Girls’ house is their castle
In the lottery of life, 16 and 21 were the numbers Pat Michielli couldn’t wait to play.
“Sixteen,” the Spokane Valley lifer recently explained, “because then I could drive. Twenty-one, because then I could sign my own mortgages.”
He is decades beyond those ages now, 70 years old, a soft-spoken man with the hands of a tradesman and a forever-brown complexion, the result of years working outdoors. And he has just handed his dream of homeownership, in miniature, to his granddaughters, 5-year-old Sammie and 7-year-old Allie Etter.
The girls buzz like honeybees through the front door of their own 12-foot-by-10-foot Victorian masterpiece, which Michielli constructed at his Greenacres shop, then hauled on a lowboy semitrailer to his daughter’s house.
The building is too opulent to really be called a playhouse, too fully functional for any title associated with blanket-sided card tables, refrigerator boxes or scrap wood.
The roped balusters on the front porch are hand-turned, and the windows in the four dormers are custom-sized. Pastel-colored half circles hang from every roof edge like giant Necco candies. It is a home perhaps just a closet shy of a college dorm room. There’s a television tucked under the kitchen counter and a karaoke machine waiting for a front-porch performance.
Allie Etter perches herself in a loft big enough to accommodate a single bed. She blows on a Hero harmonica while reading “Read to Your Bunny” by Rosemary Wells.
“I’m the second name on the list,” Allie Etter said matter-of-factly, pointing to a single page of guests allowed in the new home.
Already there is that atmosphere of privacy, of exclusivity that comes with homeownership. Already there is talk about security, the neighbors, the building’s true value, its market potential, its next life.
Such is housing big or small. We talk about what our return would be if we ever had to sell, what a gold mine we might be sitting on, what an albatross we’re apt to bear should the tax man learn our secret. Homeownership calms us and worries us. We are moths to its flame.
The girls’ house “has running water and a side window. If it had a bathroom, it could be an espresso stand when the girls get older,” said Jackie Etter, the girls’ mother and Michielli’s daughter.
His daughter’s thoughts turn forward, but Michielli’s turn backward to the cost of the first home he built in 1954. He was only 19, younger than that magical age of 21, so his older brother signed for the mortgage. The home, built to sell, was more than 2,000 square feet by today’s standards, meaning its marketable dimensions included a full basement. Real estate agents didn’t used to count the basement in the square footage, Michielli said. Now, they count the garage.
“The materials for that home cost $950. This one cost more,” he said. “I’m afraid to know how much.”
Michielli confides that he left the home construction business years ago because he didn’t have the personality to handle all the issues that arise when building someone’s home, someone’s castle. He has been in road construction for decades.
Sixteen and 21, the numbers that seemed so important to Michielli a half century ago, are taking a back seat now to 5 and 7 and the chance to embrace a sense of place as a child – without the complexities of what comes next.