Passage IV

Twelve Thousand Pieces of House

Two days after my family moved into a bigger house in a different neighborhood of San Diego, our nrighbor Mr. Vega visited us and came to welcome us. He had lived on this street his entire life: all eighty-plus years of it-and he not only remembered when our house was built but also helped build it. "We made it from a kit," he said.

I assumed he was joking, but he launched into the story. The summer he was sixteen, the two brothers who had bought this plot of land hired him as a helper. First they drove to the railroad depot, once they arrived a freight car sat stuffed with lumber, boxes, and bundles. These were the twelve thousand pieces of their house kit, everything from rafters and shingles plus doorknobs and nails. Simply transporting the materials to the building site took six trips in the brothers' large truck.

With the kit came an instruction book, one containing enough detail, which a person with basic carpentry skills, a relative set of tools, and a willingness to sweat could construct a sturdy and attractive house. Each piece of lumber bore a number, and the instructions specified where each one went. As Mr. Vega and the brothers worked day by day, the house rose up piece by piece. They did experience momentous fearfulness when the instruction book blew away one afternoon. After a two-hour search, Mr. Vega finally discovered that a neighborhood dog had carried the book under a porch. Overall, it took seven weeks to finish the house.

Back then, Mr. Vega claimed, kit houses weren't uncommon. He pointed out that two more kit-built houses across the street. Part of the appeal of building a house from a kit came from the fact that you could build one for less than what a professional builder would charge.

Placed near the end of each beam, Mr. Vega showed us the kit's numbers stamped on the wooden beams in the basement. Then he pointed to the underside of a floorboard scratched into the wood, faint but legible, was "Cedro Vega, 1947."