Dichroic Reflections

the little gray house

In December of 1995, we sold our house in League City, Texas, and moved to Arizona. We'd lived in that house for only a year and a half, but it was the first one we'd owned; we'd had it built, had chosen the floor plan and all of the colors and flooring and fixtures. It was the house in which we planned our Pennsylvania wedding and to which we returned after our honeymoon. It was where we lived as we finished our Masters degres. League City is a Houston suburb today, but it's far enough southeast of the city and old enough that in its youth, residents traded mostly in Galveston. In the days before air-conditioning and before the devastating 1900 hurricane, Galveston was the queen city of the region, while Houston was a small inland city. And for residents of League City, it was much faster to go to Galveston by boat than to Houston over land. As Rudder reminded me yesterday, our old house is in Galveston County. There's no doubt that if we still lived there we wouldn't be home today. We'd have evacuated to somewhere further inland.

Specifically, our former home is in risk zone G3, which is considered to be threatened by any hurricane of Category 3 or higher passing over the area. Local building requirements, stricter than those in Houston's Harris County, required it to be built with hurricane strapping, metal commectors reinforcing the wood frame, but that's not going to do much good in Cat 4 or 5 winds.

We built our house new, but it's in the hundred-year-old historic part of League City, not far from the City Park with its bandstand or the West Bay Common School Schoolhouse Museum. The land had apparently been in contention for years, and several lots had just become available in the old part of town where live oaks spread out to make a canopy across narrow streets. Most of the houses in the area are original Victorians, mostly in at least decent shape, some beautifully restored. Our builder gave us a choice of lot and of several house plans, all with vaguely Victorian exteriors to blend into the neighborhood. This was his first foray into modest houses; because he was used to building expensive custom homes (and because he wasn't all that bright, a fact that worked in our favor in several places), he gave us much more freedom than most builders do. In addition to all the usual choices of colors and carpets and hardware, we were able to make slight changes in the floorplan: we added a vaulted ceiling in the master bedroom, raised the hearth of the living room fireplace, and added drawers in the walls of the master closet and the second bedroom that were built into the roofspace of the first floor, which extended out beyond the second floor. We moved the back door from the dining room to the kitchen, so that anybody coming in from the back yard would track dirt on tile instead of carpet.

We visited the house every day as it was going up. Those drawers were added at the builder's wife's suggestion (she ran the office) at very little cost to us, as she walked through the house looking at the then-naked frame. The lead carpenter hated the half-wall, telling us it would be wobbly. At his suggestion, we had him add a column from the end of the wall up to the ceiling, which made it much more stable. The tile guy liked the tiles, but the siding guy hated the colors we'd picked (dove gray, with royal blue and white trim) and tried to talk us out of it. We were firm, and when he saw the finished product, he admitted that he'd been wrong and ours was the prettiest house on the block. We had people come by occasionally asking if we had a bit of scrap siding in those colors and if we'd mind if they copied them on a house somewhere else.

We put in raised beds on the side and behind the house, planting flowers, tomatoes, cantalope, and hot peppers, and put a banana plant by the downspout to soak up the excess water. There was one big tree in front, surrounded by a ring of Mexican Heather, and several others in back. My favorite features of that house were the built-in drawers, the walk-in closet on the second floor, and the hall closet on the first floor that extended back and under the stairs. (When we brewed, that's where we left the beer to ferment, since it was in the middle of the house and the temperature was fairly constant.) That house, at 1350 square feet, taught me that a little house can be comfortable to live in, if it's well-designed and has enough storage space. I still miss it.

I have friends in Houston, and lots of former coworkers and neighbors. Obviously my first concern now is for them, but I'm sparing a little bit of hope that that little house survives the hurricane without too much damage.

Posted by dichroic at September 22, 2005 01:28 PM