We ate picnic suppers on our stone wall, and winter-times drank hot coffee there boiled over a tiny bon-fire built in the rocks, for three solid years before we began to dig the cellar of our lean-to. I had hollyhocks and a whole row of Canterbury-bells flowering in our garden for two springs before there was a door and some steps to lead out to it. It's all very well to vow you'll build a cheap house, but it's another thing to do it. Of course we had to have plumbing and heat; electric light fixtures seemed a necessity too, as well as a few doors here and there. Will and I literally laboured over those plans. They had to undergo a dreadful series of operations. Every spring when it seemed to us as if we couldn't endure another summer cooped up in our noisy, stone-paved, double-electric-car-tracked street, I'd haul down the architect's blue-prints and stretch them out on a card-table. We amputated so much from those plans I wondered they held together. Of course the shower-baths and the garage, oak floors, and a superfluous bathroom came off as easily as fingers; but when we began cutting out partitions here and there, a treasured fireplace or two, two closets, and even the back stairs, I tell you it was ticklish! Even when we'd shaved off two feet from the length of the living-room, four from the dining-room, and squeezed our hall so that it was only nine feet wide, even then we couldn't find a generous-hearted builder who would even try to be reasonable in his charges. Our house wasn't, by the way, anything like the fish man's. It wasn't a plaster house with light green blinds, with half-moons cut in them. It seemed to our architect (and to me too, as soon as he suggested it) that the most New England type of house possible--flat-faced, clapboarded, painted white, a hall in the centre and a room on each side, would fit in with those apple-trees better than anything quaint or original. Oh, ours was just the housiest house possible, with nothing odd about it like oriel windows, or diamond trellises, or unexpected bays and swells. The first day the plans arrived I did some measuring, and cut out of cardboard on the same scale as the plans, patterns of our furniture. That night Will and I moved into our paper house, shoving the furniture around the rooms with lightning speed, shifting hall-clocks, davenports, and grand pianos from parlour to bedroom with surprising little effort. Why, I rearranged my rooms time and time again before I ever stepped foot in them. If you'll believe me, I made a complete new bedroom set for the nursery, and a little crib which I placed between the windows, when the real room was only a square block of air above the apple-trees.