The Yooper Schooner (Part 6)

Karen and I continue to have fun building our Upper Peninsula dream home--yeah, right!

Chapter 11 “Winter, with much ado”

 

Good luck is directly proportional to the hardships endured

 

Indeed looking back at our house building effort, five months after getting our building permit we seemed blessed, the weather favored us in an uncharacteristic UP manner, and fortuitous happenstances aided us in significant ways. At the time though, it sure didn’t feel that way. We roughed it, worked hard most days, dealt with the half-helpful, half-untrustworthy neighbor, and did without many of the nicer things in life we had taken for granted earlier in our lives. I suppose we didn’t really notice, and if we did notice, we didn’t dwell on it. Late that blissful autumn, another fortuitous event smiled upon us, or maybe more aptly put, smiled upon our dream house.  

Gary, the truss manufacturer, stopped by one afternoon to see how I had made out with the lookout modifications. He appeared impressed with how they looked despite my ignorance and how the overall truss installation had gone. Gary had started out business as a general contractor, and he told us that we were doing a very nice job, indeed. Checking out our log joists, he asked what we were going to use for flooring on the second floor. I told him I hadn’t figured that out yet, maybe just plywood and hardwood flooring. He said that he just happened to have such a deal for us: laminated nine-quarter tongue and groove pine planks at a very good price.

I didn’t know what these planks were exactly. He explained they were three layers of pine board glued together that equaled two and a quarter inches hence, nine-quarter inches. Planed on both sides, the planks had tongue and grooves on their edges and ends. The end tongue and grooves are a good feature because the ends do not have to lie on a joint when installing. Gary said they look super top and bottom when finished. We could finish both sides, the floor and from underneath, and the pine planks would look grand between our stained log joists. He threw out a price, and I agreed instantly because I had no better option.

Ben and I went over to Gary’s warehouse loaded them up, and we restacked them in the corner where the kitchen would one day reside. The planks were indeed in very nice condition, structurally brawny and pretty. They would have to acclimatize to the air inside the house for sometime before installing them, so we didn’t encounter shrinkage or expansion problems. Things were coming together, heaven sent, in fact.

I still needed to get electric to the house. The Code required a licensed electrician to wire the house box from the transformer on the pole. The farmer got over being a stranger and being ever so helpful, suggested a friend who did electrical work. This friend wasn’t in the phonebook so we turned him down, we were learning a little but not a lot, because he convinced us to let his friend provide the cable, box, and tubing to go underground, all in the name of “a deal” and to “save money.”

To do the code-required work, we hired Walt, a wheezing Vietnam Vet who suffered the aftermath of Agent Orange and years of smoking. We had him wire the pole barn box before we moved in over there, and we were satisfied in the result. The one thing we learned with Walt though was that you shouldn’t let him park his rattle-trap Ford pickup on any grassy area you wanted to stay living or near open flames because his truck leaked gasoline like a sieve. Couple those gas fumes with heavy smoker Walt and look out! We went Menards once and smelled the strong odor of gasoline. We joked that Walt must have been there somewhere�"in fact, he was! Walt proved the nicest guy around, and he often teased me about being a pansy flyboy (my Air Force career) compared to his stint in Vietnam with the Army. 

When Walt came over to survey the situation, he asked why we decided on only a 100-watt service supply. I hadn’t a clue; I didn’t do research into electrical loads and cable gauges and all that. He said it would work if we didn’t have electric ovens, central air, electric dryer, and so on. We were into efficiency and saving money so said, “okay.” Later on, while getting other electrical parts from Marquette Electrical Supply, I found 200-watt service supplies would have been cheaper if I had bought them myself, thanks Mr. Farmer and friend have another laugh on us. I said I was naïve at the beginning, but now I started believing I was a sap. I was tired, and my brain just didn’t function sometimes.

As it was growing colder, the electric heater in our little room couldn’t keep up. After working all day, we’d return and our cats Cleo and Dyna would be balled up together to keep warm. We needed more heat in the room. Of course, we had firewood enough forever, so we went to Skandia Hardware and bought a cheap box stove. This definitely had no technology built in like the stove in our house; this was just a cast iron box with a damper. We bought the pipe and a roof penetration cone with the stove.

 Above the room, I saber sawed a hole through the steel roof of the polebarn. We had a skylight of sorts in our room made from plastic sheathing, so I ripped that out and replaced it with steel roofing with a hole for the pipe. It took maybe three hours for this simple stove installation. All complete, the stove burned well, but it was WAY too huge for that small room. If we built any fire in it with real firewood, we would roast, versus the rest of the time when we froze in there.

Well, Walt agreed to put in the electric for us, but he didn’t have a way to dig the trench for the buried cables, so we were on hold. Karen and I insisted that we bury the cables instead of those overhead, eyesore cables hanging off the house and poles. Clean, clear air around the house was our motto. Anyway, it was over a hundred and fifty feet from the power pole to the house, but I had no delusion that it would be hard digging with all those trees around with their far-reaching roots. I began digging by the power pole out front. I had problems visualizing some things but including the power and waterline with the cables in the trench was a no-brainer. The ground proved easy digging sandy loam except for the roots that had to be cut off with an ax. I had about twelve feet dug, the necessary four feet down, when I heard a tractor start across the street, which was a common occurrence. It headed our way.

The farmer pulled into our yard with his newly purchased tractor. Actually, it was the same John Deere model as mine except his had a backhoe mounted on it. I thought he bought it over to rub in our faces or to make money off us. Anyway, he came over to dig our trench. Just how did he know these things? I looked around in the trees to see if, when we weren’t looking, he had mounted surveillance cameras somewhere around to watch us. It felt as if he was always looking our direction. He asked where the trench ended up, so I showed him the route up the alternate driveway, around the corner of the house to the utility room next to the back door. He did the job quite nicely besides the fact the tractor spewed more smoke and oil than mine. He unavoidably ripped out a sizable root off a large hard maple that stood in front of the house, and this faultless tree would not survive this damage. I had paid him to help us with the roof, and I paid him for this trench digging. Incontrovertibly, I believe Karen and I would not have lasted long digging that trench before the ground impenetrably froze solid.

Walt rattled back, parked his gas-spewing, grass-killing truck, mounted the circuit breaker box on the inside wall by the backdoor, and wired it all up. We now had four circuit breakers with one hooked to a receptacle just below the box. He also mounted standoffs on the telephone pole out front and ran the conduit and cables up. A quick and easy job that I could’ve have easily done though according to the code enforcers, I could not do. Also, quickly and easily, Marquette Board of Light and Power came out and hooked the cables to the transformer. We now had power inside the house, a milestone, but now my perfect temporary power pole stood there powerless. It stood there over a week before I could bear to disassemble it and pull the four by four out of the ground.

 

 Simple conveniences become nonessential with complex conveniences.

 

 Associated with this job, we had Dan’s, the well driller man, pump installer man come out. He lowered the submersible pump down into the well. “Deepest well he ever worked on in Marquette County.” Yeah, yeah we heard THAT before. He ran the flexible water line along the electrical cable conduit in the trench to the house, and bashed a hole through our nice concrete blocks. Inside on the pipe stub, he installed a junction with a faucet, a plugged stub, and a small chrome drinking fountain-like spigot apparatus. I didn’t want to pay for weird stuff like that. What was it? I asked. He told me that the Marquette Health Department required that thing for testing the water. Come on now, I knew that we’d have to get the water tested at least once, but a special spigot only for water testing? What a waste, but now we had water too!  Karen and my Christmas presents I suppose�"water and electric inside our dream home.

With the approaching Christmas holiday, we needed to decorate. Karen, Ben and I decided to cut a tree on our property. We had some huge spruces and hemlocks on our land, but nothing the right size for decorating. We wandered around and found several balsams the approximate size we needed. I always had a problem with cutting “oversized” Christmas trees, and that year was no exception. Ben and I cut the balsam down, and the three of us struggled up hill and down dale and breathlessly shoved it through the relatively tiny door.

We stood it up, all fifteen feet of it! It was huge for the Great Room in the huge, dark house. The treetop rose about six feet above the loft floor! We put lights on it and decorated it sparingly because a balsam definitely will not hold much in ornament weight. No doubt it was a Charlie Brown tree on a grand scale. Ben used a ski pole to carefully lift ornaments and drop them on branches. Karen strung white sparkling lights on the Christmas tree and on those long horizontal logs in the Great Room for a special decorative Christmas lighting touch.

 During this Christmas season, Karen’s parents came to visit for Ben’s graduation from Northern Michigan University. No one graduates from college in four years anymore, and Ben didn’t either�"he rushed through in three and a half years. That’s my boy! Sadly, it meant that he’d be leaving sometime in the near future because he admitted to not loving Marquette all that much. 

 Despite the roaring woodstove, the five of us sat huddled around a table in the dark house with an electric heater at our feet while using a heavy tablecloth to trap the heat beneath. The in-laws shivered during their visit and didn’t stay very long. They lodged at a motel, but we had to stay close to home because I kept feeding the woodstove to drive the frost away from the big, dark empty house-box.

Well, the graduation commencement went well, and we were very proud parents of Ben. He earned his degree in geography with a 4.0 and had the privilege to cover his cap with a map. I hadn’t seen that before. We took everyone out to dinner, gave Ben some cool outdoorsy toys, and he was pleased with himself. I was afraid to ask right then to what his plans for the future were.     

The end of December closed in and days grew colder and shorter. Nights, we stayed bundled up in our loft bed with the heat-producing cats inside our Little Room in the Polebarn surrounded only by the dark and scary woods. I began making twice-nocturnal walks back and forth to feed the hungry wood stove in the house. The stove needed to burn with full heat because if it died down or went out, the uninsulated shell of a house would get cold instantly. I’d stoke up the stove with some fat wood chunks before going to bed and set the alarm for two. At two, I would bundle up against the cold, and that cold would get worse as winter progressed, and walk over to the house in the dark, imagining stories of wolf and bear attacks and poor, lost souls on winter treks. I hoped the stove would still be hot with plenty of coals when entering the dark, echoing box because that way I could just chuck in more wood, watch it a few minutes and head back to bed. If it were low, or worse, completely out, I’d spend an hour over there until the fire was hot to enough to leave. At five AM, I’d repeat the process.   

Something permanent had to be done about our dark house, so I started electrical wiring. I had a little experience with wiring but not on such a grand scale�"a whole house. The secret to electrical wiring is in the planning. If you don’t plan right, expect problems like improper electrical loads, switches in the wrong places, and re-pulled cable runs. Take it from me because I made all those mistakes and more.

First, I installed four recessed lights and a ceiling fan up in the trusses over the Great Room. To avoid scrunching up inside the trusses with no headroom and working upside down, I propped the ladder up with its top three inches just barely resting on the bottom edges of the trusses. The ladder had to stand almost straight up and not leaning properly like everyone knows is the safe method. It was very scary with the ladder sort of balancing on two legs. Twenty-one feet still looked distant when I looked down between my legs. I would someday get used to those heights I tried to convince myself! 

To ready the cable route, I carefully marked the studs sixteen inches from a bottom or top wall plate where the cables would run. I then went back and drilled holes in the studs at the marks, as close to the stud centers as possible. My tired Black and Decker drill really heated up with all those big holes. I decided to use 14NM cable as an overkill on loads, and pulled it through from the circuit box, snaking through the walls and up along studs and trusses to the lights and ceiling fan. Actually, I enjoyed this work putting all the electrical staples at perfectly spaced intervals and making the cable runs all neat and perfect.

This, my first electrical work with a split circuit for the overhead recessed lights, went well. The split circuit was necessary because we planned on these lights being the general, ambient light and needed switches on the first and second floors. With one switch downstairs on an outside wall by the patio, and the other switch upstairs in the loft dangled on an extra-long cable because there wasn’t a wall or floor up there to mount the switch box on to. The cable just popped out of the wall and laid there across the joists.

The ceiling fan was not an overly expensive one, but smartly, we installed one with a remote. How smart is that with the thing up there twenty-two feet? It had three green teardrop glass shades over the lights. Make a mental note of them. It looked nice after I mounted it twenty feet back from the prow front point, in the crux of the lower run of the scissor truss. The intention was to push the wood stove’s heat down from the ceiling, when there was a ceiling, and it began spinning non-stop through the winter.   

We still didn’t have a permanent way up to the loft. In plan revision #13, we showed a spiral staircase, the only feasible way to go up from the limited floor space in the Great Room across the front of the house. I had no idea how to build spiral stairs and this job took me a protracted time to finish. How long? You won’t believe it, just read on.

Many a night, before going to bed, I doodled on lined paper and then cut freezer paper into wedges to lie out on the floor in a circle and empirically model the stair’s rotation. In the meantime, we used the stepladder to get into the loft. The staircase was yet another problem left to run on the hard drive, but if I had paid attention in eight-grade geometry class, I could have derived the correct angles and distances quite easily.

 

Funny, as time goes on, I wish I had paid more attention to schoolwork and not to the cute little redhead.

 

With deep winter feeling close, we bought and installed thick R-38 insulation in the trusses because of all that woodstove heat going right out the roof. This insulation we purchased from Wickes because Menards didn’t have faced R-38. It was expensive, so only put in about half, the easy half over the loft. I then blocked off the gap in the truss opening by stapling up plastic film. Another fast easy job, but expensive, was to wrap the house walls including the sheathed-over windows with Tyvek (the so-called space age, energy efficient house wrap). Now outside, the house was a huge white box with huge TYVEK lettering along with the pewter gray roof and a shiny, chrome, smoking smokestack. Maybe I should have called it the Yooper Tyvek Titanic. After the trusses, roof, insulation, and Tyvek, money was getting tight.

. That first winter heading toward our second year wasn’t all that bad�"average, statistical weather-wise speaking anyway. We had about ninety inches of snow with normal lukewarm-ups and some bone chilling cool-downs but nothing unexpectedly happened. Still though, consider using an outhouse when the temperature plummeted to zero. To say the least, we did not linger and read a newspaper in the outhouse any time of day. I felt we were lucky anyway, knowing that twenty degrees below zero nights were not uncommon in the Upper Peninsula in January and February.

To keep the house fire going overnight, I walked the four hundred or so yards from our little, not so warm room, to the house twice during the night, every single night, especially crucial trips when the temperature went to zero. The walks in the dark, enduring winter’s blusters blasting course, peppering snow, and bracing against wind chills in the negative twenties and thirties conjured thoughts of the wild north woods with lost orientations, wild animal attacks, and frozen extremities. If the fire was low or completely out when I arrived, I’d linger over an hour fussing at the fire before closing the damper down and heading back to bed. Those times weren’t the fondest memories, sitting in the black, cavernous house with only the stove’s flicker as illumination and comfort, but it was time to contemplate life and tasks quietly without the stress of physical work and the expected results. Staring at those flames, I recharged my Beta Waves.

Heating the house with the hungry woodstove compared to maintaining a campfire in an uninsulated barn. Don’t get me wrong, the house wasn’t drafty, in fact it was essentially draft-free because remember, we had only one door installed, no windows, so there wasn’t a way for wind to infiltrate inside. However, with insulation in only half of the ceiling and none in the walls, it was nearly impossible to bring the temperature up above 32 degrees except on relatively warm sunny days. No windows meant no passive solar assistance. We kept the hard frost out with the blazing woodstove and that was about it. I always worried about frost getting under the slab and… The five cords of wood we hastily cut, hauled, and stacked inside the front of the house in November were not going to last long.

We knew our “Little Room in the Polebarn” wasn’t insulated all that well either. It only had two by four walls butted up against cold steel siding. Well into November, we had kept the chill off with an electric heater because the fall weather was unusually mild, but it got really (normal) cold. We slept in the room’s loft three feet from the ceiling so when the stove burned hot we roasted, then when it would go out, we would freeze. If we could have purchased a stove a quarter in size that used wood the size of pencils perhaps it would’ve heated that tiny space efficiently. This stove cut into our wood supplies too but only minimally. The poor kitties snuggled in our bed for the day while we were gone, on top of the covers�"I was adamant about that. There was a myth about an underground house that was so energy efficient it only required two cats to heat it�"yeah, sure. 

Our two cats, Cleo and Dyna, spent all their time in our room those first couple of years. Cleocatra “Cleo” came from the UP when we were stationed here before our Alaskan and New Mexico assignments. She was an international traveler who usually traveled under the seat of the truck. Cleo’s name was Snowball when we brought her home, and Ben joked she became “Dirtball” because her coat grayed out. She was part Siamese and very regal when lounging around replicating an Egyptian sphinx with the eyeliner to match her human namesake.

Dynamite “Dyna” was a furry tortoiseshell cat. When we adopted her in Alaska, she was a scrawny kitten who liked her previous owner’s finches�"too much�"often hanging off the cages that swung from high hooks. When she moved in, she had a split personality, lounging calmly until she exploded into frenzies of activity, hence “Dynamite.” The vets thought her name was Dinah despite our corrections, and she eventually relaxed into a fat, fuzzy, no activity cat. They moved into the house the second year when it warmed up, and that improved the atmosphere of the little room in the polebarn, if you get my gist.

Meanwhile, the snow fell as it usually does in Marquette County’s wintertime in heavy bursts of twelve of more inches a storm, and the steel roof on the empty house did its job very nicely. When snow accumulated two or so inches up there, we heard it let loose: Swi-i-i-s-s-s-s-sh, boom! It was unnerving until we got used to that initial release sliding sound. We could feel the impact in the floor when the heavy sheet of snow hit the ground outside. The cats would jump to their feet ready for an attack, but they got used to it though still awakening with huge timorous eyes. You sure wouldn’t want to get hit with that massive snow pile when it came rocketing off the roof from seventeen feet up as it hit the ground like a huge wet slab of white concrete.

Well, back to the building project and the happenstance concerning our upstairs flooring. Gary had those planks he sold us leftover from the contracted construction of the Rosewood Restaurant in Marquette. It was the perfect answer for our project because before this, I had no idea what we were going to use for flooring! Most times, we were saved from our own shortsightedness and lack of resources.

After sitting there on our floor for almost two months, Ben and I put them down with a rented airnailer, powered by my compressor that made a hell of a racket in the hollow, cavernous house. Before laying the planks down, we used my second favorite tool, the hand-held power planer to level the log joints flat by applying my empirical eyeball and a three-foot straightedge. We had a fine father-son bonding time fitting the odd lengths in to make an interesting pattern, making noise, and getting startled by the compressor’s abrupt starts.

An updated note on the log joists. Remember my mention of Karen’s summer battle with the bark beetles and wood-boring worms?  Well, the grooves the beetles left under the bark turned out quite ornamental after she stained and varnished the logs. The grooves looked somewhat like this: XX<><>XXX<><>XXX in zigzag meandering tracks around the logs. Apparently, Robert Redford’s log house, Sundance, out west exhibits the same decorative beetle designs on the logs. We had the same log design as a MOVIE STAR!

 

Little things keep you happy, so it would seem

 

Anyway, I had sensibly seasoned the flooring planks before we installed them, but by summer, they shrunk and left gaping joints. We learned to live with them�"what choice did we have? Luckily, they did not warp with the shrinkage. Sometimes you can do your best, by the book, and the job still doesn’t work out perfectly. My guess is that the house was still too cold and damp that winter to acclimate the boards entirely and the planks didn’t completely dry out until six months afterward. Additionally, there weren’t enough planks to completely finish the job, so we had to order some more from Wickes because Menards couldn’t get them.

One diversion was socializing with the neighbor couple we met after our household goods delivery day last year. Deb and Ivan were the college professors that lived in what everyone affectionately called “the hole.” They had a very nice rustic cabin located in a hollow far down, off the road. We wished we had located our house that way, far from the road and prying eyes, such as the farmer. Deb and Ivan traveled a lot. They felt sorry for us living in our little room and asked us to house and dog sit their huge, slobbering Russian wolfhound, Cujo.

“Have a nice, warm house and bed to enjoy.” They’d tell us, and we did. It proved a very welcome, comfortable break from our room.

On a first step in constructing the spiral stairs, we bought a perfectly machined sixteen-foot log from Hiawatha Log Homes in Munising. During a driving snowstorm, we hauled this single log on our sixteen-foot trailer (slight overkill), and after the two-hour drive, we dug the brand new log from the slush and snow that caked the trailer. Karen and I struggled with the heavy, icy log and let it dry in the space where the planks had resided, the future kitchen. We also took delivery of the rest of the floor planking from Wickes. Interestingly, Gary did give us a fine deal on the planks because the amount he sold us covered two thirds of the floor and the remaining third, seventy pieces, cost more than the initial 228 pieces!

Before we finished the floor installation, I had figured out the ultimate position of the last step of the spiral stairs onto the loft. I didn’t figure out much more, sorry to say. Here, I purposely left two extra long planks flanked by four intermediate planks. From the two long planks, I saber-sawed a half circle and an angle cut back to hold the machined log and simultaneously form the top stair step. Karen and I erected the sixteen-foot log with ropes and pulleys hung in the exposed trusses and set it carefully into the half circle. I tied the loft planks and log together with steel strapping and lag bolts. I have to say it was beautiful perfection because it was the first thing built that wasn’t straight-forward construction and looked mighty impressive standing up there tall and straight! The house suddenly became more ours with our personal touches versus straightforward building techniques.

 

To build with your hands touches your heart and pleases your soul.

 

Down on the floor end, the vertical log stood supported by bolted on-edge two by six supports. For the first step deck, I cut a plywood circle�"two in actuality. The first ended up a rejected egg-shaped piece. This expensive mistake sat on a stump at the campsite as an almost-round picnic table. Applying the empirical method to make a real circle meant driving a centered nail between two butted sheets of plywood, then dragging a string and a pencil around in a circle�"a nice, perfect circle. I then cut it with my saber saw, and for the first monumental stair step, I cut a flat section out of the plywood circle (a pie piece) with the straight edge perpendicular to the wall. I finished the job off with a hole in the middle of the plywood pieces for the log. I slid the two halves around the log, positioned it relative to the wall, and screwed the plywood into the on-edge two by sixes.

This base under the stairs, in theory, meant you stubbed your toe on the raised deck before hitting your head on the suspended spiral stairs. This saved you from the dreaded spiral stair headaches, whenever in the future the stairs were to be built. This base became the first step up from the concrete floor, so we had a bottom step and a top step with none in-between.

Later that spring, Karen took breaks from her heavy labor to carve a fanciful owl named Oscar to sit on the top of the log and watch our activities below. Even though she carved Oscar from a solid chunk of aspen, he matched the pine log perfectly when she stained both log and owl.

That is how the stairs stayed for quite some time: Just the raw log bolted into the loft flooring with a raw plywood base. In a fit of silliness, I slid down the log once. OUCH! It wasn’t THAT smooth. At this point, considering the log bolted in to the loft planks and bottom deck, I succumbed to a self-assuring house building philosophy of residential cooperative empirical synergy or RCES. Does that standing log hold the loft up or does the loft hold the log? For the rest of the house, does the loft floor hold the walls upright or do the walls hold up the loft? Does the front and rear walls hold the log beams in place or do the beams hold the walls? All of these simultaneously considering RCES, of course.

Having the recessed lights working provided a decent background light, and the ceiling fan just kept spinning. The wood stove kept burning with its heat dispersing inside that huge void of a house, despite having the ceiling fan pushing the heat down and us feeding the stove to keep it hot, really hot, 1400 degrees hot. People said the stove should have cracked at that temperature. By mid-February, the five cords of wood were almost gone. There were about two and half feet of snow on the ground, but we needed more wood to burn. Woods surrounded us, but it was all green, and all those trees we cut down either went to be processed, or we cut them ourselves into lumber on the sawmill.

We were limited to where the wood would come from and still be able to haul it to the house by hand through the snow. As I explained before, our house perched on sort of a plateau with ravines skirting closely on the west and further on the east, a gentle downward slope extended to the north, and it was flat to the road, directly south. Luckily, I found a couple dead standing trees overlooked during summer logging, cut them down, and chunked them up. Karen and I loaded the chunks on a cheap plastic sled and struggled through the hip deep snow while dragging the loaded sled to the house. We lost the first couple loads until we packed a deep grooved track. We were soaked, cold, and tired. At the house after a break, I split the chunks, and Karen carried them in. It took us nearly a week to make four cords of wood, which was hopefully sufficient to supply the stove until spring.

 

Chapter 12 “Steps to Take”

 

To lessen its stressful burden, you must grasp an unavoidable task and wrestle it into submission.

 

During late winter, kinda’ sorta’ spring in the UP, actually mid-April, we didn’t bother stopping work to notice we were entering our second year on our unconventional house building project. We just continued on whatever seemed a priority to make the Yooper Schooner a home.

We bought and installed the first four, four by six foot windows for the south-facing prow front walls. Our method of installation didn’t seem professional at the time, but it got the job done with professional results. The walls, remember were solid OSB and Tyvek wrapped. Starting from the inside, I drilled holes outward to locate the four rough window-opening corners. On the outside, I cut an “X” in the Tyvek with a carpenter’s knife and rolled the Tyvek triangles back away from the drilled holes and fired a staple into each one. Back inside with the little trusty but deafening chainsaw, I plunge-cut four slots in the corners. I then commenced to slice the rectangular hole open with nasty, itchy OSB splinters flying down my shirt, into my ears, and up my nose, while the noisy ear destroying, and blue exhaust smoke-spewing saw produced a chewed-through though passable cut. With sawing the final couple inches, I let the window opening slab drop outside to the ground and allow the waiting warm sunlight to pour in. After we wrapped the Tyvek back around inside the sawed holes and stapling it taut, the windows slid in rather easily and conventionally with many nails, a few shims, strips of insulation, and lots and lots of caulk. Our house box was more than that now because it had windows like a home. It was nice to have a little of the lukewarm UP sunlight pour in!  Every window installation had the similar heartwarming feeling by bringing a bit more sunshine into our lives and our dream home.

In the newfound spring daylight, I began building upstairs walls using my first pile of two by fours. I used two by fours on the interior walls because there was no need for the extra thickness of two by sixes for insulation such as I used on the exterior walls.

Spring more or less officially came to the UP when the temperature slid above freezing more often. Snow melted around the perimeter of the house and dripped from the roof. I found it fascinating to watch the snow melt from around the trees over a period of several days. At first, a hairline gap formed on the sunny side of the trees, but as the sun warmed and climbed everyday, the gap enlarged. By early May, there’d be a six-inch crescent moon gap in the snow favoring the south. Even so, you were never sure if spring had arrived and winter departed because the UP weather is so iffy most of the year. Some years, the snow lingered in the dark, shaded swamps until July. The Yooper saying goes “Nine months of winter, three months of rough sledding.”

Going back to the in-progress issues, we couldn’t safely use the water from the well even though the pump and the foot or so plumbing with a faucet was complete. We needed to get the well water tested by the Marquette Health Department. The water test came back positive for chloroform, which is fairly normal for a new well; so we treated it with chlorine bleach, and a week later, the water retested fine. One additional unplanned component we had to install was a whole house filter because of all the sediment (sand) in the water�"that good, deep well.

Another diversion. Last year, we met the ladies who owned the Alpaca farm around the next block. Karen and I occasionally went over to help them with some heavy work like logging, cleaning up, and painting. We were demented like that to take on more manual labor for neighbors as a break from the manual labor in constructing our house. Anyway, they traveled to Alpaca shows with a couple animals now and then, so we ended up farm sitting on long weekends thereby keeping us out of our little room again. I never decided if the neighbors provided their homes (and their associated work) because they felt sorry for us in our rough lifestyle, or if we naively allowed them to take advantage of us. See a trend here?

Work on the house progressed despite the diversions. We bought an expensive sliding patio door for the western wall that faced the ravine. The wood, colonial-paned patio door was a bit difficult to assemble, and it took some effort and finessing to make sure the glides were square and gaps tight but not binding. In the end result, it proved beautiful and beneficial to have that six and a half foot high by eight-foot opening, bringing another huge chunk of outside light inside to the west side of the house while providing a beautiful view and ready access to the outside.

Outside the patio door, water dumped off the steel roof when it rained and with the water dropping seventeen feet to the ground, we developed an erosion problem. We could see the erosion start early on, but our fear was that if the rain and runoff became heavy and continuous, the steep ravine could erode right up to the door and foundation, even though it was twelve�"feet distant. Karen had built the retaining walls along the house’s sides by backfilling, but nothing was there to keep the bank from eroding. With some innovative use of rock, timbers, and rough-cut planks, we shored up the bank to keep it from washing away. Around the house, under the eaves, Karen and I framed a gravel bed bordered with landscape timbers. The bed was like a sidewalk along the perimeter of the house and worked nicely to eliminate the mud splash. The real reason for this gravel bed? I was not doing gutters!

 Springtime in the UP was a delight. Every spring, the grouses’ drumming in the deep woods amazed us. We’d have to stop work and listen to what sounded like a heavy single cylinder engine firing up and slowly gain speed as the male grouses beat their wings vigorously. One day one of those ferocious “woods chickens,” (sharp-tailed grouse) chased Karen. He put his head down, swung it back and forth, and with his feathers all fluffed out, he rushed at her. She screamed and ran from it back to the house. I had a good laugh that cost me dearly. This happened just a few yards east of the house where the barn would grow up one day. We don’t know if the grouse was protecting its territory or was in love!

Also early this spring, we had a surprise one morning when we went out to brush our teeth outside the polebarn room door. Not three feet toward the ravine, I spotted something odd looking in the old dry leaves and brush. I just couldn’t figure it out. Just as I was ready to toe the lump, it unwound into a spindly legged, newborn fawn. It wobbled up onto its legs but didn’t run; I think it couldn’t run. It gave a weird squawk and immediately its mother doe huffed back from the other side of the ravine. I motioned to the astonished and fascinated Karen to back away. We wandered over to the house and when we came back for lunch, the fawn and doe were gone. We saw a doe occasionally on our property but never saw the two together again.

In the warming late spring period, I courageously began building the spiral stair sections following the strict Marquette County Code requirements. I had begun months ago with pencil scribbles, compass, and protractor in our room during evenings. I then empirically cut (meaning several versions) full size circles with stair wedges incorporated within. Then, I figured out the full-size individual stair step wedges and cut them into paper pieces and over-lapped them in a complete, albeit paper-thin, mocked up spiral stairs circle. The number thirteen came up often in the house project, an omen, coincidence, or at least we became cognizant of that number, and this was another example. With all my calculations taking in the 315-degree spiral turn from floor to loft, and each stair step height, width, turn, taper, material thickness, toe overhang and so on, the spiral staircase ended up with thirteen uniformly-spaced steps. Well, not exactly, really, technically thirteen, we convinced our superstitious selves. The loft edge where the triangle-shaped loft plank flooring held the standing log counted as one more step, so we were saved from the eternally unlucky number thirteen with fourteen functional steps.

To build the individual steps, I began by empirically transferring the stair’s paper pattern to a chalk pattern on the polebarn floor. (How professional is that?) I then cut light angle iron to the lengths on the floor, and then welded the stair step steel frame together. We incidentally bought a new Lincoln welder from Fleet Farm just for this job. The pixies frequented me whenever I worked alone�"especially over there in the polebarn. I would use the slag hammer to chip off the welds, lay it nearby, and when I needed it between welding, it would somehow be out of reach causing me to stand up and retrieve it. They especially enjoyed my aggravation when they tangled the welding leads. Of course, they were safest in doing their dirty deeds when I was welding with my helmet on, blocking my conscious surveillance. Damn Pixies!

 During the stair-welding process at the polebarn, neighbor Mr.Thomas cruised over on his four-wheeler for another short look at my on-going joke-work. I flipped up and took my helmet off, and the pixies scattered. The 260Z sat out in the meadow in the tall grass looking cool, very very distant from my welding sparks. Don strolled over and took a close look at the sports car.

            “Howdy Neal, beauty day, eh? Nice paint job,” Don said, fingering the red and clear-coat paint job. I cringed. “You paint it?” I thought he supposed that I didn’t.

            “Oh yeah, quite the process, but I think it came out good.” I said, proud of myself.

            “I don’t ever see you driving it,” he said, eyeing the current plates.

            “Oh, yeah�"Sunday mornings mostly. You’re probably in church. It is pretty tough to get out to the highway, the way to M535 is so bumpy, and this thing is low and stiff.” I said, leaning over to peer underneath.

            He probably had an inkling of our money shortage, at least because of the way we lived, did everything ourselves, and bought things parsimoniously one at a time.

            “Are you going to sell it, you think?” Don asked, with a calculating smile.

            I knew he wasn’t interested, probably just fishing for information.

            “No, not our baby,” I said, patting it. “Things will have to get pretty tough around here, and this car would be the last to go.”

            He shook his head while looking in the side passenger window, checking out the roll cage and the array of cool cockpit controls that no one understood but Karen and me.

“That’s what I said about my tractor just before I sold it.” He said directly. 

            We chatted awhile about the nice weather, local crops, the neighbors, and the farmer until the conversational material suddenly dried up. We stood there a few silent seconds.

            “Well,” I said, picking up my welding helmet. “Back to work. See ya’ Don.”

“Have a good one,” he said, climbing on his four-wheeler and firing it off. I fired off the welder and continued welding on the stair steps.

After one reject, Karen and I load-tested the second frame by temporarily mounting it with two bolts to the telephone pole out front, and we sat on it. What a sight with no one to take a picture�"aw shucks! If individually, they held both of us, then all thirteen of them bolted together as a unit should hold any huge person. It should even satisfy the code enforcers, though I remembered that despite all their rules on stairs they didn’t have any load specifications. It took me four whole days of hacksawing, welding, and checking them against my floor pattern and the first good example to ensure assembly line consistency.

I carefully installed them on the vertical log pole with four lag bolts in each one making triple sure of the spacing, levelness, and degrees of turn. I painted them black and surfaced the steel framed steps with strip-laminated pine boards. Karen finished them off with our now favorite stain, Puritan Oak. They were beautiful and besides the steel strap holding the log, this continued our motif of industrial black steel and wood. The stairs, by the way, rotated clockwise so right-handed wielders of swords could not effectively brandish their weapons while climbing the stairs. Taking the first step you face east, then turn south to look out front with a couple steps, then about halfway up you were facing west; from there, you turn north until you reach the top at the loft facing northeast.

I had no idea how the future balusters or handrails would materialize. Ben told us he had seen an example of spiral stairs in a Master Woodworker Magazine where they glue laminated a handrail from thin strips of wood held together to dry with at least a hundred clamps. I could not believe someone would take the time and effort to accomplish that kind of difficult task, not to mention buying or having that many clamps. I would have to come up with some other answer for railings, and answers to tough questions sometimes came from the most unlikely sources! Stay tuned for that project remaining on hold. In the meantime, we used the stairs at our own risk. Watch out for the big drop off from the loft if you missed the top step by going wide or going left instead of right of the pole!

Rumors by acquaintances said that if the code inspectors, they called them “Code Nazis,” discovered our staircase was in use while unprotected by railings, they could force us to quit work for unsafe conditions. With that warning, we started watching over our shoulders, becoming nervous whenever anyone came to visit thinking they could be inspectors incognito, potential informers, or evil neighbor farmers. In retrospect, I think our work ethic, attention to detail, over-engineering, and unflinching acceptance of disapprovals by the inspectors pointed out proved our salvation from witnessing the nasty side of the inspectors.

 

Reviews

[wondering]

never say die and keep going forward, have to give you alot of credit and you two must really have a great relationship. no one has died yet