A Hobbit House
(Page 3 of 4)
March/April 2000
By Robyn Griggs Lawrence
Once the foundation was laid, the next step was raising a scissor-truss system for the home’s structure, which Libersat designed and Zuker built out of freshly cut loblolly pine from a sawmill nearby. He built the structure with the philosophy that the strength of the clay-straw walls would allow him to get away with a less-than-perfect timber frame. “There was certainly no engineering involved,” he says. “I’d walk up to a log and say, ‘That looks thick enough.’ It was seat-of-the-pants. You wouldn’t want to do this for a huge structure.”
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The stonemason stayed on to help raise the timber frame because “he knew how to handle big, heavy things without getting killed,” Zuker says. “But his carpentry was as bad as mine.” The laborers then returned for the next ten weekends to help Zuker pack the clay-straw mixture into forms to fill in the walls. The crew of three averaged about twelve bales, or 80 cubic feet, a day.
More time than money
Inside the house, Zuker laid a floor of antique heart pine that had been salvaged from an old schoolhouse in Maxwell, Texas, 20 miles away. He scoured the classifieds daily for other finishing materials and befriended demolition crews, who invited him to their sites and gave him his pick of floor joists, granite, and windows before the materials went to the salvage yards. The base cabinet in the kitchen is from a pharmacy that was torn down; the soapstone surrounding the sink is from benches in a demolished University of Texas chemistry building. Every window in the house is either salvaged or handmade by Zuker and his wife, Delores, a stained-glass artist.
“Using salvaged stuff makes things cheap, but it adds time,” Zuker says. “Anybody who’s building on a schedule can’t use this stuff.”
Throughout the building process, Zuker put blinders on about time. When he realized that the cost of having one slab of granite ground to specifications would pay for a diamond saw, he invested in the tool and crafted all the granite for his kitchen countertops and bathroom himself. “I had more time than money. You cannot make something beautiful if your mind is on the clock. It’s all part of just getting away from the modern mentality.”
Power tools aren’t always the answer, Zuker learned. “When you’re building on a small scale, power tools can be more of a nuisance than a help,” he says. “By the time you set up a table saw and find the extension cord, you could have cut the wood with a Japanese hand saw. You also have time to ponder what you are doing with a hand saw; you make mistakes real quick with a power saw.”