The Yooper Schooner (Part 7)

We are running low on money. Is our house going to remain a big empty box?

Chapter 13 Just Can’t Flush Out the Septic Quandary

 

Oft times ordeals increase in perceived enormity by hesitation and rumination. 

 

I tried to concentrate on the easy jobs at hand, such as interior walls, and not ruminate over the difficult problems running on the hard drive, and the drive ran hard in fits and starts. Remaining distant from reasonable (cheap) answers were the septic, associated drains and plumbing, the remaining windows, appliances, the stairs, and so on. Undeniably, facing the dwindling bank account made me sick.

Therefore, I focused on the interior walls, no, not blankly staring at the walls, working on building the walls. They were forming upstairs in the glow of a droplight powered by my homemade 50-foot power cord with a four-outlet box. The pixies, by the way, loved tying knots in that long unwieldy cord overnight. The house’s open design and angled scissor truss ceiling made for interesting second floor wall building. The upper plate had to have an angle on it, and during the winter months, this joint between the loft’s vertical walls to the ceiling varied as much as an inch. This scared me somewhat that somewhere the house, obviously the walls, floor, or concrete were moving or heaving. Luckily, that problem didn’t continue when the house was uniformly heated year ‘round.

The second floor plan progressed sensibly from our initial dream. The master bedroom occupied two-thirds of the loft’s width and length with a separating wall for a spacious walk-in closet and bathroom along the east side. The closet had a two foot raised platform in the corner to provide headroom for the entrance door below. This provided one example of modifications to our house to solve a problem while in progress, though not necessarily a pretty solution. One design feature upstairs I built especially to Karen’s specification was the dumbwaiter mentioned earlier. As planned, it would lift laundry up from the first floor laundry or down from the bathroom. That’s where I framed it into a gap in the plank floor, right above the nook for the dryer and into the bathroom. A note here that the upstairs walls remained exactly as I explained here, but this statement isn’t true for the downstairs.

The first floor had some issues to work around, namely the vertical log posts that were pretty to look at but a bit daunting to build around and hazardous to the body in the middle of the night when left standing alone. From the back door, we stepped down (under that raised section in the closet) to the concrete in a short hallway to the house’s center. The utility room is immediately to the left of the backdoor. A few more steps and turn left into the main splitting hallway that hugged the right vertical posts but were a few feet from the left posts. Remember the posts are nine foot four apart. (Three lengths connected to make the house’s twenty-eight foot width, the reason for the odd lengths!) In this off-center hallway, the future kitchen would be on the right, then the laundry room and bathroom on the left followed by the bedroom. A short hall connected these small rooms. The kitchen would remain open to the south and hall while a wall closed off the bedroom two feet from the spiral stairs. This layout would not remain static.

  Intelligently, we laid out the bathroom, laundry, and utility room close to the utility room, stacked beneath the upstairs bathroom to cut down on the lengths of drain and feed pipes. The kitchen remained the solo exception on the far west wall, and this distance from drains and feeds on the east wall remained a significant distress to figure out.     

In the late spring, early summer, Karen and I were “invited” to help with Donna and Carol’s Alpaca shearing project. They were intensely fastidious about their Alpacas and shearing proved a huge issue with them. Just a plain old sheep shearer wouldn’t do, so they hired a shearer from New Zealand because he was the best in the world. They had Karen, me, and a couple other people to help. Carefully, we laid the Alpacas out. Some of the difficult animals we stretched manually but carefully, with a pulley. As they sheared, they adamantly made sure the fleece (not hair, fur, or wool heaven forbid!) stayed clean, dry, and intact. We carried the fleece and packed it like the Sacred Golden Fleece. Donna and Carol insistently explained how much the Alpaca fleece was worth, but as we found out later not many buyers bought it to weave into clothes. They had plenty of brochures from Peru explaining how the clothing items were of heirloom quality and treasured down there. Indeed, Alpaca sweaters, scarves, and such were beautiful, luxurious, and costly, but there was not much of a market for them in the USA when relatively speaking similar knitted items of other materials such as wool were dirt-cheap.   

Not so dirt-cheap, we were buying a few windows every week, and this is when our expenses grew and savings fell exponentially. In one day, we bought eight double-hung, four gliders, and two crank-out windows that were required to follow the code’s egress requirements. Afterwards, we special ordered two eight-foot trapezoid shaped windows for the front prow top peak. These custom-built windows proved pocketbook stressful (read: expensive) but very necessary to accentuate and break up the blank wall in the top of the prow front wall. The long, angled headers were difficult to build especially seventeen feet up on a ladder. Every jack under the header was a different length, and the tops had to be cut at an angle. We had no scaffolding, but it was nearby.

We saw less and less of the farmer-neighbor except when we helped him make hay again. About this hay making time, Karen had a little time to socialize with the farmer’s wife and her parents. I guess she opened up a bit as time went on. Come to find out when they built, her parents agreed to finance their nice big house “if he didn’t do the work.” Remember, the farmer had said over and over, “he built the house himself” and the reality was he contracted masons, framers, plumbers, electricians, roofers, and even a cabinetmaker. I don’t think he liked that we found out his secret.

 About this same time, his farmyard started to fill up with cows. At least once a week, the herd of heifers would run through our yard and tear up our planted flowers where we had started a little landscaping. They’d leave six inch divots wherever they ran, and I often ran after them to chase them from the yard. I never could figure out why the heifers would end up back in the woods by our house. This added to our building stress. Sure, his one intermittent rusty strand of barbed wire, and sparsely planted hedgerow would hold back hungry cows that had already eaten down his small, meager pasture to grassy nubs. Yeah, he had a “right to farm,” but the real farmers we knew were intelligent. We’d complain about the cows running about all the time, but he’d smirk with a “Right to Farm” response and make more noise directly across the street from our polebarn room. He only ran his equipment right there late in the evening when he knew we were going to bed. Stress built, and our tempers flared, but money remained the stressor extraordinaire.

We came from Alaska with thirty-three thousand dollars, a small pension, and a money market account. The money market went first when the bank account shrunk because we weren’t making much money on it anyway in that recessionary period, and Karen doesn’t believe in the stock market or the mutual fund system. All that money should have been enough with all the sweat equity we put into this house, and we didn’t purchase many extravagances other than the chainsaw and the tractor. However, we did purchase one additional item, a beautiful whirlpool bathtub on sale, but we were nowhere close to installing it. Ben built the first surround for the tub in the upstairs bathroom. When we look back from what Ben is working at now compared to his early carpentry work like the surround (that was not a very sturdy or tidy job), Karen and I are amazed.

Facing facts, we broke down and obtained a moderate home equity loan. I didn’t want to and held off on buying some windows until I thought about some of the even more big ticket items that were coming up. To make payments on the loan, I got a security job at the Presque Isle Power Plant that was just short of full time, so they didn’t have to pay benefits. I always hated working nights because I could never sleep in the daytime light, but that is when I ended up working, nights. At least, I had daylight to labor on the house, and so the necessary and so slow progress was sustained.

Speaking of cash at this time, NASA lost the infamous $125 million spacecraft as it orbited Mars. We attributed it to the Martians not wishing the interplanetary publicity. Martians are almost as bad as the Pixies, but maybe, perhaps they’re one in the same or at least relatives!

Along with the wall building, I broke down to consider the initial modern utilities and for these, I doodled preliminary electrical and plumbing plans. I sketched out wiring plans with rather light loads on each circuit according to my electrical guidebook, but I got bit in the rear for that idea later on. After much late night doodling and figuring, I derived twelve circuits for the house. Planning for the first time in the history of our project, I expertly laid out the circuits in color-code with a key on graph paper, at least until the electrical inspector got a look. The details behind that are forthcoming. Eight rolls of three-wire NM cable and a case of receptacle boxes started the preliminary cable-pulling portion of the electrical work.

 

Ever consider how much hidden “stuff” is in your walls? There is plenty, and I can assure you, it ain’t buried treasure.

 

 I’m not an electrician or speed worker, as you the reader can rightly tell, but by following the book, actually three residential electrical books, I carefully measured and marked the studs where the cables would pass and labeled where the many receptacles and switches would be installed. It became surprising (boggling) how many of these there are when I installed them where we wanted them and as close together as the code specified. Anywhere we’d look there’d be a “S” or a “R” or perhaps some other code marked on a stud with Sharpie pen. I drilled more holes in the studs the perfectly measured height off the floor before I pulled and secured the cable accordingly to code-required distance and manner. Each receptacle/switch box was installed square and true, and all the cable ends received a decorative pig’s tail. I knew that after the inspection and the walls were covered over, no one would ever see my work again except in the few pictures we took to reminisce over. The inspector, when he examined my box installations, was amazed that I caulked around the cables passing into each box.

“Never saw that done before,” he said, shaking his head.

One concern I had to ask the electrical inspector (who happened to be the nicest guy in the code office) was about receptacles and the required height off the floor. I was used to seeing them sixteen inches up, but with our concrete wall extending up forty-four inches, it would be very difficult, neigh impossible, to install them that low. He said there was no stipulation to the receptacles’ height, and it would be fine for them to be forty-six inches up. He said, in fact, that installed this high the receptacles would be safer by putting them well out of the reach of children.  

            One evening when I wasn’t at my part-time job but working at my full time job banging around, putting up walls, and installing electrical boxes, a knock came on the door. We usually didn’t have unannounced visitors. Answering the door, we got “Trick or Treat!” It was Halloween again; we had lost track again because we didn’t even own a calendar. It was Randy and Laurie’s kids again, and we were fresh out of Ramen Noodles. I suggested a couple cans of chicken noodle soup to maintain the soup tradition of sorts. Karen wouldn’t stand for that, and the only other thing we had beside house building supplies were a dozen tulip bulbs in a net bag. Karen wouldn’t let me give those away either, but I thought they were a neat trick. She told them we didn’t have anything; we were the destitute couple after all. Laurie said the neighborhood was going to hell and stunting her children’s growth. One neighbor gives milk, another had squashes, and from us�"nothing�"this Halloween.

Well, her statement got the best of us, well Karen actually, because it didn’t bother me all that much, but we whipped down to a Marquette convenience store. Karen and I went to nearby Randy and Laurie’s house with a six-pack of Heineken for the parents and two jumbo Hershey bars for the kids. We weren’t going to be known as the neighbors who stunt children’s growth by depriving them of treats on Halloween!  

Back to work with one intensive electrical job. Karen wanted a well-lit kitchen, which was situated in the northwest corner of the first floor. To accomplish this, I built and installed two banks of recessed lights on far ends of the kitchen ceiling. I pulled the cables from the circuit box in the utility room across the top of the back hallway, into the kitchen’s north bank and then into the far west wall. The cables over the hallway would eventually be hidden in a hollow fake beam made from those two by six floor joists when I ran out of logs. This proved necessary elsewhere because the plank floor above didn’t allow hiding cables inside like a standard joist floor. Anyway, inside the recessed lights banks, four and five lights respectively connected to the power with armored cable that proved tedious, razor-sharp stuff to work with. (Remember this.) The job ended up providing some very nice light sources over the kitchen work areas.

Time flew, and we celebrated Thanksgiving that year at Donna and Carol’s Alpaca farm, a social outing and payback for the farm sitting, helping with the shearing, and so on.  And completely losing track of time, we found it was December before we knew it, and because all the walls were now built, (at least in the present configuration) we faced a most important milestone: The framing inspection.

The framing inspection was the one inspection all homebuilders dreaded. Required before the installation of insulation and the wall and ceiling coverings, the inspection ensured the framing followed codes including door and window headers, joists, trusses, and roof sheathing. The inspector came while I was trying to sleep in our little room after a night at work. I could never sleep during the day anyway. Karen was alone with the inspector, but she called me up using our phones that linked room and house. By the way, the phone technician did that extra service free when we hooked our phone up that past spring. (All these modern conveniences and extras catch up with me when looking back.)

As I approached the house, I heard some heavy thumping noise going on inside. Pondering what it may have been, my stomach turned, and I quickened my pace. The noise stopped before I entered the house, but Karen was p-o’d. She told me the inspector had been jumping up and down on the loft floor. This old, clichéd way to check the soundness of an old house’s structure now seemed a modern, testing technique for the Marquette Code inspectors. (Tongue firmly in cheek here.) He stated that he thought the floor turned out quite solid without any added comment about the log joists, those they didn’t want to initially approve because they were not standard, plain old dimensional lumber. However, he was visibly peeved we had insulation installed in half the ceiling and the back walls. The code, to give him credit, states that all framing must be left exposed for the framing inspection. I suggested pulling the insulation out if he needed to see it, but he immediately backed off on his obstinate attitude. He must have noticed my tired, bloodshot eyes from lack of sleep, and my slowly curling, white-knuckled fists. I probably looked like a zombie or worse! Worse?

Karen visibly stiffened when the inspector eyed the stairs coming down and drew out his measuring tape. Making amends, he was impressed with the spiral stairs even though they didn’t have railings. We wondered if we would have to move out after all the horror stories, and we were ready for a knockdown, drag-out fight. Despite Karen’s stare of high temperature barbequing, he went ahead, measured the distance between each step, and found they were within plus or minus 3/16 inch except the greater amount at the first base step because it was getting a floor covering later on.  

In his close, though not so close, examination elsewhere, he noticed that I had installed two partial sheets of roofing OSB in the wrong direction on those infamous lookout eave extensions over the prow front. I did this because using them this way produced less waste. For those non-builders reading, OSB is Oriented Strand Board sheets and because the strands are oriented, the strength is oriented. Well, he wouldn’t pass the framing because of those two partial sheets.

I could have blown up, told him to go to hell, argue, and so on, but I didn’t. I couldn’t change the sheets with a roof on�"well, I could have but think about that job! So I told him I’d put in extra lookouts in between the existing ones to beef the roof up and compensate for the weakened OSB orientation. Most people would argue that a man’s promised word should be good enough for a job done correctly in the future tense and demand immediate on the spot approval, but no, he had to come back to see the work done.

“Fine.” I said. “Could I schedule another inspection in two days?”

 “No,” he said, tersely. “Not with me, call the secretary.”

I was tired, mad, and probably red-faced to match my red eyes, but I agreed. I rescheduled a week out because that was the earliest they had. Back up there again in those rafters, I put in six new lookouts when I only needed three just to prove the point, over-engineer the work, and make the spacing of the lookouts symmetrically uniform. A little anal�"perfectionist sometimes when admittedly this work would be covered up.  A week later, he came back, looked up from the floor twenty-three feet distant and signed off on the framing inspection. Sometimes I got so p�"off but held it all back! At least he could have climbed the ladder leaning against the prow wall right there to take a closer look. This was another example of a good way for me to pop a circuit or an artery, but we were approved to continue with more insulation and wall coverings! 

As the late autumn grew increasingly cold, I pondered the problem of keeping the house warm while I worked nights. Karen volunteered to stoke the stove during the night, but I knew she disliked the dark of the night, especially out there in the middle of nowhere. I consider myself bold while trudging over to the house in the dark, but I still had those creepy sensations at times. I didn’t expect her to endure this task besides everything else she had been through. Luckily, the guy working swing shift at the security job quit, which occurred quite often, and I attained that slot. This fortuitous situation allowed me to work the much better late afternoon and evening hours. This perfect situation let me work on the house during the day and still be available to stoke the fire at night. Saved again!    

            Because of my concern in heating the house, a much more pleasant and easy (for us), but very expensive (for us) plan came about. We decided to install the back up source of heat, the radiant in-floor system furnace and hot water maker. Hot water inside the house? What a concept! We had, in the meantime, requested estimates for the furnace to run our radiant in floor heat system because the Marquette code wouldn’t allow hot water heaters to do the same, simple thing. We had that grid of plastic tubes in the very solid concrete for the system, and I hoped we hadn’t punctured any of them during the concrete pour. Back in the spring, we had attended the Marquette Builder’s Show, and we learned all about furnace systems and hot water makers. The three estimates we received were $14K, $35K, an overly high bid from a thoughtful, unnamed neighbor, and an $11K bid from John. Sometimes, money is everything, so we went with John’s $11K.

John explained that as a licensed plumber he couldn’t begin installing the furnace without a mechanical permit. Once again, we went to Marquette Courthouse, wrote a check, and went home with another permit to add to our growing folder of permits, drawings, and other documentation. John and his son came over and installed the copper piping that made the in floor system work by hooking it up to the outlets and eight zone manifolds sticking out of the concrete slab that I had readied. This first step installation went relatively quick. Honestly, I didn’t have the expertise to handle it, but undeniably having it done was another huge hit on the checkbook. With half payment for the furnace and hot water maker, John ordered them and a week later, he installed them both. With that done we made an agreement with John for plumbing later, but at least we had hot running water, if only in the utility room that drained into a bucket because there were still no drains! John made an initial survey around the house and coming down from upstairs almost stepped off the wrong side of the loft without the stairs. Stay right, John, your other right, John!

Oh and the plumbing! How can you plumb the house when you don’t know where the wastewater will exit? After all, those green disks were STILL on the trees. First things first, eh? John said we could save money by me doing most the grunt work like installing the pipes, but he warned me that Marquette had new plumbing codes concerning drains, vents, and appliances that licensed plumbers didn’t fully understand yet�"imagine that! We pondered possible solutions to the septic problem, but all I ever came up with was more expense. John didn’t have an answer for the septic conundrum, but he only had experience in straight-forward (read: normal) houses with architects and contractor builders. My stomach ached whenever I thought about the few (two) possibilities to resolve the septic quandary…

 

How could a marriage survive under the conditions we endured? I have no idea!

 

Chapter 14 A Sad New Year’s Separation

 

Christmas approached and the three of us hauled up another balsam from the distant swamps into the noticeably brighter house. Christmas decorating went more pleasantly in a house that now had a few large windows to let the natural sunshine or starlight in, and if weather precluded those options, lights that came on at the flick of a switch. Even though, we often exhibited schizophrenic mood swings concerning the house’s state. One minute, we felt proud and happy with all the progress we had made approaching the third year, but then weary and depressed over all the work that needed to be done before it resembled a home; so much more work that we realized no one but us would know about or appreciate. How many more years of this, we often wondered. Whatever we suffered over the house project, we kept working and attempted to make it a home in other ways.

 In over a week’s period, Karen built a fanciful seven-foot at the shoulders moose that was covered in cedar branches and finished with blankets of white twinkle lights. We put him out by the road powered by a couple hundred-foot long extension cords. People from miles around came to check him out as the light from him lit the trees for yards around from top to bottom. The power draw hit our dwindling bank account with an increased risk of bottoming out, and the long, over-heated cord created a long snaking strip of bare ground in the deep snow�"yikes!  

We bought two octagon windows. The oblong one for the peak in the bedroom came broken and had to be reordered, and the other, a crank out, went in the upstairs bathroom. From Astro UP Door and Window Warehouse, we purchased two, twelve-light and wood pocket doors for the loft and two solid four-panel doors for the bath and closet.

Framing for the pocket doors in the loft proved not overly difficult work, but I used two, ten-inch by twenty-foot long headers imbedded in the cross-wall to hang those doors. I suppose these doors in a non-load bearing wall didn’t need headers quite this beefy, but I wanted a strong tie between the two exterior walls besides the roof, log joists, and floor. I think I had a phobia about those walls spreading apart like when we put up the trusses.

The twin windowed pocket doors were centered in the wall and about twelve feet back from the loft’s front edge. After installation, while warming our buns on the stove below, we could look up through the doors to see the master bedroom’s ceiling. Above the doors was a fan-shaped opening in the wall that allowed the heat to flow freely from the loft into the bedroom and bathroom, one of the original dream requirements put into a physical reality. Up in the fan-shaped wall opening above the double doors, we installed peeled white pine branches that replicated the look of deer antlers. The branches added a very rustic feel up there. We got the inspiration from the giant lodges of the North Country with their antler chandeliers and railings. We gathered up the branches after a massive ice storm broke the branches off the white pines in our meadow. With the pocket doors installed, the house gained shape, definition, and character.

Y2K loomed on the horizon. Would we, at least our computers, survive the impending digital disaster? I had to work on New Years Eve into the new millennium with another security guard because of all the activity around the plant. Presque Island Power Plant was an old coal-fired electricity producing plant, but it had been updated with computer controls on many functions including emission controls. The environmental controls could not go haywire, or the EPA would shut the plant down. The computer technicians and managers were spending the night with repair crews standing by in case of a computer meltdown when 1999 became 2000. They didn’t shut anything down or change a thing in production despite all of their concerns. They sat around a makeshift buffet pigging out, chatting, and wringing their hands.

“Oh my God, what are we going to do? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?!”

I felt like that most of the time with our project going into another new year and our personal family news. Ben had decided to leave the UP and us behind with his return to Alaska. How sad despite the fact that we had a tearful separation back when he departed Alaska to start attending Northern Michigan University. He had given it his all to make a go of it in Marquette by working at Downwind Sports Shop, and enjoying the UP outdoors, but it was not, by any means, Alaska. Ben had attended High School when we lived in Wasilla during my Air Force Alaskan tour, and so he had many friends and connections for work back there. His cross-country skiing coach and teacher had started him in construction, and Ben reconnected with him for a job doing construction work again. Even though he didn’t live with us these few years already, Karen and I hated to see him go, but we wished him the best in making his own successful future. A sad new year and millennium. Meanwhile, Karen and I had our own future in construction though at only one unconventional job site.

 

A child leaving the nest for distant locales hurts deep down no matter how many times it happens.