Free wood, sweat equity built house

Rik Nelson  /  Correspondent

Ziggy's offers free wood as well as half-price scrap wood. (Photos by Kathryn Stevens/The Spokesman-Review)

FREE WOOD. That sign and its standing offer can been seen throughout the Spokane area. At Ziggy's on north Market and in Greenacres. On the chain link fence at Valley Best-Way at First and Union in Opportunity. Spray-painted on a shard of panel board at Fourth and Farr in Dishman. It's a great offer.

In 1949, my dad Bob started building our house. Esther, my mom, drove the Ford tractor that pulled the slip shovel that Bob jockeyed, and together they scooped out the basement. Bob built the forms for and helped pour the concrete foundation. For a stretch there, he'd get up at 4 a.m. to dig 20-feet per day of water-line trench, 3-feet wide, 4-feet deep, from the middle of our nine acres out to the main hookup on Eighth Avenue, and then walk to work.

With the foundation in, he laid the main floor (sans walls) and tar-papered it. Then he completed the basement and we moved into it. The Nelsons lived and entertained in that finished basement for 10 years while Bob framed and roofed the rest of the house, installed baseboard heating, plumbing, wiring, and did finish work. Brother Scott and I got our own bedroom on ground level the fall I started junior high. Six months later my parents' room, the kitchen and bathroom were completed and we began family life together "upstairs."

Since Bob was a printer by trade and of fairly modest means, do-it-yourself was the only way he could afford his and Esther's dream house without going deeply into debt, and he didn't believe in that. So his eyes lit up when he saw free wood.

In the '50s, just south of what is now University City, on what is now Appleway, the Milwaukee Road used to switch out railcars. Some of those were flat cars down from Idaho carrying Diamond Match logs. The logs were chained in place with a few ballast logs laid loose on top to take up the slack. Sometimes during switching those top logs would roll off. Walking to work across the tracks, Bob would spy one, pay $5 for it, winch it onto his trailer and take it to the Sivertson Bros.' sawmill in Otis Orchards. Eventually, Diamond Match told him he was doing them a service to remove the logs and he could just have them for free.

The rough-cut cedar siding on our home is from those logs. The 14-inch wide hemlock, wood-pegged floorboards in the living room rolled off a train. The paneling in Scott's and my bedroom is from lumber milled by Sivertson's; planed and tongue-and-grooved by Bob. The same goes for the living room ceiling he installed in a dazzling zigzag pattern. From that free wood Bob dadoed his own moldings, fabricated windows and doors, and custom-built the shelves and cupboards for our library.

In 1970, the Spokane Valley Herald moved from Sprague Avenue and the old building was torn down. The owner told Bob he could have all the free wood he wanted. He took timbers, beams and 2-by-4s. He salvaged windows and wiring. From those materials he built a combination tractor shed/root cellar. The root cellar doors had once been the front doors at the old Opportunity Presbyterian Church. The tractor shed doors are his handmade French doors that led to the basement bedroom before he expanded that room to accommodate a vintage pool table.

In 1980, Bob and Esther sold a couple acres to a contractor who built an apartment complex. He gave Bob full access to construction leftovers – more free wood. Bob used the treasure trove of scrap siding to add an addition to the tractor shed, its exterior wall a deft patchwork of odd shapes. Later, from the same leftovers, he built a two-car garage.

Today, Bob's gone. But looking out his front-room window over the brow of the hill through the pines toward Mount Spokane, you can still see the spot where he got the train station sign after the Milwaukee Road went out of business. He installed that sign above the garage door.

It reads: "Opportunity."