The house on Tenth West is gone. A patch of dry boredom stands quietly in its place. The sagging fences and broken gates, unruly grass, water-starved gardens, all scraped clean by the teeth of bulldozers. We used to joke about ‘new owners’ scratching their heads trying to figure out how such an odd collection of rocks ended up here. Two decades of stones carried home in the pockets of a family of rock hounds. The family is gone now, too, scraped clean by time and choices.
There will be no new owners. No more patches, no more layers of paint. It was never about the house—even for us. The potential was always in the land, about what could be, not what was, and now, it is a lot of nothing.
The house was a Realtor’s nightmare. A two-story, white, cinder block house that urgently required a new roof. It sat on an acre of unkempt land, almost unheard of within the city limits. The single-pane windows were covered by heavy floral curtains, and animal heads hung on the dingy plaster walls. The two bathrooms were tiny. The ramshackle addition of a laundry room was practically falling off the house. To top it all off, it had the ugliest kitchen I had ever seen. The shit-brown cabinets and laminate countertop crammed together on one wall looked more like a workshop than a kitchen.
A polygamist family built the house in the late 50s or early 60s, which explained the lack of outlets in the kitchen. They raised twelve children in that small house. The majority of them were boys. Later, we would find the vintage porn and erotic novels they hid under the floorboards. None of the house’s shortcomings mattered to me. Ben was a master carpenter. I had no doubt he would create a beautiful home for us, despite the evidence of his unfinished house warning me otherwise.
We closed on the property and moved in the weekend before Halloween 2005. We ripped up carpets and tore down the blinds. We stripped her bare. Then we all started over. At first, the move put our newly blended family on neutral ground. It was our house. Farm boots and flip-flops lined the front door. We planted trees and a large vegetable garden, but the plans to update the kitchen and replace the failing roof remained paper promises on Ben’s drafting board. There was always a reason to put it off.
That’s not to say he didn’t make changes to the house. He most certainly did. One day, without warning, Ben knocked out the kitchen wall with a sledgehammer and installed a second-hand sliding glass door. It fit poorly in the hammered-out hole, but Ben never bothered to trim it, leaving the jagged edges of the concrete block on full display.
He did the same to the large picture window in the front room, installing a salvaged atrium that he crammed full of potted plants. The tinted glass was dark and attracted spiders. Still, Ben liked the effect so much that he created a larger version on our front porch. He enclosed the concrete pad using a collection of sliding glass doors. He loosely attached them with a corrugated piece of tin roofing and a section of downspout he fixed as a post. The heavy glass panels leaned precariously, causing the zoning enforcers to cover their heads with the clipboards while hastily attaching violation notices to our door.
Ben was wholly unpredictable. He cut exploratory holes in the ceilings and floors. He tore out the upstairs bathroom wall to fit a wool rug he had mis-measured. The carpet could have gone downstairs, but he said it was too fine to get ruined in a high-trafficked area.
We were already one bedroom short, but that didn’t stop Ben from pursuing a vaulted ceiling by ripping out the little room under the upstairs that the two youngest children used as a bedroom. Its destruction was almost a relief. The space was a death trap. The door was so small that even the kids had to duck. The ceiling was so low and the pitch so prominent that the only place you could stand up straight was the dead center of the room. The small oval window Ben installed was merely decoration. It didn’t open, but the single-walled chimney he ran from the woodstove in the kitchen below through dried wooden rafters into the corner of the room was fully functional.
Losing that space meant all four kids had to double up, which violated Ben’s parental agreement with his ex and gave them more to fight about. The two boys didn’t care, but when I moved a three-year-old into my oldest daughter’s room, the high schooler politely moved into her father's house full-time by simply not returning home during our visitation weeks. Dealing with an alcoholic father and the revolving door of questionable girlfriends he moved in, was better than living with a preschooler on the wrong side of the tracks. Adding insult to injury, Ben refused to finish the project for years because he didn’t trust the roof that we hadn’t replaced. He worried it would leak and ruin any new drywall he refused to hang.
Eventually, Ben demolished the staircase to move it from the center of the house to an exterior wall. It created a great room for the hideous kitchen, with half wooden subflooring, half peeling linoleum, and a piece of plywood between them. His renovations also left half a door frame and a live wire hanging over the refrigerator. It took him over a month, but he rebuilt the stairs. He handcrafted a beautiful open staircase with reclaimed oak treads, rounded bullnoses, and a handrail made from a twisting tree branch—that he snapped at anyone who used it because he didn’t want it to come loose.
The relocation of the stairs cost us the utility closet. This was an afterthought to Ben. He shoved the water heater into the mudroom on a makeshift shelf. It leaked down the concrete steps to the cellar and blocked the view of the garden from the kitchen sink. He wedged the furnace into the exposed upstairs attic space left by the unfinished vaulted ceiling project. To get it to fit under the steep angle of the risers, he hammered down the corners of the steel frame to match the roofline. The vent he cut in the roof leaked straight onto the dinner table below. The furnace never worked right after that. It always came on, but it didn’t always blow hot air.
Hardly anything in that house worked as it should have—including Ben and me. I tried implementing creative solutions to hide the mess and dodge the messages from the zoning and building departments, but it was like bailing out a boat moored under a waterfall. Ben began salvaging larger construction materials. He bought a semi-trailer filled with doors and windows that he parked half in the front yard and half in the back, making keeping the dogs in the yard an impossible task.
My sister died, and my world came to a crashing halt. I quit school. I was always sick. The house on Tenth West rebuilt its hairshirt of junk. The paint peeled, pipes froze, and small black spirals of mold crept out of the corners. The kids were embarrassed to bring friends home. Eventually, the roof we never replaced began to leak. I moved chairs and rugs to conceal the holes in the floor. I taped the children’s art over broken windows and hung curtains where there should have been walls.
Buckets of drill bits, hinges, light fixtures, pipe fittings, and brackets spilled out of Ben’s truck and trailers. The mess spread to the driveway and the garage. Attempting to hide it, we built a fence and parked our cars on the street. He built a greenhouse, and the piles migrated in. Stacks of salvaged building materials cluttered the edges of the large vegetable garden and climbed the steps of the front and back porches. He built a beautiful workshop for himself, and it was stuffed full long before he finished roofing it.
We raised our four kids in a slowly crumbling house, the sweet green smell of the Jordan River drifting in and out, lulled to sleep by the trains singing at night. By the time the kids were grown, the house was surrounded by leaning stacks of discarded granite, piles of broken tile, and rows of salvaged windows and doors. Stacks of slate and roofing tiles pressed against the garden fences, pipes, oak banisters, and old water heaters were scattered throughout the yard. Ben bought a portable sawmill, and the yard began filling with towering stacks of lumber.
Decades of neglect, a sinking foundation, and an earthquake finally caused cracks too large to ignore for both the house and the relationship. Retreat was the only move left. Luck for us, by then, the promised wave of gentrification was finally flooding the west side. Despite the severity of the house's deterioration, we could sell it for the value of the land and make a small fortune. It was a fortune we didn’t deserve. We walked from the house on Tenth West, knowing the home we created together resulted in a house unfit for people to live in.
The house and all the landmarks of life, including the dogs buried in the corners, are gone. Bones and collars pulled up in the roots of the felled trees. My beloved Juneau, a fiery red Queen Ann Heeler, was hit by a car while I was at work. Kilo, the black reservation dog we adopted in Southern Utah, was also hit and killed in the street. We brought in a vet for Moses, the standard poodle. He was so old, he nearly died before the needle could be placed. Zeek, the giant Dane—he wasn’t even really our dog—but we had to break his legs to fit him in the hole.
Life didn’t have to be that hard. I wish I had known that then.