My friends shook their heads when I told them I was going to build a house in Ubud. They told me I would lose three quarters of my mind and all of my sense of humour. They muttered about shoddy workmanship, exceeded quotations and hopelessly lost timelines. So it was with some trepidation that I signed the quotation and shook hands with the contractor in March.
I’d never had a house before and couldn’t afford an architect. Long evenings with paper, pencil and a very large eraser eventually produced the outline of what seemed to me a workable house. On March 15 we laid out the foundations with little white strings. Then 14 men moved onto the land, built a bamboo shack and started building my house.
They moved the earth with shovels and filled in the foundation with crushed limestone carried in tiny buckets. Singing and smoking, they mixed cement and laid bricks day after day. One bucket of cement and one brick at a time, the walls of my home began to rise. Unnervingly soon I was being asked where the doors and windows should be.
I’d forgotten to specify the height of the walls and the foreman decided that 3.6 meters would be a good height. Oh well, there will plenty of air circulation. I didn’t make it to the site for several days at one point and found a wall where no wall should be -— they were working from an old drawing. But no one was the least put out when I asked them to knock it down. They laughed, and knocked it down, and by that afternoon the new edge was nicely finished. After that I went every day.
Pyramids of sand and stacks of bricks morphed into walls and floors. One of the workers spent his days making pretty edges in cement to frame the brick walls, every detail perfect. They worked with the simplest tools and without electricity. I never saw a spirit level but the walls were even and straight, guided by bits of string with chunks of broken brick at the end. Then a load of timber arrived and with it, the first and only power tools — a saw, planer and drill. A roof specialist with merry dark eyes took charge of this important component and the work crew grew to 20. Drifts of fragrant camphorwood sawdust appeared. A massive timber roof frame was assembled and magically raised between one evening and the next morning with two bits of cloth tied to the highest point, red and white to represent the Indonesian flag.
Now the shell of the house teemed with workers — the walls inside and out, the roof, the windows, the floor. One man squatted at the edge of the roof, effortlessly catching roof tiles flung to him from below and fitting them in neat rows over the struts. Muddy ducks from next door marched in and out of the house in formation and muttered in the corner where my office would be.
I visited every day to measure walls and walk the land and marvel that I was building a house in a language I could hardly speak. Yet we seemed to understand each other very well, the house and the workers and I. It’s very simple here. You lay a foundation, put up walls, drop a roof over it all and hang some doors. Even I could understand it.
The foreman, Pak Manto, was competent and unflappable. Most of the workmen had never left Lombok or Java and were surprised to find themselves at the mercy of a tamu woman with bizarre building ideas and an obsession with litter. Already astonished by the concepts of a glass block shower wall and terra cotta sinks (tidak biasa, they pointed out), they also had to deal with my daily appeal that they pick up their litter and bag it for collection. Eyes would roll and jokes in dialect would be made. It took several weeks, but eventually the site began to look cleaner. One day a large white cloth flag appeared on the sand heap, hand lettered in Indonesian to say, "It is forbidden to throw rubbish here! Penalty death!!!" A black collection bag full of garbage stood tidily beneath it.
Friends dropped by often to commiserate and stayed to be astonished. The walls were so straight! The finishing was so halus! And most remarkable, it was all happening so fast! A German friend who had volunteered to design my kitchen with her CAD program arrived one day with a tape measure and a diagram accurate to one centimetre, and was speechless to find everything exactly where it should be. Pak Manto smiled smugly. He was a pro, all right.
When he began to lay the first floor tiles, the house suddenly began to take on a new energy. It was no longer just a structure of bricks and concrete. It began to feel alive, organic. I could imagine it with furniture in it, with friends in the kitchen, with flowers growing around the windows.After the walls had all received their third coat of paint, the electricians arrived and began to hack deep channels in the brick. Why hadn’t the placement of the wiring been considered when the walls were going up? I couldn’t help wondering aloud. Everyone looked at me as if I was mad, and I was sent off to buy lampshades and light bulbs. The next day the head electrician showed me the quality of the wiring he was using and where my house had been earthed. The water tukang placed bamboo stakes along the water lines so I wouldn’t cut into them when I was digging the garden. They were nice men.
My house ceremony was on the day of a full moon. Auspiciously, it poured with rain and the ritual bamboo exploded like gunfire, frightening any malign spirits off the land forever. But I’d never felt anything negative here. The house faces a tranquil bamboo forest across the river and the land is full of light. The topsoil is rich and dark and at least 2 metres deep. My sister, who homesteads in British Columbia, wrote the other day, "Having stewardship of your own land is like having your own small country." It’s a good feeling.
I’d known the face of every man who worked on this building that would be my home. I’d watched the walls grow, seen the ribbons of wood peel out from the planer, smelled the sawdust. I knew how the septic tank was made and where the water pipes were laid. This house would have no secrets from me.
Three and a half months after we staked out the foundations with string, I am going home.
