The last days of the Virginia Frame at the Carpenter’s Yard.
Tomorrow is our last working day at Colonial Williamsburg. In one week, the destiny of our one-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot Virginia Frame will bear it away to other places. After such a distinguished beginning, it will be a little strange to move the disassembled timbers into a tumbledown barn to await their fate. But thus it has been with us for ten long years as the archetype we call Innermost House sought its next incarnation.
I confess I have never known how to recognize that next home from afar. We were certain it would be in Northern California when we began, and that one or another of the spectacular offers of land partnership we received there would prove to be the right one. But the irony of being three times denied a permit to build a modest wood-burning fireplace in our unelectrified house, only to have our land burned out from under us by a massive wildfire sparked by a malfunctioning electrical system miles away, was enough to persuade us to take our search for the Mythic Landscape elsewhere. But oh I loved the immortal sea and the forests of redwoods!
Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area
We have had many wonderful offers since. One in Missouri was set amidst some of the loveliest country of rolling hills I have ever seen. Another in Connecticut was at the edge of a glacial pond surrounded by almost 7,000 acres of breathtaking forest preserve, complete with its own forestry department from Yale. Then there was North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. But always some obstacle stubbornly arose, usually an issue of permitting. A last donation of land came from Wisconsin on a beautiful island in Lake Michigan, where summer nights are in the fifties and the University of Chicago only a morning’s drive away. I think we would be building on that island now had we not by that time settled on the oldest land in British North America at Jamestown. One paradise at a time.
After all those ten years and many moves, it took us just one hundred days to go from standing trees in the forests of Tidewater Virginia to oak sills and pine plates laid prone on the ground. With the new year and the commencement of a second hundred days, we moved into the vertical dimension and began to raise a roof. Visitors poured through the carpenter’s yard at Colonial Williamsburg and delighted in this first of American “tiny houses.” Some people returned again and again to watch its progress. Just yesterday afternoon two good ladies told me we had “the coolest” house they had ever seen, for a moment mistaking me for the carpenters responsible, who really are cool.
On Monday it was Day Forty-Five of our second hundred days. Now it is Thursday, and we have fifty-two days left to solve what is still a world of problems and challenges. We have a very few days to arrange for trucking our timbers away from the yard. We have a barn to secure. We have something approaching 750 linear feet of fine chamfering to cut into the exposed corners of our Virginia Frame, when none of us have ever cut a chamfer before in our life.
We have foundation plans to alter (oops, forgot about the hurricanes). We have footings to dig and brick foundation piers to lay, when the weather is still too cold for traditional mortar to set, and our frame lies waiting and warping. While the weather is pushing our foundations further away into the spring, we have framing members that will soon begin to have their own way against our careful joinery, pulling us back toward the edge of winter. We are caught in a tug of war between wicking and warping, winter and spring, with nowhere to go but forward—but not too fast and not too far. We have permits to secure against heaven-knows-what hundred-year possibilities, so that our “impermanent architecture” should not prove too impermanent. Some days I feel like the time is blowing away.
Today I was at the planning offices in the morning, then in the woods all afternoon. My dear friend, musician, preservationist, and perennial optimist Cliff Williams was with me. We were joined in the woods by our mutual friend and foundation forester, John Smith, who is the nearest thing I know to Henry Thoreau in the forests of old Virginia. Cliff and John and I scrambled up and down trails and splashed through streams, all the while eyeing the canopy for dangling limbs and hints of dangerous leanings. This place and not that place. Not that position but this. Plans. Permits. Foundations. Bricks and mortar. Trucks. Barns. Timbers and chamfers. Winter cold. Spring warmth.
The Virginia Frame preparing for departure.
Everything changes as one arrives to the last things. Everything happens at once, expanding our slender project to an edge of unworkable breadth. One hundred and fifty square feet is not a very big house, except when you’re trying to push it through the eye of a needle.
Yours always,
Michael
The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.
IMAGES
M. Lorence: The Virginia Frame from the North, February 17, 2022
Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area
M. Lorence: The Virginia Frame against a Winter Sunset, February 17, 2022