A Barge on the Bayou

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As we pulled nails and sorted materials, we paid close attention to how the old cypress house had been put together. We figured the fact that neither of us had built so much as a doghouse was no reason to shrink from constructing a big home full of windows and a brick fireplace! So—armed with a box of crayons, paper, and Brad Angier's How to Build Your Home in the Woods (Sheridan, 1952, $9.95)—we started drawing up our plans.

The shape of our barge naturally dictated a shotgun style of architecture, rather than a four-square model . . . the Louisiana climate demanded a big screened porch and as many windows as the walls could support . . . and our own tastes leaned toward a home with a few large rooms rather than many small ones. The rest of the design was pretty much determined by the availability of materials. For example, we were one room shy of wooden flooring . . . but the fireplace hadn't made a dent in our mountain of bricks, so we decided to use the surplus to build the floor in the library (it certainly eliminated the danger of fire from stray sparks). The bricks help store heat from the fireplace in the winter . . . and provide the room with a cool, inviting summer atmosphere.

BUILDING ON A BARGE

The construction of our home started on January 22, 1975 under the watchful and pessimistic eye of an old loiterer who kept mumbling, "It'll never stand." That gentleman, however, was one of the many people who'd scoffed at the thought of our even finding a barge in the first place, so we didn't pay him much mind.

For a while, though, it did seem that his prediction might well prove true. Each morning, we'd peer out of our temporary shelter on the bank (it had housed Calvin's horse until we moved the animal out and ourselves in) to see our stud poles listing north or south, depending on which direction the largest wake-producing towboats had taken in the night. It became a prebreakfast ritual to hoist the studs back to perpendicular with a rope while we braced and braced and braced some more. Before long, Calvin tossed the carpenter's level to our bored spaniel, and from then on we just guessed at the constantly changing angles.

Since our every available penny was being spent on nails, sandpaper, window glass, and other building incidentals, we stayed alive by means of fish caught on crosslines near the barge. Our surplus was traded to riverboat folks for milk, eggs, meat, vegetables, gas, paint, cleaning supplies, and anything else that would have taken our time to grow,or our money to buy.

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