The boy is ten. Standing on the shore of a lake, at the far end of a long gravel road in eastern New Hampshire. It is 1956. The mist is into the corners of everything just now. He can hardly see. He can hear someone out in that thick soup, rowing a boat on the lake. Nearby, even his father is only a shadow dropping cut lumber into piles across the small clearing they made the day before.
That clearing? That's where his father is building a house. That's why they're here. His father bought a book to show himself how to do it. You can build anything, fix anything, he said, so long as you have the right book. This book is Popular Mechanics: Precut House You Can Assemble Yourself. They've brought two other fathers from their neighborhood in Boston to the lake. Each of them will build a house too. One house for each family. Same book for each house.
The three fathers look at it in the morning, then work. They return to it every night. That book is splayed open on the hood of his father's car. Wanting a job of his own, the boy thinks: They should let me take care of the book. I should watch the book.
He stands on his toes by the car to look at the book, reaching out a hand. Not to turn a page, just to test the condensation on the car, to see how bad it gets. It's soaking wet! From somewhere in the mist his father warns him. "Don't touch the book, John." The boy pulls his hand back.
"It's getting wet," the boy tells him.
"We're working," his father tells him. "We need the book. You need to do your job."
The boy is supposed to be picking up nails, which he hates. So easy. He's ten now! He walks around the car and pretends to look for nails in the grass. He's going to do this for a while. Stay close to it. He'll watch the book. That'll be his job. That'll be the most important thing.
Sixty years later, the boy, now a man, takes the book out of its old box and leaves it on the table in the dining area of the house—this being the Popular Mechanics house built by the three fathers. The house stands at the east edge of Silver Lake. Near it stand the other two houses, built from the same book, in the same year, by the same three. None of them looks the same now. Different siding. Skylights. Patios. Chimneys. Sliding doors. Each house, in its own direction. A distinct fate. Most people wouldn't know they were basically the same house, the same plan, the same endeavor all those decades ago.
As for the book, decades of sunlight have faded the top half of the cover, and someone has inked a name across the top. Inside there's an electrical schematic, drawn by the boy's father. It is as clear and delicate as an ancient treasure map. There's a receipt for decking. Pages faded, corners bent, the book smells like somewhere lightless and musty—a closet, box, cellar—which is where it lives now. It's on the table by the boy, now a man, of course, John Totman, seventy—most everyone calls him Tots—who owns the house. He's dug up the book on this summer's day for the benefit of the visitor, who has come from Popular Mechanics to take a look.
It gets laid out for weekend house guests too—a couple from Montpelier, a niece and two friends from college. Just so everybody can look at the house when it was only an idea. Nobody much looks. Maybe because the details of the original construction are hard to recognize inside the skin of the house that exists today. The porch has been converted on one end, an extension has been added to the other. There's decking along the two lakeside exteriors. In the central living space all of the interior walls have been recently removed, so everything is carried by roof trusses, opening up the newly built kitchen to the light cast from the long bank of sliding doors facing the lake.
Work on the house has never stopped. But you don't need the book to help you understand the house; the house just is. It speaks for itself. But if you want to know, Tots will help you piece things together.
The history of a thing begins before its making. At some point, this spot was just a landscape. Some woods. Unconstructed, the absence of a house. "My dad found this lake in the thirties. He swam, fished, water-skied. He was a good sailor," Tots says. "When this property presented itself, he went to his friends in our neighborhood in Boston and made the proposition that they buy it."
Each of them had a propensity, a bent. Look at their jobs. Tots's father was a mechanical engineer at United Shoe Machinery Corporation in Beverly, Massachusetts. Another father, an MIT engineering graduate, was an accountant for Welch Foods, and the third was a professor of engineering at Tufts.
From the start, the book was essential. "It made the job easier for my dad to convince the neighbors," Tots says. "He'd say, 'You know, look! Popular Mechanics has this book! And it's all precut, and you can preorder the whole thing.' He had to convince them." Tots holds the book out to me, as if I might need to be convinced, still speaking in the voice of his father, rallying the troops. "Look at the book! Here you go." Tots smiles, pauses to see if I get it.
"The book showed them," he says. "Everything, I think. It's pretty dense. It will fully illustrate some very complex construction technique, like cutting compound angles, and then a page later it shows you, you know, something simple like how to work a circular saw." He widens his eyes, gets a little urge in the throat. "No kidding," he says. "Power tools were a pretty new thing back then."
Americans built more than one hundred thousand kit houses, sold mostly by Sears, in the first half of last century. These were shipped out on boxcars, complete, with between ten thousand and thirty thousand pieces, braces to brads. Midcentury, Popular Mechanics sold several varieties of home designs—the Modern House, the Family House, the Plywood House. There's no telling how many of those were built. Totman's precut house was sold as a concept listing the materials at three prices: $1,800, $2,800, or $3,800. Included was an offer to order the entire parts list from a fabricator-and-supply outfit. A kit house. Or the reader was free to take the list to a local guy and order it all himself.
The memory of this particular house now begins with Tots. Did his dad order the kit? He twists his face a little when asked, because he doesn't like to be inaccurate. "I don't know if they used a kit," he says. "I'm not sure who would remember that. I'd think with all they learned from one house to the next, that they'd want to make their own orders. Because they got better."
Tots's house was the first of the three. This was the $1,800 package. "A livable shell from a precut kit," the book declared. The other two houses were slightly more upscale, coming from the $2,800 design: "A summer cottage with all conveniences." Tots laughs. "You can tell the other two houses are the more expensive models when you walk through them. I'll tell you how: fireplaces. My dad didn't build a fireplace. I think he had to get the shell up fast so the family could sleep in there."
Early in the book there's an admission by the author, one Richard F. Dempewolff, that he had no experience in putting together a project of this scale. "It should be clear that, although I'm a writer for Popular Mechanics, I am neither carpenter nor craftsman." (My brother!) He went on, steadfast in his assurance to the reader that assembly of the house required no particular set of skills or even physical strength. You just needed to be able to follow directions and have about ninety days with nothing to do.
Despite Dempewolff's reassurances, even the least expensive plan—a basic truss construction with a flexible, if minimal, interior floor layout—looks like a lot of work. It's made all the more daunting by black-and-white photos taken on cold, gray days showing weathered contractors, cigarettes dangling from their lips, grimly mixing cement in the belly of a wheelbarrow. What's clearest is that building a house is a series of discreet episodes, the steps in the process, beads on a string. While the job is simplified, cigarettes or no, the work is clearly hard.
But fun. By Tots's memory, the house— the houses—were more lively during construction than the site and structure portrayed in the book. It was loud. It sounded like industry. The three fathers kept moving to keep up the pace necessary to complete three houses in as short a time as possible. At the end of each day, the men would stand in a semicircle in their T-shirts, smoking. At night, they slept in a screened platform shack near the water. "I think they were pretty stressed out to get the three frames up," Tots says.
After the first was standing, the families arrived, hungry for the space, the lake, the summer life. Tots speaks out of the corner of his mouth about this era, as if recounting a poker game. It amuses, or amazes, him what they put up with on the way to a house. "The families started coming up when the shell was in place, but the ceiling wasn't in. Once it was connected, the toilet just sat with a shower curtain around it. We all slept in that one shell. Women stood on the toilet to change in privacy." He laughs at the thought. "I had this aunt come up, and we drove her crazy with worry over that toilet setup. It took a while before that was changed. But, you know, we'd carpool it up there. And the fathers would arrive and start slamming these walls together. Everyone else was swimming or running around the woods. They worked pretty quickly, raising the walls. And the trusses, they went up slick as a whistle."
Tots pauses at the thought of this—he actually touches the tips of his fingers to his chin—worrying a detail only a contractor would care about. "I don't know if they used premade trusses or not," he says. "In the book, they show how to hang the assembled trusses on the tops of walls, then flip them up and into place," he says, settling into an Adirondack chair on the deck. "That's dramatic." He raises his eyebrows with more than a little enthusiasm. Tots seems to look through the eyes of his ten-year-old self. He remembers the fathers' deft flipping of the trusses, and smiles. "That must have been the first time I saw that, of course," he says, shaking his head. He's seen it dozens of times since, but even now there is a wow factor for him in the thought of what his dad had taught himself to do.
Several years ago, the whole place was overcome by mold, forcing Tots and his wife, Lolly Cochran, a jaunty, athletic equine veterinarian, to tear out everything that wasn't structural. Right to the outside walls. Together they built back. "It drew us closer," Tots says. "We're old enough that we didn't expect things to return to normal too quickly. We just wanted to save the place. In a lot of ways this house was the best thing that happened to our marriage." This too then, just another iteration of the house. More recently, Tots has shifted the HVAC to a heat pump system, which he is eager to see at work this winter.
Once it was a hunch, this house. Then a plan. A spot in the woods, then a clearing. Then a platform, and a shell. And then a house. A place where decisions were made. Where food was shared. Music played. The night air has always moved freely through the place. The windows provided a favored time of day.
Tots sometimes finds signs of his father in forgotten corners. Calculations made in pencil on a floor joist, cut lines later redrawn on shelving, the electric schematic left in the book. "It never occurred to me that my dad couldn't do something," he says. "I just had to pay attention because he was so fast. Watching him work these very basic carpentry projects, at this scale, repeating the same jobs, over all those weeks. That gave me a lot of the confidence that went into building the first places I lived in that were mine."
Did it take a year to complete the three houses? Tots tilts his head. He looks out at the lake, the falling light. His clothes are soaked around the edges. He's just come in from kayaking with Lolly, and he wants to swim around the island at the mouth of the bay before the day is out. He's skipping the beer, holding out for the chance. "I don't think it took that long. But when you're ten years old, every event seems, you know," he opens up one hand, spreading his fingers wide. "Very large."
How did building the house affect his life in particular? Here Tots gesticulates toward the water on one side, the woods on the other. "It was a package deal. The formative years. This life outdoors; this great thing we were building. When you're a kid and you're around cool stuff, and it's presented to you in a way that is attractive, like something you wanted because it added onto your life, you feel that. I felt lucky."
He lays his hands on his knobby knee, stares down at his toes and thinks. "I spent a lot of time watching," he says. "The work was bad. I was ten. What could I really do?" Staring down. "Oh yeah," he says, his head bobbing up. "One job I had was to go underneath the floor and brush preservative on the underside of the house. Like in the crawl space." He bites his lip and raises an eyebrow in a what-can-you-do kind of way. "I didn't do it long. I know I got bored. And probably the good news is they stopped me before I breathed too much of that stuff. It was bad," he says, laughing. "But I used to be able to see my brush strokes on the joists."
He learned by watching his father, mastering the various tasks, familiarizing himself with new tools. "When I became a contractor, I specialized in finding homeowners who wanted to do projects themselves but they didn't have the knowledge, the tools, or the expertise to do it. So I would come on and work with them and teach them, and bring in the right tools and equipment."
Tots looks out at the lake, which has changed only at its edges in the years since construction was finished. Some things are unaltered by what we build. Clearly that's the larger part of why Tots and his people still come here.
There was a twenty-year period, between 1968 and 1988, when Tots didn't see the house at all. "I can't account for what my dad did to it then," he says. "I just wasn't here." The why of this absence is not clear, but it is familiar—the life of every house is intertwined with the people who live in it. But these family particulars are not the job of this visit; just know that, as in any house, they exist. The mist is deep in the corners of the past, too. For his part, the man seems to see his father still out there working.
Tots likes owning the book, even if nobody reads it anymore. "That book, that was always my dad's thing," he says. "He wasn't afraid of any job ever. He'd just say, 'You need a book. You learn the manual.' I'm still plugged into that."
Voices call to us from inside the house. Dinner. Another meal, one of thousands ever eaten in this house. "I can still hear my dad," Tots says, pushing himself up out of the chair. " 'You gotta have a book. You gotta have a book.' "
The boy stands on a pile of earth, dirt the three fathers dug. He looks down and guesses that the pile of dirt is taller than he is. It's afternoon now. It occurs to him that he is twice as tall as usual. Taller, from this perspective, than any of the three fathers.
They've come a long way today, like every day. And it's been a long time since the misty day. The three fathers installed a well pump, and now they are back at the car, reading something to one another from the book. For his part, the boy swam all afternoon, then turned over rocks along the bank, threw crab apples, fetched tools for the three fathers, ate a sandwich from his mom, then watched his dad sweat pipes for plumbing in the second house.
Watching his dad, the boy thinks: How does he know this stuff? And, how did he get so fast? When will I be like that, and how?
When he asks his dad some small part of that, his father misunderstands. He thinks the boy just wants to try the propane torch. "You'll get your turn," he says, without looking up. "This thing is very dangerous." He means the torch.
But now the boy misunderstands. He thinks his dad means building a house, that building a house is dangerous. Building a house doesn't seem dangerous, the boy thinks, so much as important. "Don't worry," the boy says. "I'll read the book first."
The father laughs. The boy is a quick study. "Hand me the inch-and-a-half threader," he says. The boy jumps up and walks over to the bag full of tools. The boy sorts through the bag, finds the tool, then the building continues.
This story appears in the December 2016 / January 2017 issue of Popular Mechanics.
