In the clear day, John could see that the problem with the water coming in that one place by the big window wasn’t because of the application of the siding but because he’d hadn’t caulked that particular place adequately to seal the window flange.

We had our first Christmas in our new home with my parents and my brother as our guests. We had a big fir tree in the entrance hall, and who needed kitchen counters to make a feast of roast turkey and all the traditional accompaniments, including John’s famous sherry trifle? By the time Brendan was born in late January, we’d had a friend build cabinets for the kitchen out of yellow cedar, we’d bought a sale lot of terracotta tiles for floors and counters — this would happen in summer when I could take our young sons away for two weeks and let John tile day and night without distraction; and there were doors for all the rooms.

“Sometimes the house grows and spreads,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, “so that in order to live in it, greater elasticity of daydreaming, a daydream that is less clearly outlined, are needed.” What wasn’t included in our plans, so carefully drawn by John by the light of small reading lamp at his desk, drafting ruler at hand, and a selection of sharpened pencils, was the eventual arrival of a third child. There was one bedroom for our sons to share, a study for John and me which would also contain a sofa-bed for houseguests. The entire second story, a 20 x 20 square with plumbing roughed in for the day when we could afford time and materials to finish a small bathroom at the top of the stairs, was our bedroom. We’d intended to divide the space into two rooms but once it was framed, we loved its views, its airiness, and left it open.

What wasn’t included in our plans, so carefully drawn by John by the light of small reading lamp at his desk, drafting ruler at hand, and a selection of sharpened pencils, was the eventual arrival of a third child.

After Angelica’s birth, we began to plan an addition. By pushing out the south wall of the boys’ room, we then built two more small rooms, reasoning that the boys could still share — we had bunkbeds for them — and once Angelica was old enough to need a room (she was sleeping with us while breastfeeding), she could move into the very small room between the larger one for the boys and their old room which would become a playroom. The addition would have a flat roof which we could use as an upper deck, a small sunroom leading to it from our bedroom.

“Sometimes a house grows and spreads”: that small addition lasted for a few years and then it was clear we could use more room as personalities grew as rapidly as limbs. Out came the drawing paper, pencils, special ruler, and a plan to extend in another direction. By taking out part of the eastern wall of the playroom, we could make two more rooms, one with a small step up to accommodate the rise of rock beneath it. By knocking out the wall between the two earlier rooms, we could create a larger room there for one child and then each of the others would have a room in the new addition. The flat roof on top extended the deck off our bedroom and it was also a good idea to build a cosy study for John. The playroom evolved to a library to contain the bulk of a reading family’s book collection.

By now John had such familiarity and skill with his tools. He knew how to make the best use of materials and how to set priorities, rather than daydreaming of windowsills and sunsets, the way I did.

We decided to have a few of the cedars on our property cut down. They were on the north-east side of the house, small trees when we’d first built in the early 1980s, but now towering and full-branched, and too close for comfort during the intense winter storms. Gradually their fallen fronds soured the soil where I was trying to grow roses and they provided too much shade for anything else to thrive.

It always feels a little wrong to cut down a healthy tree, though. We thought about it and talked about it. On the one hand, on the other. And then called in a team of guys. They had no qualms about taking down cedars. “Weeds, they’re weeds in this climate,” one of them said as he prepared his saw.

I tried not to be home on the day the cedars came down. But inevitably I saw part of their demise. Even though the tree guys went up and limbed the big trunks before cutting each section of trunk in sections, there was a moment when one section — I’d come home expecting everything to be done but the team had arrived late — hit the ground with a big whoomph. That was the biggest tree and the part that came down so hard was a good size because we’d arranged to have a portable mill and its sawyer come to mill the sections into rough boards. We hoped to get a sixteen foot length of 4 x 6 out of the big trunk to replace a beam across our patio. A wisteria, nearly twenty-five years old, clambered across the beam from the woodshed end, creating a green bower, and from the other, a New Dawn rose spilled its soft pink flowers over the rough wood. There was some rot in the existing beam and we figured we could somehow slide a new one through the embrace of the vines without them really noticing.