New House

Somehow Daddy and Mom scrimped and saved enough money to start building a new house. They worked on it in the evenings after Daddy came home from work. It was a long slow process but finally they had the roof on and the outside walls closed in.

They got the partitions up on the inside and by then their house fund was depleted, but we wanted to move in anyway. Grandpa Mast brought several five gallon pails of white paint and aunt Emma brought some coloring to tint it and they spent all day painting the plywood on the floors for us. The kitchen floor was painted a rust brown and three of the bedrooms a country blue. It was fun to watch as they would pour paint into the paint pan and then dip their paint roller in it and turn the plain plywood floor into something much prettier. When they were ready to paint my bedroom floor aunt Emma told me to come watch as she tinted the paint with some coloring she had brought along especially for my room.

I watched as she carefully put several drops of red in the paint and was delighted to see the paint turn a lovely shade of pink. I thought that surely no other little girl was as fortunate as I was to have a pink floor in her bedroom. It didn't bother me that there was nothing but stud walls all through the house. To me there were only so many more options of where to enter and exit my room and all the other rooms in the house.

Once the floors were painted Grandpa went to town with our spring wagon and came back with a load of huge boxes from an appliance store. They cut the boxes open and then took them inside and nailed the cardboard to the walls of Daddy and Mom's bedroom and the bathroom. Once they had it enclosed Mom found several old blankets and nailed them over the doors.

When Daddy came home from work he and Mom started moving in our furniture from the trailer. It was so exciting to be able to finally sleep in our new house.