A house was built on my street this week.

I don't mean that there was a groundbreaking, or that a happy family crossed the threshold into a new abode at some point during the week.

A house was built on my street this week.

A week ago Friday, there was a hole in the ground (with a concrete foundation poured and cured). Just a week later, there is now a house, all but finished.

In the middle of some serious rain last weekend, a crew raised the basement walls with cinderblocks and mortar. By Tuesday, those walls were done. I'm not sure about putting down mortar in the rain, but I'm not a builder. So my concerns might be mislaid.

On Friday, my wife Barbara walked in the house and said, "There's a house blocking my car."

Well, half a house. Sometime Friday morning before we arose, the builder had trucked in two parts of a house built by Handcrafted Homes. The men were nice enough to move the house so that Barbara could get to work.

Lest you think this is one of those "doublewides, just $29,999!" you see advertised all along the highways here, let me enlighten you. On Saturday, Barbara walked over and talked to the builder. He said this was the first pre-fab job he'd done, but he says he watched the folks at the factory and proclaimed this house "just as good as a stick house." Then he told Barbara how much the thing cost. Some 40% more than we paid for our 1930s "stick" house.

Of course, we do live in the middle of the city, and in-fill building on strangely-cut lots (or in this case, a lot with an untouchable drainage creek running through the back) is tricky. In this case, the house is wide and extremely shallow, sitting at the very front of the lot, very close to the street. When we saw the thing on the trucks, we were a bit concerned with the house not fitting in with the neighborhood.

But the roof popped up to create a second story, and the front of the house has dormers, just like my house. Yeah, it has metal siding, but still, it doesn't look nearly as dreadful as I thought it would.

The alacrity with which the house was erected reminded me of stories people in not-quite Amish Country told about Amish barn raisings. In this case, trucks and a crane were involved, but in a couple of days a band-new house appeared three doors down the street from my abode. It is unsettling, at the very least.

I do worry that the folks buying the place overpaid. But that's their business. I am bummed that a previously "natural" ravine lot has been razed and denuded. But when you live a mile from downtown, you've got to expect these things. As for the aesthetics, well, the house fits in at least as well as any other new construction I've seen within older, established neighborhoods. The only real quibble is that the house is so close to the street that it dominates the whole block. But, of course, if there was to be a house on that lot, it had to be built in front of the drainage. So there it sits.

And as for the in-fill, well, that method of development is a great way to reduce sprawl. And on a somewhat touchier subject, the family buying the house is black. Which makes them the first black owners on the block. There has been a lot of talk around here about how affluent whites are moving into black neighborhoods in the city and "stealing" houses. You know, the whole gentrification thing. We're not in a black neighborhood, but we are on the "wrong" side of the tracks and just north and west of the major black neighborhoods within the "old" city.

Many of the houses on my block are owner-occupied. We've got young and old families, gay and straight, who own the houses on the block now, but all those families are white. The renters are students and working-class folks of a number of ethnicities. The addition of a black family owning a house simply solidifies a tradition of diversity. I like that, myself.

Alright, I wouldn't build a house that way. I'm still not sure about laying mortar in a downpour. But hey, it could've been a lot worse. The house could have been one of those doublewide specials, something that would have achieved lift-off during the next hurricane. That really would have sucked. So now, all I have to worry about is welcoming a new family to the street. That's okay by me.

Jon Worley might have been an architect, but he can't draw and doesn't have much of an artistic eye.