The Yooper Schooner (Part 8)

Geez, it's been a real fun time building our home, but we are getting closer to a finish with my performance of circus acts and a revelation.

Chapter 15 Performing a Circus Act

 

            Beginning this recollection story of our unconventional house-building project, I wanted our experiences and tribulations, good and bad, to be timeless, so I omitted the prices of materials and the dates our house building experience took place. You have now discovered my blatant departure from that plan in the Yooper Schooner’s Second Year. I identified the specific year and finding ourselves entering the new millennium, we’re doing the same thing as the previous nearly two years, building our empirically built dream home.

Twenty-one months into the house project and looking around, taking stock, we found nothing is quite finished except the roof. I’d like to portray that we are not exactly slow because we work vigorously all the time, but truthfully, we don’t. Sure and steady was more like our pace not counting the diversions that distract us. More on those later on. Besides, we were learning all the time trying desperately to do it right the first time, so we must consider the learning curve. Indeed, the learning curve was precipitous, the journey arduous, and the diverse tasks�"innumerable, not to mention those unmentionable tasks running on the hard drive. 

There were many mistakes made in the empirical trial and error process on practically every part of the project without a standard, tried and true blueprint and the experience to go with them. We had an abundance of miss-cut boards, logs, OSB, and plywood; electrical circuits laid-out and pulled, then pulled out and re-pulled�"even walls built, disassembled, and rebuilt. We had no hard plans; maybe the electrical layouts were closest to a plan. The rest of the house was built following sketches and doodles despite our semi-refined plans submitted to Marquette County Code Office. Still despite our attention to detail, hard work, and an honest aspiration to finish someday, quandaries remained with the unfinished plumbing being central and that one especially unmentionable problem that could preclude finishing our home at all. 

As you may have noticed from the first two years’ recollection, not only are empirical methods, or in other words, experimentation, trial and error methods were being used in most cases, especially the details, we made much of it up as we went. Maybe our submitted plans were merely guidelines�"smirk. Now nearly beginning our third year, we were finding more diversions like we needed them like a new�"almost living a normal life, and that is the key word�"almost. Oh yeah, Y2K had just flashed by.

You know what happened. Like the rest of the world, Y2K drove the computer guys and executives crazy at the power plant until it went by without affecting anything. Associated with that digital delirium, I worked my security job over New Year’s Eve. Everyone knows nothing happened on the switchover from 1999 to 2000 except the US Naval Observatory’s Master Atomic Clock problem; how ironic, wouldn’t you say? I had a slight concern because we had a computer in our little room, tucked in the corner under our cozy love nest bed-loft. We had AOL to connect with, watch, and contemplate the happenings in the real outside world, but of course, nothing happened with our computer either.

That morning after the Y2K hysteria embarrassingly died off, I headed home drowsy as usual in the trusty white Dodge Dakota Sport. On the way through Marquette, I stopped off and bought five different newspapers, all announcing the successful New Year transition and no worldly crisis of crashed computers. One of those newspapers resides in the master bedroom north wall, one in the east bathroom wall, one in the west loft wall, one in the prow southwest wall, and the last one we didn’t place right away. I don’t recall where it ended up.

The fact that newspapers could be hidden in our walls tells a little of our progress. The stud walls were up, some of the loft walls were insulated, and we had begun drywall installation. If anyone who builds says anything contrary to my statement that dry walling is the most difficult, nastiest, hardest labor in the house building process, tell them to take a jump for me. The job sucks. The glass wool insulation going in the walls is itchy to begin with, but at least it goes in quick and easy. In comparison, dry wall installation is protracted, dusty, and difficult. The lengths must be measured precisely, the edges must fall square on mid-studs, and electrical box placements are especially tricky with precise rectangular holes made carefully in the bulky, heavy sheets. And remember, there were quite the number of boxes because of the code! Then consider the silty drywall dust that goes everywhere, sucking the moisture out your hands and clogging your sinus cavities. And that’s even before the repetitive mudding and sanding nightmare &$#%!

Speaking of walls, as we progressed with other things, the first floor walls moved. No, not on their own because the Pixies aren’t that brawny, and the frost never made it under the concrete, thank goodness. I explained the first floor layout in the previous part and more or less, it remained like that, but the walls needed adjusting. The downstairs bedroom, we found after framing up the walls and working around them, was too small. The front bedroom wall stood two and half feet from the spiral stairs. After being there these months, I realized this was a waste of space, and the log post just hung lonesome-like out on the floor. Loosening the wall and moving it should have been easy, but because the walls downstairs tied into the logs overhead, each wall had been built a little different. This meant that after knocking it loose, I had to pull the top plate off and trim or replace the vertical studs accordingly. Undoubtedly, it would have been easier to build a completely new wall, but I didn’t in the name of resource conservation.

 I haven’t mentioned that the bottom plates of all the downstairs walls had concrete sinkers in them to hold the bottoms put, so these had to be pulled and filled. Installing them was a struggle to begin with, meaning drilling through the plate and into the concrete, inserting the sinker, and screwing the wall down.

I need to explain a why of these walls’ design. Attaching the walls to the log joist bottoms left open space in between the logs at about seven to eight inches deep and twelve inches wide. This space allowed the air to freely flow from the Great Room into the bedroom, laundry, and bathroom a necessary requirement with a single source of heat, the woodstove.

After moving this bedroom wall, it just didn’t look good, all blocky and all, and NOW that log post stood inside the room. I’m going a little insane at this point doing work without thinking through to the final result. Karen, who puts up with my crazy work ethics and design ideas for quite awhile until she finally puts her two cents in, suggested putting the side bedroom/hallway wall at an angle to tie in that offending log post, what a concept. So, I did that. This gave the hallway a funnel effect, allowing traffic to flow from several directions in the Great Room down into the hall. The odd angled wall inside the bedroom proved a drawback later on. We also framed in two narrow windows into the bedroom’s new south wall and installed shutters we had bought at the flea market in Clarence, New York. These windows were just behind the spiral stairs allowing additional airflow and sun into our bedroom.

The kitchen wall, actually, well, there was not going to be a kitchen wall flanking the hallway. After we gained permanent electrical power, we plunked down our old picnic table there next to the hallway for Mr. Coffee. Mr. Coffee was a close, personal, and essential friend of ours in the project. We got used to having the table there to collect stuff and thought a cabinet with countertop would be nice there for more kitchen work area. Then, in turn, it became logical that the cabinet would need a backing wall. After a mini-conference, Karen and I decided this cabinet and wall should be built as an island of sorts, so we could enter the kitchen from the front and back of the hallway. This kept the concept of an “open floor plan” viable.

Taking stock of the rest of the downstairs and being on a roll of sorts, I decided the laundry room seemed too large. Studying up on standard size appliances, I discovered my inkling was correct. In turn, I knocked a big doorway in the existing wall on the back hallway and built another wall on the laundry side. In the narrow area between these walls, I created an entry closet.

The one area that bothered me, but I couldn’t do anything much about was the fact the bathroom looked incredibly small. There was nothing in it right at the moment, but I couldn’t see shoehorning a toilet, vanity, and bathing insert in there We’ll see, we’ll see…Hard drive!

             Even with the additional money from that home equity loan, I still hesitated to buy house building supplies such as windows, electrical parts, and the huge money suck, thick R-38 insulation for the ceiling, but we kept buying stuff anyway

We discovered Dan and Linda from down the street took a vacation from building their expensive house for a while. Besides, they had full time jobs and another comfortable house to live in. I wouldn’t have gotten anything done if I had a comfortable place to “live in.” When I say they had an expensive house project, I mean it when compared to ours. In their real comprehensive plans, they had two full kitchens, three full baths, four full size bedrooms, and so much electrical load they had to install two electrical service boxes. They put radiant in-floor heat in the house, basement floor, garage floor slab, and in the wooden floors, all very expensive propositions. Anyway, because they weren’t using it at the moment, they let us borrow four sections of their rusty scaffolding. I didn’t care it was rusty, borrowing it meant we didn’t have to buy it. 

Karen and I brought the scaffolding inside piece-by-piece and set it on sawed off pieces of lumber, which we had a lot of�"remember? I went to work inserting the thick insulation way up there in the front trusses to finish insulating the ceiling. Itchy insulation went up my sleeves, down my shirt, in my face and eyes, up my nose, and clogged my throat. Building is so much fun. Actually, a more daunting task was stapling the plastic up to form the vapor barrier. Performing these tasks on the scaffolding was so much easier than on the ladder, which in retrospect, I imagine was impossible. I stapled up the largest plastic sheet pieces I could hold and the staples would still grip, so the ends draped down and around me until I moved the three stacked up sections of scaffolding to finish stapling the piece. Trouble with doing this by myself in pieces meant a lot of overlap on the edges with extra plastic sheeting.

Rather than disassemble the scaffolding and reassemble them in another position, which was a backbreaking, time-consuming, and dangerous process, I scissored the heavy assembly foot by foot, which wasn’t all that easy either. Standing, I’d back up to one side or end of the scaffolding, then I’d pick the hundred pound plus corner up with my back, carefully sidestepping about a foot at a time being careful not to tip the skeleton skyscraper over. Imagine looking down from the top. In use, the scaffolding would normally be in a rectangle, but as I moved a side, it would take on various parallelogram shapes until I stepped the other side over to form a rectangle again where I needed it.

            The reason to explain this scaffolding movement and required it for longer time on our project was that in February, we bought 173 pieces of one by four-pine tongue and groove (t&g) boards for the ceiling. We finished the house from top down is one point of view as we go on. The roof went on, the insulation, then the ceiling, and so we worked down and around. We purchased the eight-foot t&g lengths from the Marquette Work Center who employs disadvantaged people. By this point as a pretty much a habitual nightly ritual, I pondered every next big step or new skill, often getting little sleep until the solution came to me and/or the job was done. Such was the planned ceiling t&g installation.

I empirically doodled different board patterns wanting a unique pattern twenty feet up there that would be interesting, and ahhh, breathtaking, but eventually after pages of doodled ideas and patterns, I ended up with the simplest logical solution to install. From the rear wall of the loft at the center peak, I used pairs of boards, similar length pieces on each side of the peak. First, a pair of eight-foot lengths, then a pair of six foot, four foot, and finally, two foot boards working outward from the peak to form a pyramid of sorts. These I air nailed to the undersides of the trusses, which by the way, if you hadn’t figured it out, were two-foot on center. Working from the center again, then forward and outward, I added eight-foot boards that put seams every two feet in a continuing stair step pattern on each side of the peak, rather than the normal contractor installed pattern, the random “don’t let seams fall together” pattern.

 Backing up to tell you the t&g board preparation process, Karen had the task of beveling the board’s ends with our Makita orbital sander and then sealing them with fast-drying Polycrylic Sealer. The boards remained a light and natural color to keep the ceiling lighter and more airy. Putting them up with my newly purchased Paslode air nailer, I used the scaffolding and any other thing I could find to reach the ceiling. I simultaneously balanced while stretching out, held the board tightly into place, and bang! fired in the nails. Up there twenty some feet when covering the peak, I stood on a five-gallon bucket set on the plank across the scaffolding tops. Other times, I performed an aerial circus act, standing on a plank spanning from scaffolding to stepladder set up on the loft, a breath-taking maneuver but necessary when nailing up entire lengths of the eight-foot boards. Karen held her breath as she watched; I just watched my balance! I vocalized the circus song: da�"da,da,da,daaaaaa... Sometimes, I had to pry a warped board into place with a bar in one hand and the nailer in another while standing precariously on the bouncing plank. A bit scary when the bar slips! Whoa, whoooooaaaa!

One distinct visual and audile memory when putting up these boards came the time the air hose accidentally disconnected from the nailer with an ear deafening, frightening blast of air sound. I watched in horror as the heavy metal coupling and coiling, snaking hose fell in slow motion, or so it seemed, to a wood spiral stair step�"bam! Yeah, it left a nasty permanent imprint on the wood step.

The tedious t&g job took a couple weeks and every night, Karen sealed another batch of boards for the next day’s installation. There was just so much space on the floor to lay out all the boards to dry at once, so we did the job in batches. We pressed on and in a week’s time we were almost finished but ended up buying another 38 boards to finish the outside edges.

Unfortunately, after this fun job, I returned to the utilities: I could do much of the plumbing myself, but that vexing unmentionable septic problem remained. Remember, those &*^&!%$*$#@&%$* green disks? I did everyday. This septic problem needed pondering, more long drawn out pondering!

 

Chapter 16: Revelation!

 

I had pondered long enough because eventually it became obvious, or after all this time, I wished I had said, I planned it from the beginning. The septic problem’s answer had finally revealed itself, whether it was from just letting it run on the hard drive for a couple years or from me dragging my feet until the dire, crucial circumstances forced me to see the obvious. The statement by Dr. Henry Jones, Senior rang true, “I find just sitting down and pondering, and the answer will just present itself!” I sat and pondered a very long time knowing that somehow the problems would be resolved. I suppose the statement on the X-Files UFO poster I had on the back of our little room’s door took on another meaning concerning our home building project: “I want to believe.”

 

Sometimes you just have to continue on faith, whatever you may be continuing!

 

While working on the downstairs bathroom walls on the septic side of the house, the ever so simple solution came to me. The septic could exit through the concrete block wall above the footer if we could figure out how to route the drains to that location and height. Neighbors and contractors laughed at me for that stupid solution! It was obvious from that point on that it was the only viable solution. Recalling from the very first visit, the health department geologist had said that we didn’t need much more height, or increased depth of the clay layer for that matter, to make the septic work. He had actually suggested building the house higher in the ground, imagine that, but one of our requirements was the earth-bermed first floor, and we were not about to abandon those early energy efficiency ideas.

I hoped that the solution would give us the necessary height required, hence solving the overall septic installation problem. Still, all the drains and toilets had to be above the four-inch septic outlet pipe and that was the remaining dilemma. I busted a hole through the concrete block bottom edge that rested right on the footer located two feet from the utility room/bathroom wall. I dug an access trench outside. A follow up call brought the Health Department Geologist back for a careful reexamination. With one of our shovels, he reopened the inspection hole in the ground because it had caved in since his last visit. He set up his mini-transit and made new measurements despite his green disks and earlier notes. With an intense recheck of slopes and that blasted clay layer six feet down, the geologist finally sighed deeply and gave us his official  health department blessing for a normal, run of the mill (or sewer) septic installation. Hooray!

Acting right on it, we had Big Bob and son, Bob Junior, return to dig a hole for the septic tank and septic field trenches. The son asked right up front about underground utilities, and seeing I kept good records of such things, I pointed out the electrical and waterline that was four feet down and four feet from the house. As he continued the digging process, he abruptly halted and waved me over. I stood there next to the half-submerged bucket and saw what Bob Junior was pointing at. The hungry backhoe bucket bit, snagged, and broke the buried water pipe. I was speechless for several moments wondering how this could have happened thinking right then Bob Junior required a good strangling 

 Looking on the bright side of things, the electrical conduit wasn’t damaged. I measured the distance thinking he wasn’t paying attention, but found the water pipe was now five and half feet from the house. The pipe must have migrated in the trench away from the house during our backfilling. I cannot complain about this accident because the electrical lines were buried in the same trench at the same time. Apparently, because the water pipe was bigger, had more freedom to move and was lighter, being empty at the time than the electrical cables, it had moved out in the trench’s arc to the far side of the trench. I sent Karen off to the hardware store for a pipe splice and clamps. I don’t know how we could’ve repaired the electrical if that were severed. Well, they continued with the excavation.

Before covering the septic system, we had it inspected again, and got the final blessing from another overly nervous Marquette County Health Department Inspector. I think those excitable guys drank too much coffee. All those worries and fears over the septic field were maybe all for naught, but still not completely solved. It required more pondering to remedy the drain connection problems inside. One quick solution I thought of was to locate all kitchen facilities, baths, and toilets upstairs and have no running water downstairs. What an absurd and totally unacceptable idea!

John and son came back for the plumbing, in actuality to get me going on the task because they had bigger, higher paying jobs and fish to fry. Literally, they were enthusiastic anglers. Another trip to Marquette Courthouse to purchase the plumbing permit because as a contractor John couldn’t start the plumbing work without one. Sound familiar? At this point in the process, the slight matter of no permit wouldn’t have slowed me down. The answer to our drain problem came easily through a “group think” session with John. On a whimsical empirical method thought, making it up as we went, or economically cutting corners, we figured out the overall plumbing scheme.

I had planned to shortcut plumbing runs as much as possible and had the downstairs bath back up against the utility room, and the upstairs bathroom stacked above. The laundry room sidled up to the downstairs bathroom, and with all the water use areas, except the kitchen, stacked above or near one another made the plumbing easier with the shortest possible runs of pipe. To ultimately put the system together, but all not that hard to imagine now, I built an elevated toilet platform up off the floor seven-inches, and a scant three inches above the septic outlet pipe. The high toilet would make for a very royal throne indeed!

 John helped me lay out the pipes in consideration to everything else to tie together later on. First thing I did was to install the toilet on the royal-high platform, and Karen called her mother. Holding the phone over the toilet, we flushed, the first flush in our Yooper Schooner and transmitted across the phone! We were finally civilized enough to have indoor plumbing, overcoming one large bothersome problem thereby achieving a huge, monumental milestone! This provided the first step in solving the draining problem. The hard drive ran slower and easier.

Much to our dismay, even though most of the plumbing job was now planned, the kitchen remained a problem to plumb. It was on the far west side of the house and proved another one of those problem areas without normal under slab plumbing. Thrown out were suggestions of dumping kitchen “gray water” over the ravine bank because the kitchen was on that side of the house, but we weren’t in medieval Europe or the American frontier, though thinking about our location and living conditions there were similarities.

We solved the dilemma by proposing the two pex feed lines and drain pipe all along the outside concrete walls from the future location of the kitchen sink. The three pipes ran twelve feet north, twenty-two feet east, and eight feet south finally ending in the utility room by going under and through the makeshift entry stairs. A long way to go, but I carefully sloped the drainpipe the required eighth of inch per foot all the way to the sewer head. John showed me the trick of hanging the pipes by first drilling a small hole in the concrete mortar seam. To hold a piece of plywood that would hold the pipes, I pounded two nails into each hole. There was no kitchen what-so-ever yet in counters, appliances, or sinks, so the pipes stuck out mounted there on the concrete block wall for a very long time.

On a related note of drains, John had already warned me that the Marquette plumbing code had been recently updated with intricacies that licensed plumbers didn’t know about. I don’t know how simple it was before with only one main vent required for a house, but now, as John explained, every drain in a house was mandated to have a vent. In practice, this meant as a drain sloped down, a “Y’ in the drain was required within three feet of the source, and from this “Y”, the vent pipe sloped upwards. My instant realization? Twice as much drainpipe to buy, not to mention the routing and hiding problems involved. Nevertheless, the hard drive could finally delete that big overall drainage problem, all I had at this point was more hard labor. 

Shifting gears somewhat though, I want to introduce the Smythe family that lived in Skandia. They represented responsible, low impact forestry/logging with horses. We met during a meeting for area woodlot owners/managers concerning responsible and productive woodlot management. Soon after, we hired the Smythes to complete the logging on our property because we couldn’t handle the tree thinning we wanted done, and we didn’t want the farmer involved.     

We decided to log the aspens and dead or deformed hardwoods species such as maple and oak that remained farther away from the house. The logs brought us a little extra cash, but you can’t get rich logging your land unless you have the highly desired old growth oak or large yellow birches. I helped somewhat by cutting and pulling logs with the yellow clunky tractor because their skidder, a heavy, all-terrain vehicle for picking up and hauling logs, kept breaking down. Parts broke, hydraulic hoses burst, and sometimes it wouldn’t even run. This reminded us of the cursed well-drilling truck. Maybe our land had an aversion for heavy equipment operating on it. I went back to concentrate on the house-building project, and there was still plenty of house building activity to concentrate on.

It was about time I got around to rebuilding the tub surround upstairs for the whirlpool tub. Ben’s version had been dismantled long ago, and my subsequent attempt never came to fruition. You would think with all that I built already, this minor project would be a cinch. Well, it wasn’t. I took my partially built version out, more like ripped it out of there with a crowbar and a sledgehammer, temper, temper! The real problem, I surmised, was the lack of exact measurements in the areas that required a close fitting scrutiny. Instead of following my house-building book, I decided to follow the directions that came with the tub, what a concept.

Simply put, the surround would resemble a mini-wall on two sides and hang off the walls on the other two sides. The measuring mistakes came about when I didn’t take into account that the surround’s top had to fit up under the tub’s edge, but the tub also had to sit firmly on the floor. The tub’s edge-channel ended up narrower than a two by on edge, so I had to cut one down and notch the vertical two bys to hold it. In contrast, the wall mounted two bys went easy. Before we dropped the tub in, I carefully, anally, packed and secured insulation all around the outside of the tub. I told Karen her luxurious baths in her new house would stay hot for a long time by doing this extra finicky insulation work. Remember, we haven’t had a bath in nearly three years�"stinky! After we slid the tub in, I finished up by wiring the tub into the receptacle circuit. We haven’t figured out what would cover it yet, not to mention that we still had to plumb it.

Still, in the upstairs bathroom, I was especially proud of a mini-wiring project. All the ceilings were sloped in the upstairs including the bathroom. All bathrooms, by code, were required to have an exhaust fan. This proved a little difficult with the sloped ceiling, but not impossible for me. I bought an overhead light/fan/double heat lamp combo and mounted it up there in the trusses. I secured the piping and extended it outside through the wall. To make this monstrosity manageable in use, I installed a three, multiple position switch on the wall. With an unruly wad of wires running into this single box, actually one and half times the normal sized box, I wired up the switches. Now, at one switch we could dim the overhead light, operate the fan at different speeds, and turn on one or two heat lamp. How awesome am I ?

Karen, in the meantime, decided we needed stone walls outside to retain the dirt backfilling on the ravine side of the house. We had shored up the ravine grade itself but around the house was just a steep slope of dirt. She went on her own to the Harvey Gravel and Stone Pit to hand pick, load, and haul the stone for her project. To give her even more credit, she took a couple planks along to roll the rocks up into the bed of the truck. Holy smokes, some of the rocks were well over a hundred pounds! What a girl!

Well, she unloaded them and starting along the patio door, she worked out away from the house, pulling back the dirt and refilling after placing the stones. She picked some great looking granite rocks and fit each one carefully. Her hard labor cleaned up the patio area immensely.

 Meanwhile, after pulling rolls and rolls of electrical cable, moving receptacle and switch boxes around, and other final touches, I arranged for the rough electrical inspection. For some reason, I don’t have a written record of that thwarting inspection, but I remember it clearly. The Marquette County electrical code inspector was the most personable, understanding man on the code inspection office payroll, but that did not stop him from pointing out some wiring problems to save me from myself. Considering electrical safety in our home, I wouldn’t expect anything less.

I mentioned in the Second Year narration about how proud I was of my wiring and wiring diagrams. In fact, the inspector noticed and admired my tenacity and patience in securing the cable “by the book” and overall, the receptacles and switches were installed to code. However, according to the Marquette County Code Inspector, I found out the hard way that my new Black and Decker Wiring Handbook was either plain wrong, written for other lax code areas, or plainly outdated.

            Kitchen wiring, to partially explain the problem, is a huge electrical draw and is further complicated with the many countertop ground fault receptacles. My book suggested doubling the plugs on a four-wire cable instead of a three wire, with the red wire a “shared” wire between circuits. Not allowed, the inspector told me, and my stomach sank to my feet. Basically, the four wire cables I had pulled and secured so carefully couldn’t be used as I intended, turning the four wire cables into standard three-wire cables with the red wire snipped off on both ends. Because of this, two more three-wire cables were required for the kitchen. We had that row of recessed lights across the rear width of the kitchen, I explained earlier, and I pulled all the additional cable through the light box, through the fake beam over the hallway, then through the closet ceiling and utility room to the breaker box. Actually, in the end, that bundle of cables cleaned up nicely, looking impressive and neat hanging along the beam because I bought these cool plastic clamps that stacked and held up to six cables in perfect placement. Well, they looked nice until I hid them all.

Then, the other problems the inspector found: The washing machine and whirlpool tub required separate, isolated circuits even though they were only one-ten volts. I had them wired into the regular shared receptacle circuits. The tub required a separate ground fault interrupted circuit. Damn! I knew better that a body-submerging receptacle would require one. In addition to consider positively, the two-twenty circuit for the dryer was perfect, as well as all the armored wiring for the recessed lighting. Keep in mind none of the appliances were there in the house. My circuit breaker box was getting really, really crowded. Remember what I said about my pretty, neat color-coded wiring diagrams? Well, a few survived, some needed complete redesigning and others just got a few new cable runs. All the problems meant another inspection, which we passed easily with a couple additional tweaks on the spot. The good-natured inspector took it all in stride; we did as well.    

 Karen and I still had a concern over the splash from the impact of rain from the eaves twenty feet up along the outside of the house, even though we had pretty much solved it when we put the gravel bed around the perimeter. On the other hand, maybe Karen convinced me the answer was more artistic than functional. To finally solve the problem and provide a unique look to the house’s exterior, we needed something else. To get an appearance of a higher foundation and a buffer between the wood walls and the weather, we decided to put Cultured Stone around the base of the outside walls and up level to the windows’ tops.

Doing shopping via the phone book, we finally found a dealer of Cultured Stone�"road trip! We bought and hauled 23 boxes of Chardonnay Dressed Field Stone from Zoll’s Concrete Products in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The stone goes up by first screwing mesh wire over the Tyvek on the wall, then troweling an inch of mortar over the mesh before mortaring the individual stones in place. Karen and I worked long, hard hours, sorting, fitting, and putting the fake stones up that looked quite handsome when finished. I literally wore the skin off my fingertips while carefully finessing mortar between the stones. We wanted to rob a bank, but more painfully, my blood stayed there mixed in the house’s mortar. We used heavy-duty rubber gloves later in the process but wore through them too. We placed a new Susan B. Anthony dollar, a penny, and a quarter in the wet mortar between the stones on the prow front’s point. Putting up the stone was a nice, though long-winded touch to the house, but that stone building project had another interesting aspect, which I’ll explain later. We were far from finishing the house’s complete perimeter, but our fingers needed healing.

Working on the outside again felt invigorating and a bit reminiscent of our home’s early beginnings. Even though the house’s exterior still had Tyvek covering most of it, had most of the windows installed and the front stonework done, it looked nice, huge, and impressive despite the white plastic wrap.

In the summertime, you couldn’t see much of the house through the thick trees from the road, though in the winter, you could see more of the house, but it was far enough back to preclude any direct roadside stare downs. The southern orientation planning paid off. In the winter with the leaves off the trees and a low sun angle, the sun poured in those huge front windows helping to passively solar heat the house and filled the interior with sunny cheer. In the summer, the leaf canopy and overhanging prow roof shielded the interior from the hot sun, and the nearby ravine on the prevailing west wind flow kept the air cool and fresh. We felt good about our empirically built Yooper Schooner�"it was distinctly all ours and still all ours to finish.

       Still spot installing windows, the only solitary window installation we had help with was the eight-foot wide by four high glider for the master bedroom. Both end glider glass panels were cracked when we picked it up, and they had to be reordered. This oversized window overlooked the ravine, a beautiful sight to wake up to from the master bedroom. The ten-foot header for this huge window was daunting to build to say the least. Karen and I could not carry the window ourselves, so we asked Randy, the neighborhood handy man to give us a hand after we set the borrowed scaffolding up outside the rough opening. After wrestling this huge window up and into place, I was embarrassed to find this huge window had the worse fit of all the windows. Well, when you have witnesses… 

Throughout the house, the walls were roughed in, insulation was exposed in most walls, the electrical was roughed in, and the concrete slab was unpainted, so dust remained a major problem. In a rush, we finished the downstairs bedroom off in bare drywall. Despite the dust, we moved our essentials and bedding out of our trusty little polebarn room and into our empirical house, the Yooper Schooner. We finally joined our already long-term residents Cleo and Dyna. Now that was a milestone!

Leaving the empty room behind left me feeling a bit poignant, but I wanted to believe all along that we would get this far on our home�"eventually. Nevertheless, I would definitely miss making shadow characters with my fingers on the room’s ceiling late at night, while we snuggled in our love nest six feet off the floor.

 

 

Author's Note

Stick to the readings. I know much of my grammar needs work, but send me feedback on the content.

Reviews

[wondering]

amazing and yes Drywall the worst job of all unless you have been doing it your whole life then is is as easy as breathing, just ask those contractors and of course that is why they are all so well off. Good read, would buy the book and tell friends to read it.