In the mid sixties I was working full-time as an educator. I also worked part time at Sears and while working there I met a new friend who was also a Sears employee. He lived in the little town of Liberty in the Ogden Valley. Liberty is located between Paradise to the north and Eden to the east. Ogden Valley is a beautiful valley with a large recreational reservoir that supplies most of the culinary water to Ogden City. The valley is several miles east of Ogden City and probably a thousand feet higher in elevation. By virtue of its elevation, it gets a great deal more snow during the winter season. My friend suggested that I take my family for a ride up to the valley and look around and that we may even think about moving there.
Jo and I decided to load the kids in the car and go for a ride into the valley and look around. We were very impressed with its country atmosphere and beauty. We had expressed concern about being able to raise our children in a wholesome environment and maybe there the children would not have so much of the influence of the city. We felt that in the valley our children might have a better chance of avoiding some of the pitfalls of negative peer influence.
We had just had our fifth child—a boy—and needed more bed- room space. At the same time, I had a hankering to build a house by myself. There is something about some men that makes them want to be able to say: “I did it all by myself.” I am (was) one of those people, and I have a hard time denying myself of certain challenges. The problem with that type of characteristic is that if the project attempted ‘all by myself ’ turns out to be less than acceptable, the ‘all by myself person’ has to take credit for the failures, as well as the successes.
The valley was a beautiful place, and we became excited about the prospect of a change. There were beautiful building lots available in the Nordic Valley ski resort area. We decided to build a new home there.
Even though we had made a lot of friends in North Ogden that we did not want to lose, we had decided to venture. We put our little home up for sale on Friday, and it was sold the next day. That was our first home that we had paid $15,300 for in 1959, when we graduated from USU. My first post-college job was in Weber County with the Weber School District.
We made enough money from the sale of our house to buy a choice five acre lot for $3,500, and we began the planning process. The lot was on a hill side, east of the Nordic Valley golf course. It had a nice level area to put a house on, and from that spot we had a beautiful view of the valley and the town of Liberty.
We found an old farm house to rent while we were building our new home. It hadn’t been lived in for years and was very run down. It was in the middle of a weed-covered lot, so it was an attraction to field mice and there were a lot of them. We cleaned up the lot, painted the house and made it (somewhat) livable. It was located within a mile of our lot and the only place we could find to rent.
Jo and I drew up tentative plans for the home of our dreams and hired a draftsman to finalize the drawings with enough detail to qualify for a construction loan. We did qualify and were soon excavating a basement hole. The plans were for a 4,400 sq. ft. home, almost twice the size of our first home. By that time our sixth child was on the way and we felt like that much space was justified. It was a partial A-Frame construction plan, with one section being a flat roof.
We ran into trouble from the very first. We couldn’t find a basement forming contractor who could form and pour our basement. The soonest any of them could come was two or three months. The summer was already underway and I didn’t want to lose anymore time. I decided that I would dig the footings by hand and build the basement walls with 12 inch cement blocks and fill them with grout and re-bar. What a job, it took me nearly two months to do all of that. I thought, ‘This is really doing it all by myself.’
I was working full time at a new job at the university. After work I would drive home, up the canyon, as fast as I could. I would say ‘Hi!’ to the kids and change into my work clothes, have dinner with the family, then head for the work site. I would work until 11 to 12 P.M. most every night except Sunday, of course. I promised myself that I would be faithful and not work on the Sabbath Day, I figured I would need all the blessings the Lord would be willing to give me, and if I kept His day Holy, I might be eligible for optimum blessings. Not only did I keep His day Holy, but I was called to teach a teenage Sunday School class and the Priesthood lessons as well. My oldest son, Brian, and I did our home teaching faithfully each month, and I can’t remember ever missing a month. My family also needed a day with their ‘Dad.’
We were blessed, there is no doubt in my mind about that. Today, thinking back, I wonder where on earth I got all the energy to do all the things that I did. We were also blessed with a relatively mild winter as it seems that I could work most every night on one aspect of the project or another. I had an old 1949 Ford pickup truck that I would haul most of my supplies in, and even though it was old and rattly, it just kept on working for me all during the course of the project. I was blessed with good health; I don’t recall being sick during that time. Jo had a health problem, her gallbladder had to be removed and I am embarrassed now when I think that I wasn’t always there for her when she would have liked me to be. Thank goodness for some good neighbors who were watching out for us, too. Generally speaking, the blessings were great.
Before winter came, I had the floor on and was putting the walls up. Late in the fall I had a crane come up and several Elders came to help me put the huge 4″ x 12″ beams up for the roof. The top of the structure was 30 ft. high. The 30 or so roof support beams were all in place in one day. I then started laying the long 21⁄2″ thick, tongue and groove wood planking over the beams as our roof. I put 2″ form insulation over those and then split cedar shingles on top of that for the roof. What a job! The living room ceiling was 29 ft. high from the floor.
I built two fireplaces, one in the living room and one in the family room. I was laying brick on the outside of the home and on the fireplaces most of that mild winter.
I had several scary situations happen while I was alone working on that big house. I had to take many risky chances that two men working together would not have had. Most of those risky times were while I was on the top of an 8 ft tall rickety step lad- der. I climbed up and down the ladder hundreds of times. Up to measure, down to cut, up to nail in place, etc… One time, late into the night, I had to cut the excess lengths off of a series of beams that supported the flat portion of the roof. The excess length was only about 1 to 11⁄2 ft. in length, but they were 4″ × 8″ beams, so when they were cut the pieces were relatively heavy. I was cutting them while sitting on top of a wobbly 8ft. step ladder, using a skill saw with a 21⁄2″ blade cut. That means that I had to make a cut on each side of the beam in order to get through its 4″thickness. In one instance, I had already cut the one side and was now cutting through the other side that would cause it to drop. I didn’t want the cut piece to drop the eight feet to the floor for fear it may make a mark/scar in the flooring. I planned to cut the beam with the skill saw in one hand and try to catch the chunk of beam with my other hand. In order to do that I would have to set the skill saw on my leg as soon as I was through cutting. The skill saw had a spring loaded blade guard that I was counting on to close quickly so that it would not cut into my leg. When I cut through the beam I set the saw on my leg, only it had not closed fast enough and the blade shredded my coveralls. The miracle was that it never touched my garments or the long muscles in my leg. I got down from the ladder and the coveralls separated where the saw had cut through it. I had actually witnessed a miracle. The Lord had blessed me because I was promised that the garments would be a shield and a protection to me as long as I was faithful.
I was trying to be faithful by not working on Sundays and doing my duty according to my callings. I stood there contemplating what had just happened and what might have happened, and tears came streaming down my cheeks. Had the saw cut through my leg, I would have been laid up for weeks, even months. Because of having to build my own foundation, I was already behind on the contracted loan completion time. I will never forget that event in my life and the gratitude I felt to the Lord for intervening on my behalf that night.
I had decided to put in a radiant heating system, a boiler with baseboard heating. That was my first experience with a heating system. I got a lot of advice from the salesman who was selling me the system. I did a lot of studying, too, it wasn’t like today where you can jump on the internet and query about almost anything.
The electrical was another thing I had done very little with. There was a neighbor that Brian and I home taught who was a retired electrician. He agreed to come up on the project and show me some basics and then I did it by myself. I only had to call him a couple times after that for advice.
He also had an old barn-like corn shed with beautiful weathered wood. It was leaning over, and because he knew I was a bricklayer, he said that I could have the wood if I tore it down and built him a new one out of cement blocks. I agreed because we had planned to decorate some of our walls with used, weathered wood. He, of course, paid for the materials. I, later, used decorative wood wherever I could and even had one wall that I shingled with regular cedar shingles.
After the heating system and the electrical was installed, I started sheet rocking and that was a big job. I had to end up getting some help to do that because the sheets were too heavy to put up on the ceiling and to be able to hold and nail at the same time. So I hired a carpenter to help me with the ceiling sheets and later, I hired him to help me with some finish work, but not any more than I had to. We moved in about a year and a half (February 1970) after I began the project. For the size of the undertaking and the manpower, that was a fairly good time.
Jo’s dad, Bill James, came up from Salt Lake a couple of times to help out, and when I had a few projects my boys could do, I would have them up helping as well.
We only lived in our beautiful Nordic Valley home for about one and a half years. There was no natural gas or other alternative heating options in the valley, only oil. When we started building oil was only 18 cents a gallon but in the early 1970’s there was an oil embargo and the price of oil shot up to over 80 cents per gallon. With our high decorative ceiling it starting costing us as much to heat the house as it did to make the house payment. I was a relatively new member of the administrative staff at Weber State College and salarys were not sufficient to cover payments equivalent to two house payments. We decided that we would have to move back to town. We put the house up for sale and it was sold the next day to a young couple who lived in the valley. The boy’s father was the owner of the Ogden Meat Packing Company, a Mr. Lowenstein, who was a member of our ward. The boy was spoiled, and his parents had given him everything he wanted.
We had built our dream home, had lived in it for a few years and I had satisfied my challenge to build a house “all by myself.” So, now it was time to return to the real world.
We learned several lessons from our move to the valley. The most important was that it doesn’t matter where you live, your children will pair up with other children who accept them and there is very little parents can do about that. All that we can do is to be a positive example, love them and pray and hope that they become good people in the end. Many will stray a little, some a lot, but all we can do is to be there for them when they are ready to return.
Another positive about the move to the valley was the friends that Jo and I made there. We left the valley nearly forty years ago but every three months we have a standing date with three other couples whom we were close to in that valley, only one of whom still lives in Liberty. That is a long lasting friendship I would say. Our ‘get togethers’ move from one house to the next and the dinners are home cooked and delicious. We have religious discussions and share humorous thoughts and anecdotes. Was the move worth it? Of course I can only speak for myself, but I think it was, because I can say, among other things, that “I did it all by myself.”