The Yooper Schooner: A Very Unconventional Home Building Project

Ever build a house without knowing how to? While living in a barn for two years?

The Yooper Schooner

A Very Unconventional Home Building Project

 

Did you ever? Live in a barn for two years using an outhouse everyday, even when it was fifteen degrees below zero? Cut trees day after day, nearly are crushed by a 20-ton tree, and finish by bathing in a 14-inch basin? Live with a mad blue dog? Have pine martins and flying squirrels outside your window and almost step on a newborn fawn lying outside your door? Completely build a house with your own unskilled hands in previously solid woods? If you want to find out what it was like, read on.

 

Chapter One “Arrival”

 

We had arrived at our chosen destiny. It was April 16^th or day one of our adventure when wife Karen and I returned to our property in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We had driven the final hundred miles in the midst of a snowstorm, fittingly the only snowfall we experienced the entire six-day drive across Alaska, Canada, and the northernmost US. We wondered if the snowstorm was simply appropriate for the infamous UP weather or a harbinger of tribulations awaiting us. Honestly, we did not have a clue of what we were in for but hey! we were free after 23 years and had a long-held dream to realize.

Released after an Air Force career, we had driven the 3000-plus miles loaded down with personal belongings including two cats while towing a trailer carrying our custom Datsun 260Z. Keeping the sports car demonstrated that we could not give up every single luxury we once had owned. We sold or gave up nearly everything extravagant and returned to build our own dream home just as we had envisioned all those years. During the time away, we visualized a quaint little house nestled among our majestic maple, aspen and oak trees. Well, that was the entire extent of an insanely vague plan.

We spent that first night in a downtown Marquette hotel and visited with our son Ben and his friend. Ben had attended Northern Michigan University for a year already giving us additional motivation for returning to the UP. He asked how we were going about starting our house project. Exhibiting the first of a long series of blank stares, I shrugged and answered something noncommittal. Karen and I both called our parents that evening and when they asked the same question, they couldn’t see our shrugs and blank stares. We told them simply that we had a lot of work ahead of us. Understatement! We had no idea where to begin.

We had built a brown and white polebarn on our property just before we left in the 90’s; now back, I stood in the barn’s doorway on the second day looking out contemplating the fact that I couldn’t sense within me the motivation, the inspiration, the perseverance, the skills I would need for this unfathomable job ahead. As we watched the snow melt quickly from our old dirt driveway in the warm spring sun, we realized in a haphazardedly general way what we had to do to realize our dream like clear the woods where the house will stand. Duh! In all actuality, we could not or more likely didn’t want to contemplate all the steps needed to make this dream home a reality.

Overcome by the complete change in lifestyle, the grueling long drive, and the huge endeavor that lay before us, tears formed in my eyes that wife Karen didn’t see. Maybe it was just the bright sun reflecting off that melting snow, but I can tell you it was not. After all, for twenty-three years of my military career we had a good life with a good paycheck, taken care of by the Air Force. This looming project was a murky unknown, an ambiguous dream home difficult to picture out of the thin air in a thick UP woods, and we were alone on this endeavor...

Considering real basic needs, I remembered the first survival need is water, then food, and then shelter�"that is it, we needed some cheap shelter. We heard about people living in tents while building a house in Alaska, more power to them. We needed to do better than that, at least slightly better as it would turn out. We focused on our needs and located a small rental to live in nearby Skandia. We began commuting to and from our property.

 

Ignorance and inaction does not yield bliss.

 

We were so energized and focused to start work we did not give a thought to the so-called farmer across the street from our property. In the 1980’s, he lived in a mobile home over there, often shadowing us in the hedgerow while we picnicked on our land with our families or my Air Force squadron members. He would slink away if we spoke to him during his spy missions, a very odd man indeed. Over the years of our absence, things changed across the street, and in the next few years, many more changes would occur.

Looking back, we really should have paid closer attention when the farmer’s applications for an intense farming permit caught up with us in Alaska. The zoning board’s permit letter asked if we had any objections against his intense farming permit on his tiny plot of land. I support farmers’ right to farm, but farmers should demonstrate possessing brains before beginning to farm. We didn’t know enough or care that much about the situation while living in faraway Alaska. The permit was approved with our inaction and without our knowledge.

Now back and ready to build our home, mister farmer had two big barns and a nice two-story house that he proudly announced he had built himself. Someone with that kind of experience living across the street should be a good resource and ally in building our own dream house though time proved otherwise. On another hand, his little farm was very quiet for someone who had requested an intense farming permit just a couple years prior.

 We had unknown beaucoup hurtles to jump and a swamp of allegorical alligators to navigate, but we hadn’t started running or stuck our toes in it�"yet.

 

   Long held dreams become true with apt attention

 

Chapter Two “How the dream began”

 

Stationed at KI Sawyer Air Force Base in the UP of Michigan through the mid to late nineteen eighties, Karen and I purchased our property on a land contract. We loved our property of rolling hills, deep ravines, and stands of trees. We joked that if our land were stretched out flat it would amount to much more than the surveyed forty-three acres. Soon after our purchase, our aspirations grew to build our dream home snuggled in our own thick UP woods, and that dream percolated in our minds for over a decade. The project or some thought folly began when I retired from the Air Force, sold our house in Alaska, and drove back to our land.

Though largely unskilled by the time we moved back to our precious land, we had attained a few construction skills and bits of knowledge attained from minor renovations and reading house-building books, one in particular: Do-It-Yourself Housebuilding. That title pretty much summed up our project because we vowed to do all the building ourselves versus subcontracting out each construction specialty as many people do who say that they built their houses. In reality, we did not know what we were in for by making that vow. Going into the house-building project, Karen and I had loads of obscure ideas, half-baked concepts, and unfocused passion, but the single most important attribute we possessed turned out to be naiveté.

Realizing a loose set of priorities, we had an undetermined albeit admittedly immense amount of work ahead of us. The one thing central on our minds was the fact that all our furniture and household goods, including essential hand and power tools, were stored at no charge in a military warehouse for a ninety-day period. After that period expired, storage fees began at the normal preposterous commercial rates. We had sort of a healthy bank account, but facing reality, we needed to be frugal. Therefore, the first priority quickly established itself a need to store our stuff ourselves, so to make it happen, we determined the first step was a concrete floor in the presently dirt-floored polebarn.

We made our first of many, many purchases from the Menards home repair store located just west of Marquette�"his and hers’ digging shovels. Dirt removal from the polebarn by those shovels and a old trailer proved disheartening right off the bat, but the farmer neighbor showed up with his skid steer loader. With a hot rod cowboy show-off demonstration, the farmer wheelied, spun, dug, and removed the rest of the dirt from the polebarn floor in less than an hour. He wouldn’t take money for his help, which worried me a bit.

Truthfully, in all aspects of this telling account, we had the concrete pour done by contractors. Time was of the essence and this barn was not our permanent home. By my helping with the concrete pouring, screeding, and troweling, I learned a few new skills. A week later after the concrete cured, we received our household things. Not many people take delivery of their furniture and household goods without a house to put them in. We now had our clothes, cookware, our little Kawasaki four-wheeler, and furniture that would not be unpacked for years, but most importantly, hand tools and my nearly new fiberglass extension ladder. I would spend beaucoup hours on said ladder.

The day of our delivery, we met Ivan, husband of Deb, who lived in “the hole” down the street. Their cabin was situated in a glacial kettle, hence “the hole,” quite a ways off and down from the road. Ivan informed us that a small black bear had ripped down his birdfeeder. This apparently was big news to him but not to us after residing in Alaska with moose and grizzly bears on the loose. Both Ivan and Deb were professors at Northern Michigan University, and we four became fast friends.  

Karen announced we shouldn’t rent the cottage forever because we (I) found it very easy to become lazy and lackadaisical. She suggested we build a room in the corner of the polebarn. At first, I couldn’t fathom living there in the great shell of metal barn, but I gradually warmed to the idea. At the moment, the polebarn held all of our belongings in mountains of boxes and our shiny red and white Datsun 260Z. Well, the barn was only half-full. My acceptance of the idea of living in the barn grew by putting in electricity and hacking out a hole in the wall to install a second hand window. I finished the room’s stud walls, wiring, insulation, and dry wall in eleven days, a warm up for things to come and for me, my first real building experience.

Karen celebrated her birthday, April 22, by crying while digging the hole for the outhouse out behind the polebarn. Over time, I found that the outhouse was illegal, but if anyone investigated, I decided I would tell him or her it was Karen’s fault. She needed a place to tinkle despite being out in the secluded woods, and she had dug the hole! More on the illegal outhouse later on. On that same thrilling birthday/outhouse day, we met Donna and Carol who owned an Alpaca farm the next block over. We had actually made friends with them via the internet before departing Alaska.

Initially, living in the room felt like camping out�"novel and fun. Obviously though, living in the 12 by 16 foot concrete-floored, thinly insulated, under-lighted polebarn room had its challenges. After awhile, the room became a home of sorts, a place to abstemiously crash and rest up from work when we were so tired we could have slept under a tree. Looking back, Karen and I believe that if we had not moved out of the rental into the polebarn room, we would have never found the motivation to go on working day after day on our project. The room’s rough conditions, cramped quarters did much for lagging motivation. It proved beneficial in being nearby to the building plot and very cost effective�"rent-free that is.

 

Lay down your weary head and make it home.

 

Without us really considering it, believe it or not, the room became home. What made the room home is that we ate meals in there, took sponge baths standing in a basin, lounged while reading construction books, and discussed next building steps; and so therein, as we lived rustically, we began designing and building a house. We worked on the computer and slept in the mini-loft with a mattress two and half feet from the ceiling. Remember not to sit up fast! Our two cats, Cleo and Dyna, lived in there too�"I know what you are thinking. Karen cooked on our old Coleman camp stove out in the main polebarn area because of the gas fumes and washed dishes in one of our first Menards purchases, a laundry tub that one day would end up in the house yet to be. Laundry was done at the Harvey Laundromat once a week. On nice sunny days, we’d bring the wet laundry home and hang it on lines out in the meadow beside the polebarn. The laundry fluttered picturesquely on a clothesline strung between the white pines amongst the tall waving Orchard Grass and sticky Bracken weeds.

Getting directly to the daily personal necessities, every morning we’d brush our teeth outside our polebarn room’s door, spitting on the far side of an old log that lay on the brink of a flanking ravine. The outhouse behind and around back of the polebarn now had three walls, a roof, and a door�"it even had a rustic store-bought wooden seat. It may have been illegal, but the deep woods privacy was nice and with the door facing east, we could leave the door open and watch the rising morning sun filter warmly through the trees.

We had no source of water without a well and though our little stream appeared crystal clear, I didn’t trust the water without treatment. I thought of finding a public water source, but what a pain that would have been. Bob, a neighbor who had a decapitated manikin’s head on his mailbox, shared a property line with us. Bob was nice enough to let us use water from his outside faucet. Every couple of days, we would haul two water containers to and from Bob’s backyard on our salvaged from the roadside little red wagon. We used the water for drinking, gallons of caffeinated ‘go-juice,’ washing dishes, and our plastic basin sponge baths.

Early on, another neighbor Mrs. Thomas, couldn’t restrain herself any longer needing desperately to peek into our little room. Karen acquiesced. The nosy neighbor studied our living quarters through the door for some time, focusing on our elevated bed.

 She called it our “cute little love nest.” She finally could go home satisfied and happy. Who had time for love with all this work that needed doing?  We christened our room about then the “Little Room in the Polebarn,” a weak take on the Little House on the Prairie theme adjusted for the twentieth century, the spendthrift situation, and not nearly as romantic or exciting. In reality, our little room proved to be very simple living, survival per se.

Author's Note

Please, if you reaad these chapters let me knw what you think. Care to read the rest because it is a long story to tell?

Reviews

[wondering]

sounds like an adventure few of would chose not to take