The House That Jim Built
My grandmother is the mother of four girls, including my own mom, and whose names all begin with the letter ‘J’. She is a pioneer in speed-cleaning, able to scrub hundreds of square feet of wood floors in her home in a single day, even now that's she's 86. She is a champion for woodland creatures, big and small. She feeds pot-bellied pigs, squirrels, dogs and mice - whatever comes across her sprawling deck in search of a good meal - and every day of the week. She is a master card shark who wore a tinted green dealers’ visor and refused to let me win at cards as a kid, unless my hand was just that good (for the record, she probably still has that hat). She is my design mentor in a way that may never have been apparent until this post. Her love of Andrew Wyeth, crisp Norwegian whites and blues, and rooms that frame a view, still impresses me today. She is a true bibliophile, bringing boxes of books home from the Kokomo mobile library for our summer reading as kids, and sending me her favorite selections, including a collection of magazine articles on the warmth of home, and my all-time treasure: The Fiddler on High Lonesome, a book which brings me to tears even to this day.
My grandfather is a quiet ‘tinkerer’, with an engineering soul to his very core. He is a man who built two of his own sailboats from scratch. He is a man who held his pilot’s license for many years, searching the Indiana skies for adventure with my mom and three sisters in tow. A man whose brilliance in electronics led to seven individual patents during his career at General Motors. A man whose basement lair is several thousand square feet of shop space, filled with metals, machines, and old bottles of potato vodka, bottles whose tops have been neatly severed to provide just the right container for every kind of screw. My grandpa is a man who built our beloved A-frame cottage on the shores of Lake Michigan with his own dad, a cottage that to this day still operates with an outdoor toilet and a water filtration system for clean water in the cottage, designed using only a garden hose, filter, pump and bread pan.
My grandparents individually are amazing people whom I love with all my heart, but together they are also the designers and builders of my favorite home: The House That Jim Built.
Set in 20 acres of forested land my grandparents purchased in the 1970's, the house that Jim built fits discreetly into its surroundings. Begun in 1990, the entire home was engineered and built by my grandparents, with help from my dad and uncles along the way. It's a stoic house. The outside is humble and unassuming, but the inside is a cathedral of light.
The exterior walls are a foot thick, as specified by my grandfather, to capture and retain heat in the cold Wisconsin winters. The ceilings are whitewashed tongue-and-groove pine, assembled and fully installed by my grandfather alone - hoisted up on scaffolding he designed and built for the house. Windows frame unique elements of nature in every direction, and were my grandmother’s idea. A two story sun room is positioned at the intersection of two wings of the house, designed to provide cross breezes and a place to enjoy the cool Door County summers.
This house has been host to family weddings, family vacations, and family love for many years.
My wish is that it remain forever, long after we're all gone; a tribute to my family, the house that Jim (and Bev) built.
I hope it inspires you, too.
