Last updated 05-01-2026
Thia section starts with my sophomore year at Reed College in 1964 and houses I rented or designed and/or built for myself or others subsequently.
Initially I was able to rent a glassed in 6’x 9′ back porch off the kitchen with bathroom and kitchen privileges for $10/month that included utilities (but no heat in my room). It was on SE 38th and Harold at the upper end of the Reed canyon. The primary tenant was a truck driver, his wife, a teenage daughter that slept in the basement, and a young son that shared his parents’ bedroom when they didn’t lock him out. The upstairs had a number of other Reed students with their own kitchen and bath, and there was one more Reed student in the basement.
From here I moved after Thanksgiving vacation to a rental on SE 32 Place half a block from Lambert Gardens through which I could also walk to campus in my bare feet. Bonnie was my first Reed girlfriend, but she had a previous boyfriend with red hair who had transferred to Bolder Colorado, so I moved into the off campus rental she had shared with two other Reed girls when she rejoined him. She was also a psych major at that time. I partitioned off the living room for my bedroom. My share of the rent was $25/month, utilities extra. That rental was sold and the rent increased beyond my budget of $40/month for rent, utilities, food, books, etc. At that time, an older, Portland native met and introduced me to Tangela. He was an aspiring artist who lived with his grand parents who would not let him live with a girl, so given that we all needed inexpensive housing, we rented an old Victorian 6 bedroom home with no heating system for $40/month split two ways and utilities split 3 ways located on SW Colombia Street in the Goose Hollow neighborhood.. Tangela married Gary over the summer when I was back in Vermont. However, she had not agreed to rent with Gary unless I was included and many marriages later she is now married to a Reed alumnus which was likely her plan for herself from the beginning.
This Victorian was attractive from the street side, but the roof leaked. The bathroom was a second thought addition to the back porch. You could see the earth below through rotted floor boards.
Most of the off campus housing I shared as a Reed College student no longer exists. Here is the best of those shared rentals, in this case the winter of 1965 after my sophomore year. I shared this 4 bedroom home with a the married couple and two other people, one, an older Reed alumnus, and the other a fellow I would later be hired to direct construction of a new home for in Lake Oswego.
After paying off the Reed College tuition loan my father had taken out, I hitch-hiked from Vermont to San Francisco to establish residency for in-state tuition for more affordable U.C. Berkeley School of Environmental Design. I had a mailing address at 793 Clayton Street pictured next. The third floor and attic had previously been rented by the Portland band, P.H.Phactor Jug Band. During much of this September-February I was actually renting a room in more affordable Portland. The front 2nd floor studio apartment was rented by Philip Hammond who managed Big Brother and the Holding Company before Chet Helms recruited Janice Joplin. One of the contributing factors to my leaving in February 1967 was that the band, Blue Cheer, was practicing in the attic above my room and it was impossible to read.
All I wanted to do was be in college studying architecture. I was not attracted to the counter culture because I had more adult models of Quaker communities, and the community development projects of my paternal grandfather, and the Putney School where I had been both a faculty child and later a boarding student. This memoir by a classmate who dropped out of Reed in 1964, the year I transferred to Reed, and who was a partner of a member of the P.H.Phactor Jug Band is an intelligent Reed of the times.
Following a summer as a union carpenter in 1974, I was hired by one of the former renters in the yellow rental to direct and train the owner and a friend of his younger brother to build a new architect designed upgrade to an older, fire damaged residence on 8 acres with a brook in Lake Oswego, Oregon. The architect had not done an adequate evaluation of the fire damaged structure. Its foundation had no footings and the floor joists were rotted at the sills and propped up with lots of little posts on pier blocks. What wood we were able to salvage went to building forms for a proper new foundation.
Me, 1974, as foundation and framing foreman 3 bedroom, 3 bath plus sauna residence, Lake Oswego, Oregon on 8 acre lot with brook, winter 1974 for one of the 5 sharing renters of the house above, back in 1965.
Johns Landing project, summer of 1978 for my middle ex. I was hired to implement upgrades to wiring, plumbing, floor plan, etc. based on an architect’s plans. The fun part was the porch railings that I designed. The city code required a railing height of 36″ but the square part of the posts ended lower. To celebrate the turnings of the posts, the top rail doesn’t meet them. Instead there is a mid height horizontal. This required the verticals to be continuous through square holes in the mid rail. 
In 1979 I rented one of the two extra rooms for studying during graduate school at PSU. Parking was free and and within walking distance. I built a Heathkit H19 Z80 based CRT terminal so that I could communicate with the PSU mainframe computer over the telephone line. This way I didn’t have to wait in line at school for an available card punch machine. I built in a Heathkit phone dialer and an early optically isolated 300 baud modem to reduce cable clutter and extra power adapters on my desk. My middle ex partner at my book shelf.
I brought my first stepdaughter, Lisa, both to see me at PSU and to my above off campus office so that she would know where I was when I was not with her and her mother. In this third picture she is singing for one of the former renters whose room I was renting at this time.
My last partner objected to my renting this room near Portland State University for studying. There was no way to make her section 8 rental secure for my computer and I couldn’t study with her TV blaring, so I bought this next house in December, 1980. The dean of the Portland State engineering department had just offered me a part time graduate teaching/research stipend (that I had not applied for) and that became my down payment. As a full time graduate student with part time employment, it took some creative financing. I assume the seller’s mortgage and he granted me a second mortgage for his profit which was about 100%. His house was in foreclosure for consumer debt. Since he didn’t have any equity except his profit which I had 5 years to pay, he could not afford to move when our lease was up and we were ready to move in to our house. I agreed to rent the house back to him if I could start digging the new basement I planned. Built in 1895 it had no basement. It had an 8″ sag in the floor and was headed for collapse, The height of bank suggested jacking it up to dig a full height basement rather than just a putting in a crawl space foundation.
My blue 1969 VW bus hauled the dirt one ton at a time as I dug the new basement by hand. In the second picture, it has retired from service. in 1992. This was during the Reagan recession/stagnation so the 1st mortgage I assumed went up to 19% APY. Naturally I was eager to pay that off at an accelerated schedule. This did not please my partner either.
After digging a driveway, jacking up the house as I dug a full basement, and pouring a reinforced concrete basement, I gutted the interior and added two bedrooms and a second bath inside the existing attic. This “bridge” over the central two story living room below, connects the east and west bedrooms with the upstairs bath and the stairs.
In 1989 law enforcement promoted a ballot initiative that allowed police to retain the cash and profits from sale of drug related seizures. Until 2000 when another ballot initiative passed to restore the prior rule of forfeitures supporting public education, it was SOP for police to only seize enough drugs from street corner dealers to make it legal to take their cash. Then the dealer had to sell the drugs he had been allowed to retain and police came back for that cash too. After 2000 the neighborhood gentrified. I started getting 18 piles of dog shit in my upper yard between mowings. Finally I decided to put in a retaining wall and to replace my back stairs to turn into my fenced driveway so there would be no more sitting to drink, smoke crack, or have sex.
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It would have been difficult to replace the sewer line between the house and the property line if I had built a retaining wall first, so although the existing cast iron and clay tile did not leak, I decided to replace it with 4″ plastic under permit.
Original 4″ cast iron with branch to original kitchen just above connection to 8″ clay tile.
New 4″ ABS with clean out, which connects to green 4″ PVC that runs through original 8″ clay tile, crossing property line at a depth of about 3′. This 1895 vintage house did not originally have a basement, just crawl space. The city as-built records show the sewer at the curb at a depth of about 5’at the curb. To allow a future owner to add a washer hookup or an entire internal accessory dwelling unit in the basement, I dug and placed a 4″ white PVC sewer pipe under the future driveway. It has a minimum slope of 1/4″ slope and runs at a depth of 4′ at the property line under the 3′ depth sewer line pictured here. If the as-built data depth is correct, these two 4″ sewer lines could join a new 6″ PVC line under the sidewalk and meet the 6″ green PVC lateral at the curb coming up from the sewer in the street without having to open the street. All my new 4″ PVC sewer piping had the required green insulated copper tracer wire.
(Find my photos of 4″ white PVC sewer trench crossing future driveway)
The city gives a sewer discount if you dispose of your roof rain runoff onsite instead of letting it go in the sewer or out to the sidewalk and street which drain to the sewer. The requirement was a seepage area equal to 10% of the horizontal projection of the roof with certain setback distances. I made mine a triangle and located near the from of my lot because my side neighbor had a brick foundation that was leaky and closer to our common property line than would be allowed currently. By digging through the clay layer, I actually reduced the impact of rain on his basement.
As the garage basement floor was below the level of the sidewalk and driveway. I put in a sump to drain the water that would have run into the basement. A large part of the cost of a precast sump is the truck with derrick to move it. Instead, I built forms and poured it in place with hand mixed concrete.
The natural sand started just below the basement garage floor slab so I never needed a pump for my sump. The city damaged a manhole cover (pulled the handles loose), so the crew recycled it to me and even delivered it to give me access to my sump for cleaning. It fits over the smaller wood circle that is forming the access hole of cast top of the sump.
The original front door opened directly to the living room. My new floor plan had a entry hall. Here I am swapping the original door of the living room with the window that the entry hall inherited from the former downstairs front bedroom. This involved moving the prefabricate concrete front steps by using a beam through their railing to lift with posts and a floor jack. The entry hall will have a token porch on step down from the main floor and under the main roof rather than with a separate porch roof. This negative volume will relate to the positive volume of the upstairs bathroom dormer which is similar in scale.
Visual check for idea of a 3 pane wide sliding door between the kitchen and the dining alcove. The pocket for the door is only 2 panes wide, leaving a vertical column of one pane limiting the open doorway , but visually the door is 48″ wide as desired. Painting, table with plants and folding chairs belong to Jennifer W. Finally her two 10′ x 15′ storage lockers from the sale of her former house have been sorted enough to restore some semblance of order to my home.
Besides being a licensed clinical social worker, Jennifer had some skills with stained glass and a kiln for working with fused glass. Here is a corner of my basement that I planned for secure computer server equipment, but first set up for her glass studio.
Example of her fused glass work at her former home that was sold due to divorce.
While in graduate school I worked part time for a general contractor the built water treatment and sewer plants. He loaned me the steel forms for pouring my reinforced concrete basment under my 1985 vintage home. That way I trained myself and then he hired me to add 2032 square feet to his office.
That is an 80′ x 12″ thick concrete wall designed to store solar heat. The hall on the other side faces aouth and has a slate floor to also store solar heat. An overhang shades this in the summer.
I constructed the foundation, framed it, installed window, and appled the vertical cedar siding. The floor and eves had to math the small original flat roofed building.
The foundation in the foreground was for a covered area that completed the boundary of the interior courtyard and provided an outdoor space for rainy days.
Each of these three office rooms had north facing skylightd.
Matching chicken coop shingles and paint taken by neighbor at SE corner of my lot from his 2nd story condo deck, 04-11-2026.
Shelter I build for a client the summer of 1999 just south of Pacific City. He had winched these cedar logs out of a canyon. Yes, the ridge beam does have a tongue that fits through a rectangular hole in its support post. We had no way to lift it into place when I made the tongue and its hole, so the work had to be accurate with out test fitting. When I was not present, a backhoe was used to lift it into place. Later we decked the roof with 2″x6″ tongue and grove planking that was exposed on the bottom. On top we placed foam insulation board stock under the standing seam metal roofing so that it would be cool underneath on hot sunny days.
The next summer, 2000, I built a large studio for the same client on the same 5 acres. It has the same standing seam metal roofing, skylights, and is surfaced with cedar shingles which weather to a beautiful gray. The entrance way features the same cedar logs. There is glass above the door that fits into a groove in the posts and beams without a separate sash.