticipation???  You must think I’m joking!  But YES–ANTICIPATION!–because, besides the more appalling things I did, I also accomplished many appealing things at very little cost: things that made  the interior of our little house into something that looked like pages out of House Beautiful—well, except for the family room.  Too country.  I was good at “Country” though.  I mean I didn’t exactly grow up in a city.

I covered one wall of our new family room with a mural of a barley field with floor to ceiling barley heads in the foreground and Mt. Rainier in the background.  It was the picture part of a bill board ad given to me by the Rainier Beer Company: Cost: 0.  I was so proud of this that I later showed a picture of it to one of my design professors at the University of Oregon School of Architecture.  He almost threw up.  But HEY!  I grew up with barley fields even though Mt Hood was my mountain instead of Mt. Rainier.  I covered one wall of the living room with horizontal, inch wide by 8^th inch strips of basswood that I discovered I could get from a basswood screen company back in Ohio: cost: about $15.00.  I hung them from strips of filament tape fastened to the top of the wall every 10 inches.  It transformed the room.  A woven basswood screen, long in my possession, that had started my basswood craze, hung from the wall above the sofa as a background for a large, REALLY STRANGE painting that was Howard’s pride and joy: Cost: $0: the painting and screen being already in hand. I made ivory colored draperies: Cost: $20.00.  I made an 11 ft. long by 30 inch wide by 4 inch thick bench-top the length of one wall, set it on a six ft. wide drawer with 45° angle ends narrowing at the bottom and painted them both a gun-metal blue-gray, a color picked up from the painting.  I covered a six ft. foam rubber pad and bolsters with the same ivory colored fabric as the draperies and put them on top the bench above the drawer.  This montage became an 11 ft. long sofa with cantilevered end tables.  Cost: about $45.00.  I made a room divider at one end of the sofa out of the two sides of the baby crib after we didn’t need it any more.  This ladder-like divider was four feet from, and facing, the front door and next to the opening into the kitchen.  It defined the entry space.  Cost: $0.   I made book shelves and, instead of hanging them from the wall, hung them from the ceiling by thin but strong nylon cords strung through holes drilled in the corners of the shelves.  Cost: about $5.00.

Side Story: A neighborhood builder came over, at my request, to talk about the possibility of putting a concrete block foundation under the house which had been built on concrete blocks and posts.  This, of course, should have been done at the very beginning, but in my ignorance and typical of my erratic way of doing things, I waited until the concrete-floored carport had been built, making doing the foundation about ten times more difficult.  Lying on my side, I had previously dug out all the dirt (rich top soil) to make an 18-inch crawl space.  This man and I stood in the entry area talking.  He was over six feet tall and brawny, and his typical stance while talking was to lean one hand high on a wall and the other on his hip.  At first he leaned on the jamb of the cased opening between the living room and the kitchen.  Then he took his hand down and started to lean on the baby crib room divider.  I cried, “Oh, don’t lean on that!  It is just put up there with a few screws and some glue!”  Then he straightened up, put that hand on his hip and started to put his other hand on the book shelves that were on the other side of the entry door.  I cried out again, “Oh, don’t lean on the shelves!  They are just hanging from the ceiling…. by….. cords.”  There was a silence.  He straightened up slowly and folded both arms across his chest.  Then he started to chuckle.  He said, “What kind of a lash-up have you got here anyway?  And no foundation either!  Is this whole house put together with scotch tape?”  We both laughed.  I didn’t tell him that it was a Scotch tape product that was holding up the basswood on the living room wall.