This Is the House that House Built

Robert House’s previous house in Summit, Mississippi had wooden floors, and walls made of 200-year-old longleaf heart pine.

After it burned in 2007, the late Summit fire chief Windsor Gay told him, “Robert, if you hadn’t built your house out of kindling, it wouldn’t have burned so easily,” House recalled.

His current house — still a work in progress — may not be quite as scenic, but it’s not made of “kindling,” either.

“Fireproof,” House said, pointing to walls of polybutylene.

The frame around to which the panels are attached is solid timber joined with dowels, not nails.

“I’m going to say that this is one of the strongest houses I’ve ever been around,” House said. “Storm? I don’t think a storm is going to bother it that much.”

House, now 67, was visiting his son David in Tennessee on Nov. 7, 2007, when he got a call about the fire from McComb fireman Jim Brown. It still chokes him up to think about it.”

He said, `I’m standing here watching your house burn,'”House said. “But it’s just like David said, ‘Daddy, you weren’t in it.’ ”

He drove home — too fast, he admits now — to find his life in ashes. People described the blaze as a “bonfire,” so hot that firemen could hardly get near it.

“There was no way they could put that out,” he said.

The house had been a labor of love. He had spent five years building it, starting in 1993. Now he was back to square one.

By February 2008, House, an ironworker and carpenter by trade, was busy rebuilding.

He and Kay Day had attended a timber frame workshop in North Carolina, and House was smitten by using wooden dowels instead of nails.

“I wanted to learn about the dowel pins, about mortise joints,” he said.

He bought a lathe, intending to turn all the dowel rods himself. Then he was at a building supply store and saw a bin of 41/2-foot wooden dowels for sale, cheap.

“I got to thinking, I can’t make them for that,” he said.

He used a chain mortise — which he compared to a vertical chain saw — to drill the holes, then drove the dowels into them.

He assembled a frame for the house from 6-by-6 yellow pine posts and beams attached by dowels — none of the 2-by-4 studs common to house construction.

“I don’t have any nails in this house except in this cabinet right here,” House said, pointing to a beautiful cabinet made of poplar and sassafras. He and Day used his Sky Trak extending boom forklift to raise sections of the frame and set them on the slab foundation. He attached them to the floor with metal plates.

“I cut this whole house out out yonder,” he said, gesturing to a huge open barn that he and Day built which shelters his Wood-Mizer portable sawmill.

Raising and bracing the sections of frame was no easy matter, and House said he put a lot of thought into figuring out how to do it. The result is a structure with incredible strength, he said.

Once the frame was up, he dismayed his friends by covering it over with polybutylene foam panels. The panels provide excellent insulation and resistance to flame, and also hide the wiring.

“They said, ‘Why don’t you leave all this open so you can see this stuff?'” House said. “I built it this way so I could utilize those panels.”

The 2,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath house has a metal roof and 9-foot ceilings. Each bedroom has its own private entrance.

His bedroom, which is 24 by 16 feet, features a bed hanging from the ceiling by chains —the same set-up he had in his previous home. The chains are fitted into sliding racks. The overall effect is one of gentle motion.

“Comfortable,” he said. “They always talk about rocking a baby to sleep.”

Much work remains, including doors to hang and porch roofs to build. House plans to sell the Sky Trak and Wood-Mizer to keep funding his work.

With the exception of Day, he’s been doing it on his own.

“It lets you get back into yourself when you do a project like this and you do it all by yourself.”