My father built most of the houses I lived in as a child. If he started working double time to complete the construction, our family knew that particular house was about to be sold.

The living room of one house had bright red wallpaper with shockingly green birds on it. Below the paper, the wainscot was red if viewed from one direction, green from the other. That living room also served to connect the bedrooms with the kitchen and dining room. The really distinctive feature? We lived in the house several years before Dad got around to putting a roof on it. During a rainstorm, the choice was to stay put or run through the living room in the rain to the other area of the house. I’ve often wondered why he put up the wallpaper and painted before he put on the roof. I suspect he couldn’t wait to experiment with the red and green wainscot effect.

I remember a missing wall between the closets of two adjoining bedrooms. Each closet had sliding doors, and on the exterior looked “normal”. I’d love to know what the next owners thought when their kids discovered they could go from room to room through the closets.

In another house, Dad painted the living room hot pink—not that he had any special attachment to that color, but he got a good deal on the paint at a flea market. That was the same place where there were two upstairs areas, built at different times, each with its own stairwell. To move from one upstairs bedroom to another required going back to the first floor and up the other set of stairs. He made a library upstairs, where he kept the table he’d retrieved from the Salvation Army thrift store’s trash heap. After an investment of countless hours of labor, the table was beautiful. Dad loved making something out of nothing.

Recently, the city notified us of a date we could leave bulky items by the curb for a special trash collection. I watched as a ratty old pickup cruised down the street that morning. Sure enough, it slowed to a stop in front of my house. A man dressed in work clothes hopped out and loaded up my neighbor’s broken, discarded desk and bookcase. I smiled and thought of Daddy.

Carlene Havel,
Co-author, “Daughter of the King”
http://goo.gl/5WLKj
Author of "A Hero's Homecoming"
http://goo.gl/s6EQS