Since I was a discharged soldier I was eligible to buy a surplus government vehicle.  I knew I’d need some kind of a truck.  I got the necessary clearance and bought the truck.  It was a strange looking vehicle, but, it had a winch, which I knew I’d need.  The vehicle was called a Burma Jeep, built by Ford.

The hood was one half forward of the windshield, the balance inside the windshield, much like the later vans.

Since most of our pulling would be to the rear, I had to do a little engineering.  I had a wide roller above and slightly forward of the winch.  Then there was a triangular structure with a large pulley shear mounted behind and above the cab, which was merely a canvas one.

I forgot to mention that we were going to clear the land and haul the logs to the mill for all of the structural members.

With the cable arrangement we could pull the logs up onto the bed of the truck.

First, of course, we had to clear the space for the house.  The ‘we’ of this operation were myself, who had six months experience as a carpenter, and my brother-in-law, Dick Benson who had no experience as a carpenter but was a good truck driver and had a very strong back, both of which were much needed.

Neither of us had any experience at land clearing.  We managed to drop a tree on a 2200 volt electric line that served Innes Arden, an upscale housing development that was promoted by the Boeing family.  It also served Richmond Beach.

We also dropped a tree on the main phone line to our area.  We were very fortunate that we weren’t charged for either of these mishaps.

When we finally had enough clear for the house we had Lovel Construction Company bring in a bulldozer to dig out the stumps and dig the opening for a daylight basement.

We had cut our logs so we could haul them to the mill which was owned by Henry Washkuhn in Woodenville, WA.  It was about twenty miles NE of Seattle.

I didn’t mention that my little truck had an eight foot bed and with the tailgate down it had about a nine and a half foot bed.  Most of our logs were sixteen feet long which made a very long overhang.  I’m very sure the State Patrol would have taken a very dim view of our loads.  Our route passed a weigh station, but we were very fortunate there was never a State Patrolman on duty.  If there had been an officer in charge, I probably would still be in jail.

Along with the fir logs for the structural lumber, we had a lot of knotty pine, to be cut and shaped for paneling.  Knotty pine was very ‘in’ at that time.

Between us we built a six room house with a full daylight basement.  The only failure we had was when we were pouring the foundation.  The fancy form ties in one small section of the wall partially failed.  The wall became about six inches thicker than it was supposed to be.  Consequently, the space for a bookcase became a magazine rack in the basement recreation room.

Since this house was built shortly after the end of World War II it had features that were quite new.  One of those was the new aluminum framed windows.  It was the window of the basement recreation room that was such a low height that our 3 year old son, Richard, was able to dig the putty from the newly glazed window.  As I remember, the window people didn’t charge me for the reputtying that was necessary.

In my previous story I told of cutting the rafters for a hip roof which did require a little knowledge of a saw.  Since I didn’t have a DeWalt saw, I had to use a plain electric hand saw.  The hip roof on this house is still doing well fifty nine years later.

We were living in the lower floor of a duplex that my dad owned.  He had figured that we would be through with the building by the first of September of 1947.

On the first of September we were in the process of putting on a split shake roof.  We had the roof over about a fourth of the house.  We put our beds under that portion of the roof.  Somehow we were able to complete the rest of the roof without any rain at all.  Our neighbor, Charlie Woods, came down from his house on that day so he connected us to the electric service so we could live a somewhat semblance of a civilized existence.

Many years later I was in the restaurant furniture business and we used alder lumber in the frames of our booths and banquettes.  We bought a lot of that lumber from the same Henry Washkuhn who had cut the lumber for our house years before.  Henry told me that he’d recently pulled one of my knotty pine logs from the bottom of his mill pond.  I figured that that had to have been at least thirteen years later in 1960.