The first act of building a house is to walk onto the empty property with a helper and a long piece of string. The two of you will pull the string taut to create a straight line and then carefully position it to mark the exact edge of the house to be built. The end of the string will then be tied around a nail on top of a temporary batter board that’s set up beyond the edge of the house. This simple seeming action is actually pretty profound. It’s the first visible chore of a hundred thousand to follow that will result in a finished house.
With the house I’m now having built in the narrow confines of a typically narrow downtown Benicia lot, the survey work was done by a civil engineer so we would be sure the house was accurately located accurately within the tight side-yard setbacks.
But it was a different situation altogether the first time I was involved with this step, twenty-five years ago on an oak covered hilltop in Alamo at the site where a house fire had destroyed my parents’ home – the house where I had passed my teenage years and had moved out ten years previous. My mom, dad and sister had to flee for their lives in the middle of the night through thick smoke. The house was completely gutted.
After that trauma, my parents had no choice but to immediately dive into major chores like renting a house, purchasing new wardrobes, and then the unending task of dealing with insurance issues. But for the freshly minted family architect (that would be me) there was some honest-to-goodness fun designing a new house for that fantastic spot.
Eight months after the fire we were ready to build. The charred remains had been scraped away, leaving a dirt flat top on a hill with views down through the oak trees on all sides. The patch of empty earth was like a blank canvas yearning to have a something built there – at least that’s what it seemed like to me, especially, as I stood in the dappled shade under a big tree, roll of plans in hand, ready to layout a house on that perfect April day.
The next day there would be a big crew getting ready to dig. For now it was just me and lead framer Chris and our yellow string. We aimed that straight line right between two oaks so the house would have the best possible view of Mount Diablo which looms extra large and close when seen from the hills of western Alamo. To me it felt like we were effortlessly floating a large but invisible two story house into place.
More strings were set up to mark the other sides of the house. Tape measures were stretched across and adjustments made to ensure parallel lines were achieved. Just as important, we had to be sure the corners were at right angles. Getting this wrong would plague almost everybody who came to work on the house. We needed accurate right angles, and all we had were strings and tape measures to do so. But we also had our wits.
It’s the “3-4-5” trick. Where two strings intersect at a corner we would measure out exactly three feet on one string and four feet out on the other and make marks on the strings with one of those wide flat construction pencils that get whittled to stay sharp. If you wet the pencil tip with your tongue it creates a darker mark. The distance between those two tick marks measured on the diagonal should be precisely five feet. If not, then the angle is not ninety degrees and one of the strings needs to be angled slightly until these measurements are achieved. It’s a Pythagorean thing brought from the classroom into real-life usefulness.
We would take the “3-4-5” trick and turn into a “9-12-15” trick because the larger scale meant greater accuracy when reading our tape measures to the nearest sixteenth of an inch. (Do you see what we did there, multiplying the original numbers by three? Pretty slick, huh?)
I passed the next several months helping to frame the house and managing many aspects of the project. Any problems with the construction became my problems. It was a six month master class in building. All this on a house that I had designed and made the construction documents for.
I could see where my plans were at their most useful and where they were lacking. It forever changed my understanding of what a set of plans needs to show. Along the way I developed a deep respect for what a general contractor goes through to build a house that would serve me well in the decades to follow.
When a house is being built, things seem to happen fast at first and then seem to slow down. Within weeks, a house under construction grows spectacularly into a framed thing that can be walked through and marveled at by visitors. Then the big scale changes slow down and all the other trades add their parts. Wires get strung through studs and pipes are poked up through floors. And on it goes.
At the end, there was no definitive finish line that signified the completion of the house. Perhaps it was when the building inspector performed a final inspection with no more corrections needed and then initialed the bottom line of our building card. With that step at least my parents could then move in. But there were punch-lists that never quite fully went away, filled with unglamorous chores like installing missing cabinet knobs in the upstairs bathrooms, or adding another coat of urethane to the handrail at the stair. Eventually, day-to-day life took over and the work somehow ended. The seasons came. The seasons went. Grandchildren started to make the scene in my parents’ lives.
Sometimes at family gatherings, I would find myself admiring the view out the big back window and I’d recall that spring day when it all began with just a roll of string. Mount Diablo always looked especially good to me the way it was framed perfectly between those two big oak trees. Almost like someone made a special effort to make that happen. There’s a story there.

Steve McKee is a Benicia architect.
He can be reached on the web at: www.smckee.com or at (707) 746-6788
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