The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

rent low, I was able to recruit friends and friends of friends to move in. Together we lived happily enough, with lumpy futon mattresses and three-legged chairs, and lamps and cups and dinner plates dragged home from garage sales or “Free” boxes. We once pushed a couch six blocks and through heavy traffic by balancing it on a skateboard, only to discover as we dragged it up the front stairs that it was infested with fleas and that a rat had made a nest in the bottom springs. We quickly reloaded it onto the skateboard and backtracked, screaming and laughing and scratching ourscalps. Living on a budget may have been more fun than any of us cared to admit.
    Over the next six years, I had eight different housemates—nine if I count Jenna, who moved in temporarily, sleeping in a small, unheated room off the kitchen that we called the “recycling porch.” It was a sweet room, not much bigger than a single bed, but surrounded by south-facing windows that created one of the more spacious, sunny spots in the house. Jenna moved in for a few weeks, but stayed for six months, until it got too cold on the porch, and she found a job and an apartment across town.
    Before Jenna left, she turned her room into what would become one of my favorite spots in the house, repainting it a warm red-orange color and building bookshelves above the door, the window, and the coat hooks she’d screwed into the plaster. She made a comfortable enough bed out of plywood and a lawn chair cushion, and then permanently inscribed poems and pinned tiny bits of artwork on the window jambs. The space reminded me of the small hay-bale clubhouses and scrap-wood tree forts that my brothers and I had made as kids—high-up spaces where you could see things differently, where you could get your bearings and decide whether the argument you’d just had was fixable.
    We eventually returned Jenna’s room to the recycling bins, but I’d still sometimes find myself standing there, catching mybreath and reading the stuff that Jenna had scribbled on the walls and painted into the woodwork, imagining how simple things would be if the only space I had to vacuum was this tiny button of a room.
    My weekend trips to the hardware store had slowly taken the place of my weekends in the mountains, and after a while I couldn’t remember the last time I’d touched my climbing gear except perhaps to dig for some art supplies I’d packed away in the boxes below it. I convinced myself that my house projects weren’t that different from climbing: They almost always involved some moment of fear—that I’d shoot myself off the ladder, nail my foot to the floor, or run a saw through the plumbing—and that moment was almost always followed by immediate relief. In either case (fear or relief) I felt like a champion because I was figuring shit out. I was a doer and a getter-doner, and it was okay to be identified by the neighbors as the little lady who had a dump truck of manure delivered, a load that made the entire neighborhood smell like a dairy barn for weeks.
    I figured these house projects were making me smart, even if I didn’t always know what I was doing. I remember calling an equipment rental place one Valentine’s Day weekend, telling them I needed to rent a fourteen-inch “vibrator,” assuming this was the common word for the large vibrating pad sander I needed to refinish my wood floors. The guy laughed into thephone: “Ha, you and every other woman in Portland!” I was so caught up in the project, in getting the equipment and cracking a whip, that it took me a minute to get his joke.
    Another day, I wanted to trim some branches off the big fir tree in the front yard; I didn’t want it to take long, just a quick up and down, so I left the ladder in the garage and scrambled up the fir with a tree saw in my mouth. New neighbors were moving in next door, ushering boxes up their front stairs, when I dropped out of the tree near their porch to say hello and welcome