Chapter V - Home Building

I began to enter a world that I had never known before. My mind began to turn toward the house we would build on our land. My husband requested a catalog from a mail order house and we selected the house we wanted to build from it. We proceeded to engage a meeting with a lawyer.

It took a few months before we could start with the cellar. Nicola decided to use horsepower to help excavate. What a mistake that was! We had to finish this very hard work by hand. We hired a man to help since my husband could only work on the weekends. This man produced very little. Our friends and relatives would help us too. This was the custom of the times. One would help another. Finally the foundation was laid and the walls of the basement began to take form, but it took many months before the house was finished. We had made many mistakes. First of all, the biggest one was our doing the work with the help of friends. We would feed them and give them gifts, which cost us more than paid laborers.

It was June, 1928, when we moved into our not quite complete home. The painting had to be done and the floors scraped and finished. We had run out of money and had to borrow some, but it was our home and it was beautiful. There were ten rooms in all, a bathroom with a gleaming white bathtub, heat and electricity and a gas stove in the kitchen. Our seven children and ourselves still had a lot of hard work. The seventh child, a girl, was born while we were getting ready for our beautiful house but now we had plenty of room.

We proceeded to plant a big garden planning to sell some of the produce. The rest would be canned and stored for the winter months.

Nicola built a chicken coop for many chicks. Everything was going beautifully during our hard work and we were very happy.

The children were doing very well in school as their report cards told us.

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