The Homestead

[Martin Hash]

In 1998, my wife, Gwynne, and I bought a piece of property to build a house on. We had talked about it for a couple years and picked out a unique architectural design that we made even more unique by using emerging materials like concrete walls, formed-tin roofing & novel construction practices. I was the general contractor and performed several of the sub-contracting specialties like driveway, kitchen, floors, landscaping & painting. I was still running my own computer software company so would visit the job site in the early mornings before work and after I got off in the evenings. Gwynne & our kids helped when they could, after school and on the weekends.

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House Construction

It was a big job, huge, impressing anyone who watched the two-year progression; and was monumental & exciting, well worth the effort, but it had the serious drawback that Gwynne and I had regular arguments about how to do things. Looking back, I think she was anxious about the risks I was taking. At the time, I couldn’t understand the nature of her anxiety, her complaints seemed more like obstacles to getting finished than helpful suggestions. I certainly wouldn’t put that kind of strain on our marriage again, and that’s saying a lot because we have since done amazingly risky things together, both financially & physically. In fact, it’s probable that building the house prepared us emotionally for all the stressful & complicated things that came after.

Now, a quarter-century later, we’ve begun to organize the attic space of the place we call home: kid’s toys, holiday decorations, building materials, business records, keepsakes, baby furniture; all the sundry detritus that accumulates over the years of growing up and raising a family. One of the things I came across was the old rolled-up blueprints for the house; they were jumbled together, faded & torn. Touching them caused an instant wave of nostalgia to pass through my body; a mixture of positive and negative, reminding me of our youth, exuberance & raising children. I sorted & organized each sheet, took pictures for posterity, then packed them back away, probably never to be seen again until after Gwynne & I are gone. What a weird melancholy trigger? I wouldn’t build another house; like most things, once is enough.

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Blueprints