CATEGORY: METZGER

The addition I designed for our little house in Metzger was never built.  My marriage to Howard was not a successful one.  I took Eric and Jari and moved to Tumalo near Bend, then to Eugene to get a degree in architecture, then to Portland, and then to Port Townsend to start a career.  But the process I went through on that first house made me a life long advocate of starter houses.  What better way to get the house that you want on a limited budget, than by starting small and adding on?

During those early years, I sometimes bought magazines of starter houses but was always disappointed.  They were inevitably small houses with a small living room, dining room and kitchen.  The add-on feature was usually a second bathroom and more bedrooms.  The finished house had lots of bedrooms and the same small living, dining and cooking areas.  It was like the old woman who lived in the shoe.  She would be trying to cook for “so many children she didn’t know what to do” in a tiny kitchen, and use a shoe horn to get them around a tiny table in the tiny dining room.

I thought I could do better.  Appreciating my delightful Metzger kitchen and remembering the kitchen at the ranch where I grew up, I thought, why not start with a big country kitchen?  Everyone lives in the kitchen anyway.   In the beginning, it would be the living room, dining room and kitchen all in one, and when the additions were made later (living room, dining room, more bedrooms and baths) the kitchen would be big enough to service the whole house.  It would still be the big, homey room that it had always been.

While I was still living in Metzger, just for fun, I started designing a house that could be built a little at a time, starting with a country kitchen, half-bath and laundry on the main floor, and one bedroom and bath on the second floor.  It was a rather simple Cape Cod type structure with a 45° roof pitch.  It was so simple that it could take on many faces.  There was a variety of possibilities for the additions also, but the finished product was basically the same house.  Over the years I kept playing around with it.  When passive solar became popular in the mid ’60’s, I got hooked on that and did versions of the house for every position of south in relation to the street.

While I was going to college in Eugene, I worked for awhile at the Elks Club as a cocktail waitress.  I was amazed to see that they could set up walls to make meeting rooms anywhere in their big ball room in just a few minutes.  These walls were light weight four ft. wide panels, just barely short of floor to ceiling height. They were made like flush doors but with the door skins extending out a short distance around the edges making a channel.  In the channel was a rubber tube, like an elongated bicycle inner tube.  They would bring the panels in on a cart, along with a pressurized air tank, put them in place, and blow up the tube with air.  Zouup! The wall section was in place!  Some of the panels had standard size doors in them for access to these temporary rooms.  I utilized this idea in some of my designs for the starter house, turning summer breezeways into winter solar collectors using the pneumatic system with light weight clear plastics instead of heavy glass.  I included an easy access storage place in which to stash them in the off season.

Over the years I added other build-by-addition houses to my collection.  The kitchen in my house in Port Townsend fitted the Country Kitchen model with an ingle nook at one end and a long table down the center, so I used its design as a nucleus for some of them.  I did one for a builder friend that turned out very well starting with a 20’x 20’ daylight basement–just right for a bachelor.  I called it “The Bare Bare Minimum.”  It had a shower and toilet for a bathroom.  A laundry tray provided both a lavatory basin and a kitchen sink.  Next to it were a small base cabinet, a range and a refrigerator. These last two provided the wiring and space necessary for the future laundry.  A closet across one wall later became the stairway up to the second-stage 20’x 20’ kitchen built on top the basement. Next was a bedroom and bath on top of that.  The roof of all three of these little squares was designed so that it could be lifted with a crane for each additional level.  After that, the house expanded outward on three sides with a descending hip roof, the final design having a barn-like look.  The last “growing house” I designed was also a “shrinking house”.  It could be changed into a duplex when the owners wanted to down-size.

As I added to this collection, I thought that I might try to publish some of the designs in a book or magazine.  However as time went by, the whole idea of starter houses became rather obsolete.  It might work in the country for people who would buy land and didn’t want a mortgage–people who wanted to stay in the same place, in the same house for a very long time.  But how many people were like that?  Americans seemed to thrive on mortgages and “moving up” by selling and buying bigger.  Zoning and CC&R’s prevented building small houses in many urban and suburban areas–but of course starter houses had to start small in order to be starter houses.  Codes prevented some of the features that made my small houses work.  So I put my file away and there it has remained for over thirty years.

Lately I have been seeing on the internet, many little, even tiny houses, that people are building–in their back yards to rent out; on wheels or skids in their parents back yard to avoid codes so they can have ladders to a sleeping loft instead of stairs three feet wide, or on their own land to live inexpensively.  Maybe that time has come again.  I will get out my file, dust it off, maybe make some more modern changes, and see if a publisher wants them.  I might even make working drawings (Wow! What a job that would be!) and see if I can sell copies of the plans.   So-o whada ya think?