House-Dreams - Hardcover

Howard, Hugh

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565122933 ISBN 13: 9781565122932

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2001

Synopsis

Imagine a house built and tailored to your every need and personal taste. Hugh Howard dreamed of such a house, and when he and his wife, Betsy, learn that they're expecting their second child, he seizes the opportunity to build a home for their growing family.

Fifteen months later and just in time for the winter holidays, Howard, exhausted and wildly over his budget, completes their home-a fine 2,500-square-foot Federal-style house. And each piece has a story, from the cut nails that come from Howard's old elementary school janitor to the staircase that comes from a parsonage built just after the Civil War.

Howard discovers that all his planning and hard work earn him a house, yes, but he also gains a community of new friends-the people who help him along the way. There's Charlie, whose ancestors helped establish the upstate New York hamlet where they build the house; Ralph, a third-generation mason, who constructs a remarkable Russian heater; and Robbie, an eccentric Irish landscaper who has his own peculiar way of designing a garden.

HOUSE-DREAMS is for readers who spend weekends improving their houses, hardware store die-hards, and the millions who regularly tune in to the Home Garden Network and PBS's This Old House.

About this title

Review

The first thing one does when building a house is dig the foundation, and that's precisely what happens in the first pages of Hugh Howard's warm, engaging House-Dreams. He'll tell us about how he designed and planned his upstate New York country house in due time, but in the first chapter he brings in the excavator and gets on with the work of construction. It's a fine way to begin a book about building a house. And no, this is not a story about having a house built, with those familiar, dull "horror stories" about contractors' schedules and shoddy workmanship. This is a story of building a house.

Howard is an amateur carpenter and former electrician's assistant, a woodshop tinkerer with little professional experience, who decides to design and construct a house for his growing family. More important, though, he's a writer, and a good one. There are no grand gestures or flourishes here, no clever turns of phrase; his style is simple and comfortable, as I imagine his home must now be. Taking us through the unbelievably complex year-and-a-half-long process, from design to framing, roofing, installing dry wall, trimming, flooring, wiring, plumbing, plastering, cabinet making, and painting, he makes every part of it not only clear but suspenseful (I found myself peeking at a picture of the finished house near the end of the book). Howard is also a good-humored storyteller: a single defining two-word sentence about the man who digs the foundation made me laugh out loud.

This is a book in which hard work is solidly done. Backbreaking days spent framing and roofing are described without a note of complaint. Although they are both self-employed writers, there's no poormouthing in House-Dreams, either, though the couple's late-night anxieties--as winter closes in, as the closing date on their old house draws near--are rarely glossed over. The Howards' financial maneuverings are presented quietly, as evidence that even mind-bogglingly huge tasks can be accomplished, a well-built home can be made, on a limited budget. Though Howard built almost every part of the house himself, with the help of a dry-witted college student from Scotland in the summer and a laid-off landscaper in the off-season, he knew enough to bring in professionals for the jobs with which he was relatively unfamiliar. An enthusiastic local stonemason is hired to make an old-style Rumford fireplace and a Russian grubka (a masonry wood stove in which a fire started in the morning burns intensely for a short time, leaving the brick and stone to radiate heat for the rest of the day). A dreamy and mysterious transplanted Irish landscaper informs the Howards--as it's happening--that he's building a ha-ha at the edge of the lawn, and that over in the woods he'll be putting in "an abandoned tennis court ... a grass one, gone to seed." With only a little hesitation, the Howards, to their credit, decide that suits them just fine.

The local craftsmen in Howard's narrative, though they must have scoffed at his reading and rereading of Palladio, Wright, and Coleridge for inspiration, are sympathetic to his desire to build a house that occupies a certain place in the architectural timeline, one that is of a piece with the land on which he and his family have chosen to put down roots. Recognizing, through Howard's winningly modest account, these tough men's silent approval, and their admiration for the work he's done, is one of the greatest pleasures of House-Dreams. --Liana Fredley

From the Author

Dear Reader:

House-Dreams tells the story of how we designed and built a house so, in a sense, it's a do-it-yourself version of a book I much admire, Tracy Kidder's House. However, after I was persuaded to write this accidental memoir (I hadn't planned to write about the process), the realization dawned that I was recounting much more than a construction story.

House-Dreams is about the process of making a home. The narrative that drives it is full of the drama of the build--as the house rises, there are delays, cost-overruns, accidents, and all matter of frustrations and pleasures--but the flesh and blood of the story is how my wife Betsy, our two young daughters, the men who worked with us, and our neighbors and friends all worked together. The experience showed me how a mere house, when built with about equal parts sweat, imagination, tradition, and love, can become a family home.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1565122933
• ISBN 13: 9781565122932
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336