CHAPTER 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1980 – Texas boy and English girl want to own land

In the spring of 1980, just a few months after our wedding, Anne and I decided that the quickest and most affordable way for us to become homeowners was to buy a piece of land and build our own house. That would be the ticket out of our tiny, roach-infested efficiency apartment in South Austin.

After viewing dozens of lots in the Austin area – some urban, some rural – we found this gem in Austin Lake Estates: 1/4 acre in the limestone hills above Lake Austin, 8 miles west of the city center.  (We found the lot through a local agent, Barbara Owen, who operated out of a convenience store called the Maverick Market.)

In May 1980 we negotiated a purchase price of $3,600 with the owner, a K-98 FM Austin radio deejay known as "Nick Koster the Imposter."  Though by today's norms that sum sounds ridiculously low, the only way we could scrape the funds together was by using my summer-lump-sum schoolteacher paycheck that I received in May. 

(To pay our bills the rest of the summer, I took a construction-laborer job for $5/hour while Anne worked her first U.S. green-card job as an office secretary in the Travis County Probation Office.)

 



For starters, we had to hire a local guy (Bert Teague) to dig into the back of our lot and install a septic system. We scraped together the funds for that by August 1980. (Cost: $70 for the percolation-test holes and $1,625 for the system.)  Below: The 1000-gallon tank.  

(Note to homeowner-builder:  REMEMBER where the septic tank is buried.  Six months later, I foolishly directed a concrete-delivery truck to back up closer, and closer, and closer . . . and suddenly the cement truck sank into this tank, destroying the top of it.  Fortunately, the septic tank had never been used, so it wasn't too icky to build a new concrete lid for it.)




I paid Mr. Teague an extra $55 to take the excess dirt from the hillside septic-system excavation and build a rudimentary driveway. But before he could get in there with his backhoe, I had to clear the brush. In the process, I contracted an awesome case of poison ivy.  (For anyone reading this who is not a native Texan, the privilege of "clearing brush" is somewhat of a birthright for the male species.

 

I had the backhoe-operator dump all the rest of the hillside dirt into the middle of the lot. Then, in the August heat, I staked out the rough outlines of a future slab and began filling feed bags with dirt and stacking them. One challenge: the sheer height of the dirt pile made it difficult to stake out the diagonals, but using some high-school geometry I was able to roughly triangulate where to place the corner stakes.

Considering that I filled each of 200 feed bags with approximately 80 pounds of dirt, I estimate that I bagged 16,000 pounds of dirt (8 tons).  I didn't worry much about gaining weight in those days!  I bought the used bags at Austin Feed & Ranch Supply on South Congress Avenue – these days, known as "SoCo."



In lieu of a pickup truck, which we couldn't afford to buy, my 1972 Chevy Vega (at right) was enlisted as a construction workhorse – as ridiculous as that sounds. The car, originally owned by my Uncle Tony Yemma in Hartford, CT, went through 4 transmissions and 3 clutches in its lifespan.  Despite landing on a 1980s poll as one of the Top Ten all-time worst cars ever produced in Detroit, that '72 Vega took a licking but kept on ticking. Mainly, because when I wasn't teaching or digging or building, I was working on that car to keep it running. (I did 2 of the transmissions and all of the clutches myself. That's just what you do if you come from South Austin.)



This is a sketch of the rear-elevation of the future house.  Shortly after buying the lot, Anne and I went to the Twin Oaks branch of the Austin Public Library and looked through book after book of house designs until we found a plan we liked –  and that I felt confident that I could actually build. This house, called "The Hideaway," was designed as a chalet-style vacation cabin –  not a true "A-frame," but rather a modified A-frame sitting on "knee walls."

Once we chose the plan, we wrote to the architect, William G. Chirgotis of the National Home Planning Service in Springfield, New Jersey, with some specific questions. Satisfied with his answers, we purchased the detailed blueprints for $90.00.

(Although I had studied some architecture in college, I thought it would be a fool's game for me to try to actually design a place. I felt that I would have my hands full actually building the house, and I simply did not want to have to worry about all the hundreds of little details like doors swinging the wrong way, windows mounted in the wrong places, etc.)




This is a view of the 4" main sewer drain advancing west from the septic tank toward the center of the pile of dirt – which will be the under the center of the house. In those days, we used PVC for drain/waste/vent piping, whereas today most such applications involve the use of black ABS pipe.

PVC, ABS, either way, it's all a hell of a lot easier than what I learned as a kid from my Dad.  When he put an addition (with new bathrooms) onto our South Austin home, he rented a huge chest of medieval-looking tools from Sears that were used to cut iron pipe, melt lead, pound "oakum" rope into the iron joints and put horse collars around horizontal pipe to hold molten lead.  It was incredibly labor-intensive – and amazing.





This is a 3" branch drain to the kitchen-side of the house

September 1980:  Anne was a sport to come out and help me whenever she could, and I don't just mean words of encouragement. She helped me take measurements, hold pipes together, you name it.  If she was around, she was involved, no matter how she was dressed. These photos were taken by Robin Jareaux, my sister-in-law and former journalism artist comrade at The Dallas Morning News.  Below: installing drain pipes for the downstairs bathroom.





Sunset over pipes!

Above & below: Following Martha Stewart's guidelines, Anne helps me cement PVC pipes together without getting dirty.





John Yemma and Robin Jareaux inspect the work in September, 1980, prior to leaving for their new home in Cyprus







Future downstairs bathroom.





Robin, John and Anne at the back of the lot, standing approximately in the area of the septic system drain field, which eventually will become a grassy yard.





Upstairs floor plan.



The first page of an expenses-journal that I used to keep track of the cost basis for the house over the 8-year project . I started this on a typewriter, then went to hand-entries, then made "fancy" forms on my Kaypro II personal computer.

The large dirt pile begins to vanish as I sculpt fill for the future slab.

Respite from the heat: A small wooded area provided shade for breaks from the blistering Texas sun. I spent virtually every weekend and holiday – along with many late-afternoons and evenings after getting off work – trying to meet my self-imposed deadline to pour concrete in January, 1981.

Finished drain-waste-vent piping for the downstairs bathroom.



SNEAK PREVIEW:  This is what the finished house looked like in 1988 when we pulled up stakes and moved to California. 

BELOW:  A final look at the undeveloped lot:

TO BE CONTINUED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter 2:  Getting water and power to the lot and framing the concrete foundation forms.