The Yooper Schooner (Part 2)

The continuing saga of wife Karen and my struggles to build our home with our own four hands.

Chapter Three: “Preliminary House Plans”

Build it yourself, and make it truly yours

 

 Now that we had a place to live, we returned our focus to building the house, the real subject of this book. Our central concern became meeting zoning and building codes and pacifying the code inspectors to attain the Declaration of Independence of home construction�"the building permit. But first we had to meet local West Branch Township requirements�"the zoning permit and that meant we needed to make a definitive decision on where the house would be built. Karen and I contemplated various locations for the house, but most of our 43-acre property was hilly or swampy subsequently, we decided on a location near our old campsite from the eighties. The house would sit on a high spot near one of our scenic ravines to the west where deer often roamed through our property, and it would be back away from the road, though unfortunately we eventually found, not far enough.

Overall, the site had good Feng Shui. The ravine to the west, tiger hills to the north and east, and a turtle hummock to the south. The driveway would curve away with no direct sight of the road. Right at that moment, there was only a two-track trail though the woods not a driveway at all. There were no evil arrows to poke at us and with green leafy trees all around, so Feng Shui or not, the woods environment just made us feel good.

To satisfy the township’s zoning board requirements, we needed only to submit a rough footprint of the property and a description of how large the house would be, which amounted only to a “where and how big” and a stick person type of lay-of-the-land map. After dreaming about our home for twenty-plus years, we embarrassingly still did not know exactly what we were building. There was no architect on retainer waiting in the wings to assist us with in depth house plans and extensive blueprints�"we were it. I envisioned more or less a cabin, one main story with a sleeping loft. Karen, on the other hand, had something much grander in scale in mind. It would be her dream home to her specifications, while I just wanted a cozy place to hang out. She won the discussion.

 

Don’t mess with the wife’s long-held dreams.

 

My cabin doodles began at 20 by 24 feet with a second story loft half that size. Karen thought that was awfully small and stretched the plans so the overall dimensions crept up to 30 by 36 feet with a loft larger than half the first floor. After considering these needs of the house, I added fudge space within those dimensions for a laundry room and a utility room. This sketch gave the basis of what the house would one day become. Also due to Karen’s insistence, we included a horse barn not far from the house site on the rough map in the zoning application. We submitted our request to the West Branch Township Zoning Administrator, the enigmatic Mark Maki.

Mark remained a mysterious character because we never met him, even though had many dealings with him by phone, fax, mail, and internet. Maybe Mark didn’t really exist, it was someone else returning messages we left, maybe he was an android, or maybe he was just the answering machine. Whoever it was, Mark or otherwise, they approved our sketches and description without a hitch with an answer/approval in the mail. That was soooo easy! We became instantly spoiled with visions of smooth sailing because we had no clue of what we soon faced. 

After the zoning approval, it was time to consider a more serious matter such as meeting the Marquette County building codes with the first objective of obtaining the actual building permit. The codes are well-publicized requisites to be followed verbatim and not simply as construction guidelines as some think who have obviously not dealt with them. The building codes are definitely not pirate codes. Even though I was well aware of the codes, often mentioned in the DIY book as building rules and requirements to follow and obey, neither my book nor anything in my wildest nightmares could prepare us for the Marquette County Codes.

Marquette had decided to lead the country in some of the newest, meaning the strictest, code rules and enforcement in the US. Here we were in the more or less UP backwoods, and they had super strict building codes. We found out later that adjoining counties had no zoning or building codes whatsoever! As we began the process, horror stories began emerging from around Marquette County, where law-abiding people building homes themselves, like us, were evicted from their new homes because of missing code-required safety concerns, construction shortcuts, or missed inspections.

 Unknowing friends, neighbors, and relatives wondered why it took us so long to obtain a building permit. I can tell you here in this retelling, they did not realize how many drawings, changes, modifications, compromises, dog and pony shows, and jumps through hoops we had to perform to satisfy Marquette’s code requirements. Factor in our inexperience, naiveté, and initial ignorance of the code puts it into a vague perspective. The house eventually took on a character all of its own from our initial dream and doodles because of the changes and modifications needed to meet the county codes not to mention the eventual financial constraints, and even more because of another large, very critical underlying problem. Just read on!

The central reason for the delay in getting code approval and subsequent building permit was the fact that we did not have the clear vision of the project from the beginning�"we did not know what the finished house would look like there on our site in the woods. Yeah, we could picture it in our minds all charming and nice�"four walls, a roof over our heads and a nice fire to warm our tootsies, but we could not draw a complete, comprehensive schematic of the complete house! Marquette County didn’t think our submission of stick figure plans was funny. Luckily, they didn’t require electrical and plumbing schematics, yet. Those are two different Marquette County Code Departments.

This is how vague our initial vision was briefly from front to back. the house would have a prow front (like a ship’s bow) with large south facing windows, a front Great Room, wood stove heat, kitchen to the west, bedroom, bathroom, and laundry room to the right, a hall up the middle to the back door with a utility room nearby. The utility room was necessary because the main living area (first floor) was earth-sheltered, four feet below ground level, so there was no basement to hide the utilities.

I studied the fist full of brochures the code department provided and started tweaking our ideas to mirror the requirements given in the brochures. I began learning about rafters and joists, concrete thicknesses, frost depths, and load bearing walls, windows, doors, and egress requirements and tons more we never thought before that had to be satisfied before we would be approved. But the code inspectors wanted specifics: How big a footer, how thick the walls, insulation thicknesses, heat sources other than the stove, how the walls connected to the concrete walls and to the roof, and how the roof was built. I usually gave them my now signature blank stare and innocent shrug when they asked these questions and a laundry list more.    

After about four five attempts to put a house plan together, I became frustrated by the fact that we could not put the house together and explain all these specifics on paper well enough to satisfy the code inspectors. Thus, not being able to begin our house, I began killing time by building a pair of over-engineered sawhorses that would eventually receive a lot of use and abuse. I also began cutting trees down around the house site because at least we knew where the house would one day stand. We had that kind of naïve optimism.

 

 

Chapter Four: “The First Days, the First Rays of Hope”

Just when you are about to give up…

 

From all those years of dreaming, our vague house plan vision began simply with portions of a plan, bits and pieces from houses we had seen in magazine articles and so on. We had doodled a tall front wall, a nice loft, and a big family room of some sort, but there was no sound construction forethought included before we sat down and contemplated, forced into such comprehensive contemplation by the Marquette County inspectors. Because of this, we had no previous conception if our doodled dreams could be safely built. I suppose that’s what the code inspectors were hammering home into my thick unskilled head.

We’d add the desired interior log construction in the dimensions (which the inspectors really frowned upon,) an open floor plan with measurements for circulating the heat through the house. We wanted high energy efficiency with super tight construction in two by six lumber throughout with loads of insulation in R-21 walls and R-38 ceiling, a high ratio of south-facing glass for passive solar heating with less glass (one small window up and downstairs) to the north to shield us from the UP’s cold north winter wind. Karen always added a dumbwaiter into the plans from the second floor bathroom down to the first floor laundry. Yes, we added the second bathroom, bedroom and recreation area in the plans with dimensions  These vague particulars were still inconclusive, not engineered nor laid out in any shape or manner, so they required much further contemplation and many additions and details (so many details) to put them together into a whole house for code approval.

Bit by bit, we figured more details into the vague plan to make it less vague and put it down on paper to present to the code enforcers, but those first few early nervous trips to the Marquette Court House saw us leave empty-handed, crestfallen, and almost heartbroken. Added to the laundry list: How many windows (how big), how were the stairs built (number of steps, rise, height width)�"where were the stairs going, how about railings, lighting, heating, plumbing, septic, and so on! I became overwhelmed with all the requirements, considerations, alternate solutions, and various options. It was almost too much for an unskilled guy to handle.

During one of our visits to the majestic, historic Marquette Court House with increasingly detailed hand-sketched plans in hand, the code inspector resignedly said they did not have the time to mess with owner-builders like us, vowing to soon disallow the practice. Another time we felt our hearts sank to our stomachs. I, the eternal conspiracy-plot believer, thought their decision to disallow owner/builders would pad the inspectors’ pockets while let them to look the other way on high-priced contactor jobs versus us owner/builders on a shoestring who caused trouble and work for the inspectors.

 Undoubtedly, we pursued the All-American Dream, and if I were more boisterous, I would have pointed out that it was my right as an All-American Citizen to build my own domicile with my own two hands, or in our case, our four hands, to see affirmation of said dream without dealing with crooked, lollygagging, and highly over-priced contractors. I would like to go there again so I could state all that and play “America the Beautiful” in the background just like Oliver Wendell Douglas’s speeches on the old sitcom Green Acres, but of course, I never did. Indeed that is what I thought of them and their whole process, though admittedly, time and a few favorable incidents would meekly alter my attitude of the Marquette County Code Inspectors. They eventually backed down from some of their stringent requirements on occasions and acquiesced on one sticky proposal we wanted desperately in our dream home.

 

Under great duress and deep desire, dig deep and take dominion.

 

 I always found that I often needed time to mull things over with any kind of project, to sort them out in my head before putting anything down on paper. Therefore, in the mean time, as we fine-tuned our building permit application and plans, we started working wherever we could. Logging and clearing the building site was necessary, but other than the huge and short-lived mature Aspens dotting the property elsewhere in mixed stands, we only clear-cut, that is remove all the trees, where the house would stand. The cleared rectangle where the house would one day stand gave us the first hole-in-the-woods sky view we would grow to love.

The farmer moseyed over and proposed selling the logs for us, especially the thick straight Aspen logs, those we found the wood processing companies really liked for veneer. He was awful eager to haul the logs to the processor himself, so we didn’t have to waste our time, he’d mention. I should have suspected something with the minuscule checks we’d receive. Better than nothing, I supposed at the time. 

I enjoyed the logging experience, the hard manual labor, eyeing up each tree to see which way they’d fall, running the powerfully noisy chainsaw, breathing in the smell of burnt premix exhaust and cutting through the thick trees with the sawdust flying everywhere including my shirt and pants�"itchy! The tree’s creak, groan, a yelled “timber!” and a crash to the ground made each fall a thrill. After felling a tree, Karen and I would then have to move all the limbs and brush. Admittedly, without the manly aspect, when you worked at it all day, everyday, logging is terribly hard, dirty, and dangerous work�"really dangerous. The farmer’s brother told me that their grandfather was crushed under a falling tree, and their father had to carry him out of the woods, dead. A particularly chilling image, that.

The tough manual labor allowed me to work my muscles as all the considerations for the building permit percolated in my mind. As I would soon refer to all my progress-delaying percolating thoughts�"I ran them on my hard drive for a while.   

Author's Note

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