Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 62        building a wheelchair house

Shortly after Mom died, my wife and I bought a rural acre in Ft Bend County, west of Houston and planned a house … and I planted two oak trees for Mom and she would’ve loved the property as the converted farm land turned into a wide yard dotted with cats and trees.

The house was designed with a wheelchair shower stall, and full wheelchair accommodations: wide halls, lever handle knobs, pocket doors, lots of tile flooring, and big windows to let light in. My wife wanted a lot of light and dreamed of a big kitchen.

We had money saved-up, plus Mom’s estate was going to provide an additional twenty thousand once my older brother got the details wrapped up.

We simply started building, and I’d never build a house and didn’t know what I didn’t know. But the arthritis clock was ticking.

Without experience, I crossed my fingers and laid the sewer lines below the slab, and had a company pour the concrete. Afterwards we emptied a can of water down the pipe and waited for it to come out the septic line … eureka, it worked!

Three of us framed up the house and had it ready for roofing within ten days. We worked hard, and the design was simple … with no fancy roof lines or special lay-outs. It was a single-story 2300 square foot house with wood siding; and built quick and insulated well.

I saved large sheets of glass from a remodeling job and made seven big windows across the back. The front door came from another remodeling job. The kitchen sink came from a lady’s back yard … she threw it away because it had a chip. I got vents and lights off the close-out bin. I built all the cabinets out of birch plywood and sketched in the bathrooms.

The bathtubs were plain-janes but I didn’t skimp where it counted, and used concrete board instead of drywall so the tub walls wouldn’t rot out later.
 
We ran the electric and plumbing and had a company do the sheetrock and another company put on the shingles and another company put in the HV/AC … then I threw on two coats of dark brown paint over the exterior without a single bit of caulking. (cheap guy tip: un-caulked cracks don’t show with dark brown paint)

… and voila, we had a completed house in it’s crudest form without carpet or finished bathroom or interior doors … and my neighbors were horrified by the dinky unfinished house amongst their big abodes.

We ran short of money, and the promised February arrival of Mom’s estate money failed to materialize, so the project came to a near-halt … but it was finished enough and we pulled our stuff out of the rent-house in Houston and piled it in our new home.

We had one working toilet and a single bathroom mirror, but we no longer paid rent and lived in the house for $350 a month … including taxes, insurance and electricity.

The main goal was met: we had a secure place for a crippled husband, and a promise fulfilled to a trusted life-long companion. She had a house, and we were as financially secure as possible … and actually had the modest beginning to a nice little dwelling on the cul-de-sac.

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