Building the Boy, Building the Addition

In 1962 the world seemed much different than it does now.
I was in Jr. High and was always hungry as mom would attest. After getting home from school I could easily put down a half a gallon of milk and a half a dozen oranges.

During the Summer I grew over 6 inches in height. Nothing fit and my joints were always experiencing the pull from my muscles that where not growing as fast.
My parents decided to "grow" our house and add a dinning room and a bedroom for me in the back of our track split level three bedroom home. My family hired an architect to draw up the plans. His name was Donald Sandy. He was an architect of great reputation. He had even won an award for his designed from Sunset Magazine.

Our first job was to move the dirt in the backyard. From the disaster,arose new hope.
The year before we started construction, a serious landslide occurred in our backyard. An underground spring had opened up and dumped a ton of water against a slope that could not take it any more. When I came home one afternoon I heard this enormous thud. and the sound of at least 28 cubic yards of dirt came careening down the hill and took out the backyard fence and smashed up against our house.

Dad looked around and found Mr. Cushing that needed all of the clean fill he could get. He even had a "loaner" pickup truck that had a dump attachment to it. He was trying to get enough fill dirt to build a tennis court in his backyard. The round trip was about 4 miles. Dad decided that I needed to learn how to run a shovel. So ever night before dinner, dad and I were filling up wheel barrows of dirt and loading them onto the pickup truck and driving over to Mr. Cushing's backyard. He drove the truck to where the dirk needed to be and dumped it. It was always available the next time we took a load out. It seems like we had about a hundred loads of dirt. This fact will have to be verified since 7th grade eyes are not reliable.

We took out the dirt and dug a footer for a retaining wall. In the mean time,small pine trees and pampas grass were planted to keep the surface erosion down. When the form passed inspection, a group of neighbors and dad's friends came over and spent a Saturday morning rolling wheel barrows of cement from the street to the retaining wall that would form the end to the addition. They were paid by a beer here and there and a chance to help out a friend in need.

The idea of a contractor was simply out of the budget for a single wage earner family. So dad asked the architect to design the addition so that we could put it together ourselves with a a carpenter doing some of the work but basically overseeing us. Phil, our carpenter supervisor lived up the hill. He "moonlighted" at our job. During some of the phases of construction we were just clean up. In others we were wiring and paining creosote for the foundation or stuccoing.. more on that later.

And so it happened. One of Percy's friends was almost 7 feet tall. He came by and helped us set the beams. I remember spending some nights up on the roof pounding in big headed nails to keep the roof insulated and sound. The biggest job that dad and I took on together was the stucco. We got the chicken wire up. Dad rented a cement mixer for a week. I was the mixer and the hod carrier. The first batches of stucco were too loose. When dad tried to push it through the wire, the cement came tumbling onto the ground. We then tried to learn the perfect combination of water, sand and cement.

And so I learned to work... Pat