Adult Project Based Learning (PBL): Our Summer of Joyful Hard Work!
Building the roof!
Our Small House
Our small house was built in 1923 in a new unassuming middle class neighborhood that grew up on what had been German cherry farms, at the end of one of the spokes on the new Oakland, California, Key Light Rail System. Most of the houses in our neighborhood were California bungalow style, not the fancy Craftsman type but stucco. Ours is about 875 square feet, a “two plus one,” meaning two small bedrooms and one bathroom. In 1923, it was one of those neighborhoods that had covenants that excluded Blacks and Chinese. This of course helped to create the segregation that resulted in redlining and thus large disparities by race in generational wealth in Oakland, not so different from many other U.S. cities. Now called Upper Dimond, the neighborhood is still an unassuming middle class place (no gigantic McMansions here), but it is now quite diverse by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, family type, age, political persuasion, national origin, and profession, among other characteristics. We moved in at the beginning of the pandemic. Since both of us are educators, we considered ourselves lucky to find a place we could afford where we were not outbid by someone offering three hundred thousand dollars over asking price in cash.
At the back of our small lot, listing sadly to one side, sat a small garage, probably built at the same time as the house. Like many in the neighborhood, it was built right on the property line. Too small for most of today’s automobiles, it had been converted by previous owners into a storage shed and makeshift workshop. Its situation was dire, siding slowly rotting away, a crumbling concrete slab instead of a foundation, infested with rats and strange insects, geological layers of roofing and interior wall facings added for support, weather proofing, and different ideas of what its purpose was. We were happy to have the additional space for storage, but with it slowly disintegrating, and with our small home too small to accommodate family visitors or other guests, it presented us with the combined imminent need for demolition and an opportunity for replacement with something that might add additional living space. We decided to build an accessory dwelling unit (an ADU) of about 240 square feet, a requirement being that any new construction on a property line cannot change the original footprint of the older structure, or it has to have a setback from the line of five feet, which would have taken up half our small backyard.
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