Building in Ramona
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
Why are you building a new house?" someone asked my mother the other day. "Why do they want to know?" Mom asked us.
"Because a house hasn't been built in Ramona for 40 years," we answered, laughing. Even though Mom grew up around here, she's been gone a long time and isn't quite used to curious questions.
This is a new thing for our little town — house building. Kathy put up a new shed, recently. Tim's building a hay barn. But nobody is building new houses. There was a modular house erected on the edge of town a few years ago and a trailer house moved in by the park two years back — other than that, probably the brick house on B Street where Ralph lives is the last house built from scratch.
Remodelers and fixer-uppers of old homes, we've wondered ourselves about building a new house in Ramona. Building a house in a big town is one thing, but in Ramona? Are we wise? Is this a smart investment? Probably not, but, here we are, investing in the future of this little one-horse, five-block town.
Mom likes the idea. "This house isn't just for me," she reminds us, "when I don't need it any longer, it's yours — so make sure you like it. And after you, there are grandchildren and maybe even great-grandkids who will keep coming back to Ramona."
And so Mom purchased a plot of land from Clinton and Frances Hanschu on the north corner of 5th and D Street and together we began the process of designing the house. We've gone over and over the house plans with our contractor, John Laurin of Marion, to make sure the house is usable for almost every contingency. It's gonna be open and airy with lots of windows to please us, kid-proof and guest-ready, handicap accessible, wheelchair friendly with extra entryways for care-givers or relatives.
"In the good old days," says Mom's sister, Frieda, "they built a new house when you got married and added on when there were too many kids to fit." Our Grandpa Schubert's house followed this pattern with the original structure built in the early 1900s when he and Auguste Bentz were married. After Uncle Albert, child number four, was born, a wing was added onto the house. "When I was born," says Frieda with a grin, "they did the last addition." Frieda was number eight in the nine-child line-up.
It's been quite an odyssey for Martha — the Schubert's child number seven — to arrive back in Ramona for a house-building. And some people might think it's a little unusual to think about building a new house in your 80s.
"Wouldn't a remodel do?" a friend asked. But Mom has been looking forward to a house that doesn't lean one direction or another, where the cupboards are new and drawers slide easily, where windows don't leak and the furnace isn't in the middle of the floor. We don't blame her. After all, she left a brand new house in Oregon that she'd never been able to move into — only dream about — and came to Ramona to be near us.
Thirteen years ago when we came from California to buy our first house in Ramona, a lanky teenager named Brendon Bailey watched our progress and said, "Traffic sure has picked up on the north end of town." There were lots of curious cars cruising by to see what those girls from California were doing.
Yesterday, we heard the unusual sound of heavy equipment in Ramona. My sister and I stopped painting screens just long enough to see what was happening in our end of town. We grinned, "Traffic is picking up on the north end of town, again," we said to each other with a grin. Makovec Construction was leveling the land and we're building a new house so that generations to come can spend another day in the country.
