Self-Taught Builder Tackles Home Rathdrum Single Mom Learns As She Goes

Lin Rimple figures there isn’t anything she can’t do.

But, she’s quick to add, “There are things I wouldn’t want to do again!”

Anyone who has been their own general contractor on a home-building project would probably have the same lament. For Rimple, the time-consuming and frustrating job has been even harder because she’s doing most of the labor herself.

“I give her credit,” said Tom Messina, a Coeur d’Alene contractor. “If it’s someone who has never tackled something like this, it’s quite overwhelming.”

Messina hasn’t met Rimple but says the job she’s doing is a challenge even for professionals. He couldn’t think of another woman who has built her own house.

Rimple is used to expressions of disbelief from the guys at the building supply store, the subcontractors, even the power company worker who hooked up a line to her work-in-progress.

“They say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. Most men wouldn’t take that on.”’ Rimple, 34, is a single mom who wanted to save money on her house.

“I also wanted to know what went into it, make sure there weren’t any shortcuts. I couldn’t afford a really good builder.”

The house is going up on the 16 acres Rimple owns near Rathdrum. A few steps away is the mobile home she shares with 16-year-old Aleyna and their big black dog, Sparky.

She sat at her kitchen table last June and sketched out a floor plan. An architect friend put it in a form county planners would accept.

In recent years, Rimple made a living running her own window-cleaning business. Right now, she’s a full-time builder.

Until she started on the house, Rimple hadn’t built anything more complicated than her barn. She fashioned that out of logs she cut nearby.

“This is all self-taught,” she said. “There are times when I didn’t know how to do something. So I did what I did know how to do, and pretty soon I figured it out.”

She’s 5-foot-7 and sturdy, but found to her disappointment that she wasn’t strong enough to do a number of jobs on her own. So she called on friends to handle 16-foot boards and Sheetrock, and raise the roof trusses.

She hired people to excavate, pour the foundation, install plumbing and heating. But she couldn’t bring herself to pay an electrician.

“I did the breaker box myself,” she said. “They came out and inspected it and it passed. Too cool!”

She’s also quite proud of the basement stairway, which needed precise measurement. “I cut it and it fit the very first time.”

The project hasn’t always gone smoothly. She’s wished she hadn’t started “at least 50 times.” Like the day concrete was being pumped into the plastic foam insulation blocks that form the outside walls.

The pressure of the pumping repeatedly caused the blocks to move, sending concrete gushing down the sides.

“We had about 15 blowouts on the top floor. When you have one, it’s a disaster,” she said. “For six hours, it was a madhouse.”

Cleo Spraggins, a helper with construction experience, said the wall-building went far better than Rimple described.

“To her it was frustrating, but to someone who has worked around concrete for 25 years, Lin’s house poured like a dream.”

The blocks are an energy-efficient alternative to wood framing. Though few people in this country use them to build an entire house, having that option was one reason Rimple thought she could do the job herself.

She got some help stacking and securing the blocks from her sister, Mary Rimple, a Midwest businesswoman who was in Idaho on a hiatus.

Recalled Lin Rimple: “After two months she threw up her hands and said, ‘I’m not a builder! This isn’t fun at all!”’

Naomi Rimple, the women’s mother, said from her Wisconsin home that her six kids grew up on a dairy farm and are all hard workers. But as for Lin’s particular drive, she said, “To be honest, I don’t know where she gets it.”

Lin’s teenager doesn’t help much with the house building. Aleyna made it clear from the start that all the hard work was Mom’s idea, Rimple said, but she helps out by cleaning their mobile home and fixing dinner.

“She’s very nurturing.”

Rimple is looking forward to finding a regular job when the house is built. But there’s been plenty of mental challenge in this project.

“I’d come in some days and my brains just hurt” from all the decision making.

“Being single, I didn’t have to fight with anyone over the decisions. The bad thing is, I didn’t have anyone to bounce anything off.”

Rimple plans to move into the house by February. It will be paid for, thanks to the sale of some land and to five austere years spent living in a “tin can” trailer.

“We didn’t buy clothes because we didn’t have room for them,” she said with a laugh.

She’s spent $35,000 on the house, and expects to spend another $10,000. She figures she saved $15,000 in labor. That doesn’t count landscaping, which she will do.

The house is a simple rectangle with a deck. It has 1,400 square feet on the main floor, plus the full basement. It will have a few luxuries, including a jetted bathtub and a knotty pine vaulted ceiling. Rimple got such a good deal on the pine that she bought extra and may use some to build kitchen cabinets.

She’s rested the past few days to recuperate from some surgery. Plus, she’s waiting for a go-head from building inspectors.

They stopped work on her project, she said sheepishly, after discovering that she’d switched from wood to steel framing on the inside walls without getting county approval.

Spraggins isn’t surprised that his determined friend could build a house largely by herself. Still, he tried to convince Rimple not to tackle the massive job.

“Everybody tried to talk her out of this. But in reality, it wasn’t so crazy,” he said. “Sometimes the crazy things work out for the best.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo