Little house on a shoestring

When I told my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter I'd build her a backyard playhouse, I envisioned a fun little weekend DIY project.

I thought I could save a few bucks over a store-bought version and I'd gain the satisfaction of building a real house, even it was Hobbit-sized.

But why not take it up a notch, I thought, and turn this whole thing into an experiment in economy? What if I tried to build the house for free, or close to free? And what if I tried to make it entirely out of used materials?

With those two caveats, my manageable project turned into an all-consuming mission: a weeklong obsession with frugality, recycling and cost accounting; a reckoning with the limits of my own carpentry skills; and, finally, a humbling experience in the generosity of others.

***

It all started with a promise.

On a Sunday evening, I told my daughter the playhouse I'd been jawing about for months would finally be done -- and by the following weekend!

I'd just made a pledge, out loud, to a child with an unforgiving memory.

It was on.

I began by looking at some playhouse designs online and sketching out a rough plan. Then I started searching for free wood, paint and other supplies.

My mission to build the house on the cheap and with secondhand materials would mean asking friends and strangers to give me things -- like lumber, tools and their expertise. I have to admit this made me a little nervous, due to both an ingrained notion of self-reliance and a soupçon of social phobia.

I started with strangers, posting requests for materials on Freecycle and Berkeley Parents Network, but didn't get any responses right away. I hit the mother lode, though, on the "free" section of craigslist. On Monday night I found a post offering a pile of free wood, and I arranged to pick it up from the owner, Maryanne, the next day.

A kind and cheerful woman, Maryanne had brought the wood, mostly shelf boards and two-by-fours, with her from a cabin she'd rented in Santa Cruz, and had never gotten around to reusing it in her new home.

"I just hate to waste anything," she said.

After I loaded the boards into my car, we chatted for about half an hour -- about her work as a doctoral candidate in political theory, about traffic mimes in Bogata, Columbia, and about the Craigslist subculture of free stuff.

It was a nice little moment. An arbitrary online connection over scrap wood had led me outside, away from my computer, to a beautiful spot in the Berkeley hills on a gorgeous day, where I'd shared a connection, however fleeting, with a generous stranger whom I would have never otherwise met.

I brought the wood home and unloaded it -- the round trip totaled about two hours. I should start tracking my time, I thought, in order to make a true accounting of this project's costs. But should I count the time I spent chatting with Maryanne? That wasn't really "billable work," was it? In my time log, I put a question mark next to 12:30 - 1:00 p.m.

The playhouse project was off to an auspicious start, but I figured I'd need a lot more wood. And I knew I'd need better tools than I had, which amounted to little more than a saw and a hammer. I checked with my landlord, Mehrdad, to see if I could use some of the leftover wood from his remodel of our bathroom. Then I asked my new next-door-neighbor, Paco, if I could borrow his miter saw. Both agreed and offered me some additional wood, too.

I brought Paco's saw home and starting cutting boards. And I got my first bit of free building advice from across the fence: "Cut slower!" Paco yelled.

On Wednesday I posted a message to Facebook, asking friends if they had any materials to spare. I got a couple offers, one from an old college professor of mine whom I hadn't seen in years. "Ron [my husband] has lots of this stuff he'd be willing to give you if you can come to El Granada to pick it up," she wrote. "He's a retired contractor with a basement full of stuff. Give a call and come by."

The next day I drove to the house overlooking the Pacific that Ron had built himself. He was down in his shop, sawing something.

I showed him my plans and he offered advice, his enthusiasm growing as he explained construction codes for joining wall frames and building roofs. He pulled out boards from his lumber racks and jumped around to demonstrate.

Ron suggested I take some sheets of plywood that were sitting unused in his shop. I demurred, wary of asking for too much (this was supposed to be a do-it-myself project!). Besides, the plywood sheets were too big to fit in my car.

Upstairs, Patricia had made us some sandwiches; it was a balmy day, and we ate out on the deck. By the end of lunch, against my hesitations, it was agreed that Ron would come to my house on Saturday, bringing the plywood, his nail gun and some other serious tools. He might even stay to help with the construction.

That trip to El Granada took about three hours, total. How to account for it in my "costs" column? At 72 miles, round trip, I'd burned through about 2.5 gallons of gas.

But the sandwiches, the ocean view and the conversation clearly belonged in the "benefits" column. And Ron's offer would turn out to be an incalculable benefit.

***

As the week continued, I began to see everything around me through a sort of "playhouse filter." I noticed unused wood lying around in lots of places, and I rummaged through it looking for usable pieces.

On a walk in our neighborhood one evening, my wife, daughter and I saw a beautiful, shingle-covered playhouse in someone's front yard. We rang the doorbell and asked if we could look check it out.

"Let me get my husband; he built it," said the woman who answered the door, Nina.

The husband came out and offered construction advice. "Start with a plan," he said. And for recycled materials, he advised, try Urban Ore.

The next day, I brought my daughter to the massive Berkeley salvage yard. ("Our purpose is to end the age of waste by advocating and developing total recycling," says the Urban Ore Web site. "We receive unwanted things and sell them as-is for reuse.")

We rummaged through the junk and I encouraged her to brainstorm about what we could use for the playhouse. We came away with two window shutters and a small door for $30.

Later that day, I loaded the car with wood and stopped by the Oakland shop of my daughter's daycare-friend's dad, Chris, a woodworker who'd said I could use his table saw. He looked at my plans and disabused me of my idea of using the table saw to pre-cut boards. He made some drawings for a better alternative, then lent me some sawhorses, a level and a waist apron with pockets.

"This may seem silly," Chris said of the waist apron. "But you'll be glad you have it." (Spoiler alert: Chris was right! I bet that apron saved me at least 45 minutes of running around looking for the tape measure and my pencil).

***

By mid-week, the playhouse was consuming me. Instead of tending to my freelance writing and editing work, I was making trips to Urban Ore and obsessively checking the Craigslist "free" section.

On Friday morning I saw a post for free wood and drove across town to pick up some redwood scraps. Then I got a tip from Berkeley Parents Network about a cabinet sitting out on the sidewalk in Rockridge. Another Craigslist post offered some free roofing paper, but it was in Sunnyvale. Was it worth the two-hour roundtrip? I'd also seen some free shingles advertised, but the woman who offered those hadn't e-mailed me back.

On Thursday night I literally went to bed and woke up thinking about the playhouse: about whether I'd have enough wood, and where to get paint, and what would happen if I didn't finish by the end of the weekend.

By Friday night I'd spent about 16 hours planning and collecting materials. I had only two of the wall frames built.

The next morning, Ron arrived with a truck full of plywood and a contractor-grade tools. I may have been hallucinating, but I could've sworn I saw a ring of light around his head.

It was during the roof construction -- when Ron cut "birdsmouth" joints into the rafters, and when the two of us heaved the plywood sheets onto the frame -- that I realized how woefully I'd underestimated the scope of Project Playhouse. This was not a DIY project. It had evolved into a DIWLOHFO -- do it with lots of help from others -- project. It also turned out not to be free, and in the end I didn't use 100 percent used materials.

With Ron's help, all but one side of the house was completed by 4:30 that afternoon. I was floored by Ron's generosity -- I barely knew him, and here he'd spent his whole Saturday helping me make this house for my daughter.

The next day I put on the final side of the house by myself. The forecast called for rain, and in order to weatherproof the house, it needed some paint or some shingles quick. I never heard back from the Craigslist poster about the free shingles, and I wasn't seeing any outdoor paint on freecycle.org. It was Sunday --my arbitrary deadline -- and we needed some paint.

Reader, I bought the paint at Home Depot. A gallon of combination primer-exterior paint (plus rollers, brushes and a couple of other painting supplies) cost us $58.

On Sunday afternoon my wife and daughter helped paint the house red. The next day I made a final trip to Urban Ore to search for trim wood and found some, along with -- miraculously! -- a kids' wooden play-sink and refrigerator. (I should explain that play kitchens make my daughter delirious. And the trim wood and the play kitchen together cost $10!)

On Monday I trimmed the door, windows and roof, and I painted them white with my landlord's paint and then screwed in the shutters. For a final favor, I asked the guys in the rock band next door to help me move the house into place in the corner of our yard.

***

So what did it all cost?

I ended up spending $143 on materials -- used wood, shutters, and the play kitchen from Urban Ore; new paint and painting supplies from Home Depot; and new sandpaper, nails and screws (which were rendered unnecessary by Ron's nail gun) from local hardware stores. All of the wood was either used or donated.

All told I spent about 37 hours on the playhouse, from design to completion. Ron pitched in six hours of highly skilled labor, not counting his commute to and from El Granada.

But the costs included some gray areas, like my trips to pick up supplies or to meet with friends and acquaintances for advice. That half-hour conversation with Maryanne is included in the total -- it was, after all, "project related" -- but counting it feels a little sleazy, like expensing the company for an extra piece of cheesecake.

In fact, the closer I looked at costs, the blurrier they became. Should I count all of the driving time -- and the gas -- that I used to get materials? What about the Advil I took on Sunday morning when my body was hung-over from roofing? And what about the $6 for Sunday's unread New York Times, which my wife gingerly pointed out I had accidentally used as a painting drop cloth.

Did I mention that I broke a latch on the finish sander that Paco lent me? Replacing the part should run about $13.

The benefits side of the equation is even harder to quantify. At $143, my playhouse was at least a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than most of the houses I saw online.

(But again that's not counting my own time, or the market value of the labor of a retired professional homebuilder, Ron, or a skilled woodworker, Chris, who offered consulting, and so on. And a store-bought playhouse could probably be delivered, minimizing the fuel I burned running around town all week. But then again, it would probably have been shipped from China, and made of new materials, including plastic, and would have to be assembled, too.)

One of the real benefits of building a playhouse on my own (or as it turned out, helping Ron build it), was the satisfaction of the work, both on philosophical and physical level. It's a cliché, but I found it to be true: It just feels good to make something on your own instead of buying it.

And there was, above all, the great payoff of my daughter's joy when she saw the house come together. "My house is beautiful," she said while we were painting it, in one of those moments that kind of feels like your kid is doing a parody of "cute." But to be fair, she probably would have said the same thing about a pre-fab playhouse from Costco.

The hardest-to-quantify value of this whole project lay in the connections I made with friends, neighbors and strangers, and their incredible generosity. I also had to confront my own tendencies toward isolated self-reliance -- my reluctance to ask for help. And every time I did, I was met with unequivocal yesses.

***

Patricia, Ron's wife and my college professor who answered the Facebook post, is a guru of improvisational theater.

And so it was a neat serendipity that led to this connection over the playhouse, because her work and her teaching are based on the radical idea of "saying yes," and on accepting "gifts" in their many -- and often unrecognized -- forms.

"Perhaps your eye, like mine, is trained to notice certain kinds of things," she writes in her book, Improv Wisdom. "What is wrong with the situation, who is a jerk, and how much others need fixing."

In fact, she writes, "Everywhere you turn, something or someone is helping you. You may have been asleep to all this, however. Waking up can be illuminating. There are gifts everywhere we see them."

My week of playhouse construction caused me to recognize the abundance around me.

The playhouse ended up costing a lot, but my daughter was right: It's beautiful.

Rob is interested in hearing stories from people who grow vegetables at home with a goal of saving money. E-mail him at rbaedeker@sfgate.com

Rob Baedeker is a writer living in Oakland. He is the co-author, with the Kasper Hauser comedy group, of "SkyMaul," Weddings of the Times," and "Obama's Blackberry."