Lee Mothes - Keep Out!: Build Your Own Backyard Clubhouse: A Step-by-Step Guide

I deeply appreciate all the help of Deborah Balmuth, Nancy Ringer, Ilona Sherratt, and the rest of the staff at Storey Publishing in making this book a wonderful experience for me. It has been fun all the way!

Michael J. Caduto

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224 pages. Paper. ISBN 978-1-60342-794-4.

Hardcover. 978-1-60342-971-9.

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To Mom, Chris, Kathy, and Virginia, for enabling me to find my way by building clubhouses.

My greatest feeling of accomplishment as a kid occurred after school one day when I sat in a beat-up wicker chair outside our clubhouse. We two girls and two boys had just finished nailing up shingles that we had scrounged from a building site and hauled home on a wagon. I was beaming with pride at what we had achieved. After all, we designed and built the entire structure ourselves from stuff we found on our own, without a single suggestion or intervention from grown-ups.

The clubhouse was our hangout, where we learned to work together and to tolerate the sometimes strange habits of other kids. We had no choice but to get along: some kids provided the wood, nails, and paint, anothers parents owned the yard, and I had figured out how to build it. We had arguments and breakdowns, but our common desire to have a clubhouse kept us together. I think that because we had the freedom to get dirty, learn how to use our hands, and make mistakes on our own, we all had more fun building clubhouses than anything we ever did under the supervision of adults.

I was probably a mediocre kid a bit of a loner in my elementary school, not interested in sports, and my reading habits favored comic books. But I was fascinated by building things. My mom had told me about her brother Frank, who was the only boy in her otherwise strictly disciplined family of girls. Frank, at age 13, built his own little house on a vacant lot across the street. Mom praised her brothers ingenuity, and I found myself hooked; I wanted a clubhouse too!

Herein the mysteries of house building were revealed to me.

At about this time, my grandfather Jesse gave me a weatherworn set of Audels Carpenters and Builders Guides, published in 1923. These books contained everything known about building houses, at least in 1923. I pored over the hundreds of detailed drawings of foundations, floors, walls, roofs, dormers, stoops, and stairs, paging through them as I did my comic books. I saw building as an intricate puzzle and felt challenged to figure out how all the pieces were put together to make a house. Maybe I could do something like this....

Study hall at school was my favorite time to draw plans. The floor plan on the right included an early patio.

Starting to Build

My best friend Chris and I had formed a bond by building things together. We spent hours on our nearby beach building sand castles, sand houses, sand towns, and sand freeways with elaborate bridges. The beach offered a trove of washed-up building materials and other treasures, scattered among the seaweed and dead seagulls. We spent hours on end doing this, but after a while, we wanted to build something bigger.

At age 11, I felt I was ready to build a clubhouse of my own, and Chris was eager to help. We chose a sandy vacant lot near my house as our building site. By luck, a late winter storm had washed up a lot of junk on the beach, including some usable lumber, and our next-door neighbor had just thrown out a pile of tall plywood cabinet doors. Chris and I lugged the doors, the driftwood, and any other wood we could scrounge up to our site. With my moms hammer and handsaw and all the nails I could find in our garage, we went to work. However, we had little idea of how to transform the pile of wood in front of us into a clubhouse; for all my studying of the pictures in Audels, the complexities of house building were still a bit beyond us.

So we improvised by sinking four 24 corner posts into the sand (easy digging, luckily), nailing the long 16 boards to these, and then shorter boards to the longer boards, until all the walls and the roof were covered with wood, except where the door would be. I nailed a door together with more boards and used rubber sandal soles for hinges. We managed to finish our clubhouse, a wobbly box about 7 feet long by 7 feet wide and 5 feet high, in about a week. A friendly neighbor heard about our project and donated a picket fence for a little front yard.

Learning Social Realities

This clubhouse became quite a learning experience! For fun, I put up a No Girls Allowed sign next to the door, but we soon found out that having the girls on our side would be a much better idea. Chriss sister Chele, her friend Kathy, and Kathys older sister Jean (who was bigger than me) took offense at the sign. They delivered a warning note that said Take down the sign OR ELSE!!!!!! We ignored it. Then they showed up with a wagonload of stones, which they hurled at the clubhouse without mercy, trapping us inside until they proved their point. Finally, after a long assault, Jean hollered, Hey, well stop if you take that sign down. I yelled back, Okay! and I took it down. We all knew each other and had played together before, so after the battle we became better friends.