When I had finished remodeling the studio, I was flush with new carpentry, plumbing and electrical skills. I had a tool belt and a bunch of tools and I knew how to use almost all of them... The deck that I built on the back of the studio overlooking the horse pasture was probably the most fun building project. Why? Because I got to build it from scratch and I didn't have to try and mate it to an existing structure with cock-eyed angles.
As the years past, I enjoyed the extra rental income that was generated from my modest handiwork, and the labors of my studio partners in the renovating we did to turn the original garage into a recording studio. In 1991, I was invited by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, where I was the assistant controller, to seek employment elsewhere. When I was hired by the Director of Finance, one of her selling points was that as a resident of Mill Valley, I could take the Sausalito Ferry to and from work every day as our offices were only about a five minute walk from the ferry building. The work day was a typical 9 to 5 kind of deal. There was a ferry at 5:20 PM which was ideal. I could pack up my accounting accoutrement (I worked mostly in crayons back then) at 5:10 and be at the ferry building by 5:20 for a jolly ride across the bay back to my beloved Happy Acres. When I found out that there were later ferries, I took that opportunity to occasionally wet my whistle at the local watering hole next to the ferry building. Hell, I could always take the next ferry...
After about six months of this schedule, I got a summons from the Director of Finance, Ms. Bernstein (all names are, of course, fictitious). It turns out that they weren't quite satisfied with the amount of crayon work I was putting in on a weekly basis. Instead of regaling my fellow tipplers at the ferry-side bar, Ms. Bernstein was disappointed (I'm paraphrasing here...) that I wasn't spending some of that time putting in extra, uncompensated, mind you, hours toiling in the numbers mine. I think they were also a bit uncomfortable having a decidedly WASPish Goy such as myself counting their shekels. That's merely conjecture on my part. Whatever the reason they sacked me. I mentioned to the good Ms. Bernstein that neither she nor my immediate boss, the Controller, had ever said anything to me and that I had no negative reports in my employment file. In the light of that situation, it seems like an unfair termination. I mentioned that I wouldn't contest the disemployment if she wouldn't contest my filing for unemployment compensation. She agreed and the devil's pact was made.
Looking back at my decidedly middling career as a corporate accountant, I noticed how each job had a shorter duration than the one before it. I had to take stock; I was a mediocre accountant with spectacularly bad skills in the art of corporate politics. Maybe it was time to get out of the numbers racket. Having enjoyed the extra rental income that the studio afforded me, it occurred to me that if I built another rental unit I could be independently poor. I left the JCF offices for the last time with my purloined box of crayons and went home to do a little figuring. My most excellent landlord had given me permission to build a shed on the property to house a vegetable packing and processing operation for the fruits, vegetables and salad greens I had planned to generate from my large (12,000 sq. ft.) garden. If I, instead, repurposed that shed into a quaint little cottage for two, I would be able to make ends meet. Most of my meals would come from the garden; to hell with the ridiculous idea of a commercial produce concern. After building the cottage and getting it rented I would spend my time growing glorious produce in my garden. I used to joke with people that the clerks at the local grocery store couldn't figure out how I thrived through the years as pretty much all I bought at the store was booze, meat and tobacco...
I picked out a spot on the left side of the horse pasture down below the main house. From there you couldn't see any other houses and, perhaps more importantly, no other houses would be able to see the cottage. I planned to have the back wall, that faced back up hill to the main house and the next door neighbor, built without windows so those houses wouldn't be seen. All the windows would be on the sides and in the front of the cottage. To the right were the horses, to the left was a small stand of Bay trees and below was a lovely view of the garden; perfect!
My brother, Tom (I call him Timmy), was living at Happy Acres at the time. In lieu of rent he would help around the property. He was a big help in the garden. He likes to weed. I told him about my plan. He wasn't pleased. The spot where I wanted to build was the same place where he had just piled up all the odd sticks of lumber that had been accumulating on the homestead since the thirties. "Timmy", I said, "I'm sorry, buddy, but we're going to have to move all this wood up by the main house." I convinced him that that spot was the ideal place for the cottage. It took some convincing but he finally, reluctantly, agreed to move the wood. While he was doing that, I got to work on my plan for the cottage.
Since Norm had given me permission to build a shed, obviously the roof was going to be a shed roof. The structure was going to be a simple rectangle twenty-four feet from front to back and thirty-six feet from side to side. The roof would be flat with a 1 1/2 foot rise over 24 feet. High in front and lower in back for runoff. Internally I would build two twelve foot long half walls that would divide the cottage into three bays. The first would be the bathroom/kitchen area. The second was to be the living room. The third bay, with large windows looking out over the garden and the forest, was to be the bedroom with a twelve foot long closet at the back. I didn't want to close off the various rooms as I fancied the idea of the internal architecture being open. The open 36X12 foot area, surrounded by large bay windows and a six foot sliding glass door, would make the place airy and light.
The foundation would be post and beam, like you find under most decks. In fact I took the specs. for the foundation from a book about building decks. (At this point, the astute reader might note that I was not supporting a deck, but a house; bringing question to the wisdom of using a deck-style foundation to support a house. More on that later...) Because the unit would be built on a slope, the front half would have significant room underneath it and I planned to build a little storage closet under there. At ground level in front of the cottage I would build a lovely redwood deck with a wooden wall on the windward side to serve as a windbreak. I planned on putting another big window in that wall to provide a view of the horses and the setting sun. It all looked so idyllic in my mind.
My brother was both skeptical and supportive at the same time. He gently questioned the wisdom of building a cottage on property that I was renting; a rental agreement that consisted of a handshake and a month-to-month tenancy. I countered with that fact that I had already enjoyed twenty lovely years at Happy Acres and I had a wonderful relationship with my landlord. Indeed, I looked upon Norm and Georgia as if they were my foster parents. "Don't forget, Timmy, Norm said I could do pretty much whatever I wanted as long as I took responsibility for it." My beloved brother pointed out that this project probably didn't fall under the label of "pretty much anything". But I had the bit in my mouth and I was committed to this. My brother agreed that I was committed. Or did he say should be committed? I forget. No matter; Mickey and Timmy are going to build a house!
Thanks mostly to my brother's Sisyphean labors, the building site had been cleared and I was ready to start laying out my foundation of posts and beams. If you have read the first part of this narrative, you'll recall how frustrated I was having to remodel our recording studio, none of whose angles were square. With this building project, I was starting from scratch and I was determined to make this foundation and the sub-floor as level and square as I could, knowing that this would greatly ease the rest of the construction. I carefully laid out my basic 24 X 36 foot outline. I marked the places where I would be digging the holes for the posts that would support the beams that would, in turn, support the subfloor via a series of twelve foot joists. For this task I used a plumb bob that I fashioned out of a bunch of slugs tied to the end of a string.
Because of the obvious risks of such a foolhardy venture, I determined to build this little palace on the cheap. The labor would be supplied by the brothers Stevens for free. The lumber for the foundation, the subfloor, the walls and the roof would come from a used lumber outfit in the East Bay that I had used before for the studio retrofit and some of the garden construction. The BMW 320i that I was driving at the time, wasn't really up to the task of hauling all this lumber, so I bought a beater Toyota pick-up truck with long bed for the job. The truck also came in handy for hauling horse manure from the Muir Beach stables to my garden's compost pile. I dug the holes, nine in all, and filled them with cement and stuck in a piece of support iron called a saddle that each of the posts would be affixed to. Using a tautly stretched piece of twine I marked each post to be cut so that the beams, which would lie on top would be level and straight. After the beams had been laid on top of the posts, I used a long bubble level to make sure I had done it right. So far, so good. I hammered in more support saddle angle irons on top of the posts to fix the beams to the posts.
The beams ran front to back. Each one was twelve feet in length and they were 4 X 8's. I had to give Wesco the exact dimensions because they often had to mill their existing stock of used lumber to the buyer's specifications. The newly milled beams eventually torqued a bit and I had to plane them down to give the sub-floor a fighting chance at coming out properly. I squared the diagonals of the foundation to make sure we were in square. After a little bit of pushing and pulling we were within a half inch of perfectly square which I judged to be adequate.
The deer are justifiably curious about this new development at Happy Acres.
Next it was time to nail in the joist hangers which would support the twelve foot long 2 X 8 joists that would support the sub-floor. I measured, cut and hammered in all my joists. Next up laying the sub-floor. It took several trips to Wesco to secure all the plywood I needed for the sub-floor. Laying the plywood floor would be the true test of my former calculations. I was in luck and all the 4 X 8 plywood sheets fit, pretty much, perfectly. My brother's well founded skepticism began to turn to admiration. "Wow Mickey! You've built a beautiful dance floor!" marveled my brother, "Maybe you should just stop here. You could have some righteous square dances here!" "Timmy", I said, "we're not building a dance floor; we're building a rental cottage. Do you have any idea how much I could get per month for a cottage in Mill Valley, adjacent to the coastal hiking trails with a deck in a lovely rural three acre environment with barn, horses and a large organic vegetable garden, all less than twenty minutes from San Francisco? I ain't stopping till I'm collecting rent on this place. I plan on being the envy of all the neighboring slum lords..."
Now it was time for the walls. Before building the walls, I had to procure windows so I would know the dimensions of the cut-outs in the walls. After perusing the local paper, I found a guy who was replacing all his windows. His old windows were for sale for a pittance. I bought them and hauled them down to the building site. They were very substantial double glazed windows in various sizes. I figured where I wanted to put each window and built the wall frames accordingly. I showed my brother how you construct the frame for each wall by making a rectangle filled with studs nailed in at sixteen inch intervals. The frames are fastened together lying on the floor. When they're finished you tilt them up into place and using the bubble level to make sure they're vertical you nail them into the edges of the floor and use diagonal supports to keep them vertical. Measure, cut, hammer, repeat. Pretty soon the wall frames were up. I was really getting into the flow of things. Next up was putting up the plywood outer walls with the appropriate cutouts for the windows.
When this was accomplished my brother really started to get excited. "Wow Mickey!" he enthused, "it's really starting to look like a house!" Interior posts were fastened to the floor and another set of beams, to support the roof were nailed into place. Another set of joists to support the roof were hammered into place. Now it was time to put the windows in place. For proper weather proofing and drainage, I had determined that these windows had to be attached from the outside. The smaller of the windows weren't that much of a problem as we could walk the windows up two ladders placed side-by-side and place them into their frames, then I could nail them into place. The big window, which was about 4 X 8, was another story. When my brother and I had transported it from truck to the building site we realized how heavy it was; real heavy. On bringing it down the hill we actually slid it vertically supporting it from the front. It made a little furrow in the ground as we slowly dragged it into place below its window frame in the wall, ten feet above. That night I put my mind to the task of how to raise the window into place. I was quite pleased with the scheme I came up with and I couldn't wait to see if we could pull it off on the morrow. We'll find out in the next posting of "Mickey and Timmy Build a House".
See y'all then! Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres
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