To my surprise, I actually found Pete at the job site, checking plumbing lines and adjusting a couple of the caps. Every open end, like where the toilets, sinks, and washing machine would eventually hook in, had to be temporarily capped. Then we filled the lines with water through the open end of one pipe elevated about two feet above the rest, where the city inspector would observe.
The surface of the Donna Fill had large white PVC lines running flat along the surface with the capped-off pipes sticking up like too many straws in a milk shake. The inspector’s water level had to hold steady to prove I didn’t have any leaks. He hung around and gave me building tips in between dropping subtle hints that I was insane for trying to build the house with my kids. I was a nervous wreck. If he found a leak, I had no idea how to repair it aside from cutting out faulty joints and then splicing new pipe in with an even higher risk of leaks because every repair would add at least two extra glued joints.
We passed on the first test and I caught myself reaching out to hug him.
The inspector checked our electric box and found we had electricity. I had no idea how long it had been hooked up, since I hadn’t seen the electricians after the Funyuns day. The box passed inspection and we would now be able to power tools from our own meter.
We were left slightly shell-shocked by the amount of effort involved in the foundation. In fact, it was a part of the build that hadn’t even crossed our minds back when we were building a stick house and drawing the plan. We’d had to dig deep, literally and figuratively, just to get everything to a solid ground level that felt like the start of a real house. From this point on, we would be spending a lot less time on our hands and knees in the mud and a lot more time reaching over our heads.
That self-rising flour had worked after all. Inkwell Manor was rising from the earth like a live creature with important things on her mind. Before we went home that night, we each dipped our hands in red clay and made a print on the block at the front of the house. The primitive cave-art on our massive concrete structure made me smile.
“We made this,” Hope said.
“With our own hands,” Drew added with a half smile that was all the way real.
We went home aching less than we had in months, maybe years. The bones, muscles, and joints still ached, but we were all beginning to realize how unimportant those aches were in the construction of a person.
That week I hired two unknown finishers to manage the slab pour. I needed it to be professionally smoothed, since I planned to stain it as finished concrete flooring. It didn’t cost much more to pay them than it would to rent the concrete tools, so it was worth the cash. Despite a few tense moments when the trucks arrived too close together and dumped yards of concrete faster than we could manage, everything turned out close enough to perfect for me. Our house and our shop had a solid foundation, and it was starting to look like my relationship with the kids did, too.
Projects at the office were overwhelming enough to send me home with brain bleed every day for the next week. Programming was a great job to pay the bills and satisfied my inner geek, but office drama and deadlines were harder to handle on three hours of sleep a night.
Whether it was healthy or not, I started using a hammer to deal with stress. Thankfully, I had plenty of things to pound on without looking completely out of my mind. The kids had fallen in right behind me with the work-till-you-drop method of healing. Since most of the time they appeared to be feeling better about themselves instead of worse, I deemed it a success.
On a warm day in late January, after we ate some of the best blueberry skillet cakes on the planet, we dressed in our construction clothes. Hope packed a cooler into the trunk while Drew piled in tools. Hershey crowded in the back at the kids’ feet, her head on Jada’s lap, eyes darting from her to Roman.
It felt different driving up and seeing a smooth, hard slab. None of us had walked on it yet, and for a few minutes we stood and marveled over the solidity, half wondering if it was a mirage that we’d sink right through.
Finally, we stepped forward together, all smiles. It had been no small feat to make it this far. Standing eight feet off the ground to overlook our kingdom, I felt like we’d summited Everest. An inordinate amount of fist pumping, squealing, and cartwheeling took place. And just like an Everest climber, I became newly aware of the hazards of a descent. We were up out of the mud, but we had farther to fall. Roman could tumble right off the edge. We needed walls fast. We set out to put them up, certain of one thing only: Nothing is as easy as it appears on YouTube.
“Stay back, Roman. Stay away from the edge, okay sweetie?” I dashed toward him.
Drew snatched him by the arm, and then to take the sting out of it, propped him up on his shoulders. “Whoa! Look how tall you are!” he said.
“I a great, big, little, giant!” He lifted his arms high and roared.
“We need to build a safety fence around this slab,” Drew said, peering down over the eight-foot corner where Roman had teetered seconds ago. Broken blocks and shards of hardened mortar littered the ground.
“No time for temporary safety nets. Let’s build some walls. Until then, we’ll keep taking shifts watching Roman. Jada has the first shift today.” I spread a copy of our pencil-drawn plans on the floor of our future laundry room. Drew and Hope knelt next to me while Jada and Roman ran off the slab to hunt for tadpoles in the puddles.
“Where do we start?” Hope asked.
I wiped a hand over my face. I had no idea where to start. “The library,” I answered, as though it were the gospel truth. “The south wall is a wet wall, so we know exactly where to put it.” That was true at least. The big white pipes to carry wastewater down from the upstairs had to be sandwiched inside a wall. We walked back to that side of the house. Drew and Hope were wearing their tool belts, and I strapped mine on while we all stared down at the sewer line poking up through the slab.
“I’ve got the tape measure.” Drew shook the hundred-foot reel tape at me.
“Who has the chalk line?” I asked.
“Jada!” Hope yelled. “We need the chalk line!”
Jada looked down at her feet and ran through the mud field to the back corner of the property, Roman trailing after her with an empty pail and muddy net. Her tongue stuck out a little while she worked the knot tying the chalk line around a fat hickory tree. Even though I was sixty feet from it, I could see neon-orange rings around the tree from the ground up to her shoulder height where she had tied it. I hoped it hadn’t been hanging there as her limbo line through any rainstorms.