The Yooper Schooner (Part 13)

We're closing in on finishing the house like those infamous spiral stairs and my major screw up. I worry about burning our woods to the ground! Part 13? Could this be the end?

Chapter 25 Many Bits and Pieces

 

            Once again, our financial situation grew tight without the little money I made while going to school and working that thankless, unrewarding security job. We still had plenty of work to do, bits and pieces to buy to finish the Yooper Schooner, not to mention that ever-looming home equity loan hanging out there. Then, of course insurance, electric and propane bills to pay, but in reality, using wood heat and frugal electric use, the utility bills remained miniscule. Karen thought about working to supplement my pension and offset her horse expenses.            

            She decided to take up housekeeping and quickly landed three good-paying (under the tax table) clients. She cleaned their houses top to bottom once a week and felt this type of job eliminated the dreaded office cubical environment and other daily drudgeries. Her clients loved her work.

Meanwhile, I picked and chose jobs around the house. We kept the “construction phase” five-step stairs in the back entrance all this time, and I decided we needed better. The old stairs wiggled, creaked, and squeaked when you stepped on them, and the landing didn’t quite reach the door’s threshold, so it remained a slight two-inch step or more accurately, a tripping hazard. Karen said she liked the stair’s squeak and creak because no one could sneak into the house. The stairs also lacked a code-required railing.

Straight-shot stairs should be a simple job considering the spirals and after everything else I had done. I built the old stairs using pre-cut stair risers from Menards, and that is why they didn’t quite fit because everything in the house was not the normal, standard application. The stair disassembly and removal was not as easy as taking a sledge and crowbar to them, no, because the plumbing supply lines and drain went through and hung from them. With careful sawing and prying, I took the stairs out piece by piece and left the lines propped up on scrap lumber.

Using the standby empirical method, I traced one of the old risers onto a big piece of cardboard. Easily enough, I added the amount of additional rise I needed divided onto each step and retraced this pattern on the cardboard. Well, that didn’t work out at all because the steps were too close together, steps too high and ended overall too high. Back to the drawing board.  I figured out that for the steps to work out, I needed another step�"oh, oh! One fact I didn’t mention before, the utility door was right there at the base of the stairs, maybe four inches back from the bottom step of the old stairs. The narrow door squeezed in the space measured only twenty-four inches wide because the code-enforcers didn’t think invalids or seniors would be going in the utility room so didn’t need the code-required entrance space, railings and so on, but I never knew what they thought about or based their code on.  The door became a genuine problem if I needed another step and after some contemplation, I determined I definitely did.

This so-called easy job became difficult because nothing ever came easy. I removed a little length from the landing, potentially making entering and exiting the door more precarious. That wasn’t enough. The code only allowed certain ranges of stair rise height, step width, toe-overhang, and so I had to keep all this in mind. I shaved fractions off each step’s depth that I could and still the bottom step stuck into the utility door’s opening. I sat there and pondered�"and pondered into the next day. I locked the door, so no one unannounced would step in, take the four-foot nosedive, and broke his or her neck. We used the patio door, and I endured a semi-sleepless night.

The next day, my cardboard cut out remained there leaning against the wall with the bottom step sticking into the utility room doorway. What the heck! It became the pattern because I could not come up with a solution. I already had lengths of two by twelve’s and cut the three risers from them versus the wiggly two of the construction stairs. I set them up and leveling them, I found the concrete floor was uneven back there.  

Cutting and sanding the stair riser bases, I trued them up. The rest went easy with crossed braces between the risers, thin plywood kick panels, and the steps made out of the now-trusty laminated strip planking. The landing proved just a bit wider than the planking even though I had decreased the size from before, but I solved this slight dilemma by carefully cutting the extra width needed from a spare piece of planking. Truing the cut edges with the sander and after a few tries, I glued the edges together and nailed in the entire landing. My homemade joint blended right in and the stairs proved rock steady. After a quick sand, I sealed them myself rather than ask Karen to do this unimportant task.

Now that the stairs were permanent, those ugly pipes on the ugly concrete wall needed hiding. The other concrete walls I had finished with one bys and quarter inch veneer, so the width of the wall didn’t vary more than a inch. This hallway wall had those hot and cold water pipes and a drainpipe that measured about an inch and three-quarters thick, and, AND, they sloped downward toward the floor near the stairs and utility room. I cut two by fours lengthwise until they were about two by two and a half inches then cut them for the length from floor to the top of the concrete wall. Empirically speaking, I spaced them out, numbered them, and put a Sharpie mark where the edge of the drainpipe touched the board. I took my fat hole saw and by eye bored holes through the sides of the boards on the Sharpie marks.

It took a few trial and errors to get the depth right so the board would slip over the pipe at the bored holes. The water supply lines hung above the drain pipe. To make room for the lines, I guessed at how much room they took up, sawed through the depth of the line’s thickness and then knocked out the piece with a wood chisel. Did I even mention the wood chisels? They actually belong to Karen, a Christmas present after carving Oscar, but I ended up using them everywhere to knock out wood chunks like this case or carve off edges of boards to make tight fits.

After drilling more anchor holes in the concrete, I screwed in the two by whatevers, cut pink board to fit around the pipes, remembering that the pipes were all on a slope requiring corresponding angled cuts. I air nailed the veneer over the majority of this hallway area being careful not to nail through the pipes that lay underneath. Feeling good about this cleanup, innovative work, I built a corner doghouse next to the kitchen where the hallway made the ninety-degree turn. My intention was to have a permanent bed where Bonnie could snuggle while keeping watch out the back door for intruders or out into the front of the house to make sure we were not sneaking a snack. She had somehow become a champion four-legged moocher.

It was a cute inside doghouse, complete with a rounded top entrance though Bonnie did not care for it all that much preferring to stay in her favorite first spot there by the unfinished spiral stairs, along the stone-fronted counter in the sun, or tucked under the hot wood stove. At night, Bonnie would lie on top of our covers, but we grew paranoid about moving our legs near her as she slept. I guess she thought there were creatures under the covers, and she would jump up to all fours and lunge at our unfortunate legs, biting oh so hard through the covers and comforter! However, we had to laugh in the morning at her playing dead bug. Bonnie would be lying on her back with her four sticky legs reaching straight for the ceiling. What a strange dog!

Karen did her thing and painted the remainder of the concrete floor. In the kitchen, she painted a tan base coat and then carefully applied a red/brown design with a rubber stamp in lines and rows. After the stamp process, she enhanced the stamp design with hand-painted decorations. The finished concrete simulated a floor tile design. In the hallway, starting at the base of the big Art Deco tree on the floor of the Great Room, Karen extended the roots and painted realistic steppingstones down the hallway. After this, she fought with the center hallway drywall that kept popping nails. I had given up with it, but she fought on, eventually winning with some additional screws and super hard filler.

In the meantime, my father informed us that he had cancer. We wondered if we should go visit him, but my relationship with him was never the best and our last reunion proved very un-heartfelt. We, rather I, put off a visit.

            In the previous year, we helped our neighbors Jim and Suzy build their indoor arena. We had a third of a barn, sort of an outdoor arena, and our hay stored over in the polebarn. The third-of-a-barn needed finishing, and no one offered to help. I had not sufficiently planned ahead, imagine that, when I built the first section, so now it required a little finagling to get started on the remaining sections. There would be four lengthwise wall sections, two outsides and two insides. These walls divided the barn into thirds, the two outside lean-to sections and a high center. The lack of forethought created a problem because we already had that one outside wall, which was fine, and an inside wall that was not so fine. This wall with its support posts only rose as high as the lean to roof, but now the center section that shared this support wall had to rise three feet higher.

To solve this dilemma, we dug down beside the existing poles (which were already concreted underground) and doubled those up with longer poles to reach the necessary heights for the center’s roof. This worked all right and looked okay too, but on the opposite side, we didn’t have any existing poles, so I put in double poles anyway, just to make it look symmetrical. Doing the job this way cost more money and took more work, but in the end I wouldn’t be able to live with double poles on one side and singles on the other. Karen and I came up with a suitable answer for the doubles if anyone asked why the center section was soooo over-engineered. It was for all that weight of the hayloft above that center section, the snow load, and so on and so forth. Shhhhh! (finger to lips) symmetry just looked better to me, and I couldn’t live it otherwise!       

            The rest of the barn went slowly but smoothly with more holes to dig, poles to erect, cross bars to nail and T-111 to sheathe the sides. “Tee one-eleven” looked better installed on the barn because when finished it looked like barn boards. I nailed all of the crossbars to the poles with huge ring shank polebarn nails including the two by tens that ran between the double-poles, overhead in the center section, now main aisle, becoming hayloft floor joists. Heavy plywood went on top of those so we could work up there and after become the hayloft. I built roof rafters on a ridgepole, a first attempt at roof construction from scratch. I covered the knee walls with plain plywood siding and T-111 to finish the front and back. White sheet metal went on the barn roof versus the pewter gray of the house. The white roof and trim contrasted well with the real barn red paint.

Karen and I felt like combatants in our own neighborhood. Every morning without fail, when we stepped out the door the farmer banged on some metal or immediately started a noisy vehicle and revved it up. We wondered how he could see us through the trees. We became ultra paranoid over it, looking for those spy cameras in our trees. Meanwhile, Karen had made fast friends with Suzy and rode one her horses. The problem across the street escalated when Karen began walking to Suzy’s. The farmer would zoom out his driveway with some kind of clunky, noisy vehicle and see how close he could drive to Karen. When he brushed her with a side mirror, she began to dread the walks and talked about needing a gun. I didn’t say anything because I had no encounter until he nearly ran me down one day as I jogged. We did not understand his aggressiveness, but I suppose, we should have…

Luckily, the prevailing wind flow prevented him from spreading manure downwind from us on a regular basis, but when the wind shifted our way, we could predict a fresh stinky coating of manure for our benefit. We had our words those couple years ago, and I tried making amends, but apparently, there was more attitude on his side than he let on. We remained baffled by his actions.   

            Overall, the Yooper Schooner began looking real fine and instead of needing work wherever we looked, it was neat and finished wherever we turned. I mentioned mudding and sanding ceiling drywall as an overwhelmingly nasty job, and we had all that drywall up in the master bedroom ceiling with the seams and screws exposed. We put our heads together, and Karen started the first step in solving the problem. She painted the ceiling sky blue and sponged realistic fair weather clouds here and there. After that, I stained and sealed many lengths of plain two and a half inch flat molding. We then put the molding up over the drywall seams and rows of screws. Completed, it resembled a giant skylight with dark stained window frames and a blue-sky view through simulated glass panels. Visitors commented positively on the ceiling’s appearance, but asked why we would want to go through all that work. Ha! It was sooo much, much better than mudding and sanding the drywall by a long shot!   

            Seeing the upstairs neared completion, at least all the drywall and painting was done, we finally decided to finish the loft floor. Recall that the loft and bedroom had the pine planking exposed, and it was quite dry with more than full share of dents, scratches, and gouges. We rented a huge, heavy orbital sander. The machine weighed a ton, but step-by-step, Karen and I hoisted it up the stairs, proving the unfinished spirals were very sturdy indeed.

We started sanding the floor with sandpaper as course as driveway gravel�"ten grit, I believe. The machine pounded and bounced so much it shook the house, and we had to wear hearing protection. The dust went into the air and down through the cracks to the kitchen and bedroom�"everywhere. In a few places, the boards’ ends didn’t match too well, so I hit with them with the belt sander to speed things up. After sanding the floor four times in steps of finer paper, we deemed it smooth enough. The floor looked so much better sanded smooth, exposing the fresh wood surface. We vacuumed everything several times and wiped the floor with tack cloths to get up the last of the sanding residue. Karen performed her specialty and sealed them with polyurethane. She used a sponge applicator and carefully applied the sealer along the length of every single board. It was gorgeous, but being a floor, it required a second coat. A day later, we fine-sanded the entire floor by hand. Karen put on the second coat, and if we thought the first coat was gorgeous, we were without words after the second coat dried!        

            As temperatures cooled and autumn changes colored the leaves in the surrounding woods, Karen researched and diagnosed the lameness issue with Kate the horse. She suffered from a muscle disease (EPSM) that could be relieved somewhat by a special high fat diet. Even though she was in pain, it still didn’t explain why this huge horse stared across the street, all day, everyday in fear of something unseen over there.

The annual chore of firewood making grew easier as time went on because I always had the winter’s wood requirement in mind. Throughout the year, I would cut dead standing trees or eliminate the doubled (twin) trees in the area around the house and barns. In the fall though, I would do my stacking out behind the house between the trees. From experience over the previous years, filling these gaps with split wood to about shoulder high, equaled about eight cords. The nice thing about living in the woods was that if it turned out a miserably cold winter, plenty of firewood, albeit green wood, stood close by.

My electrician days almost spent, I cleaned up loose ends in that department. The circuit breaker box remained a rat’s nest of wiring. Wires came down in bundles from above from the closet, some came from the right powering the bathroom, bedroom, and Great Room, from the left for the outside and back hallway lights, and finally a bundle overhead came from the kitchen routed through that fake beam over the center hallway.

 To solve the wires’ rat nesting problem, I screwed plywood on the wall around the box and one by one routed the wires through bored holes. Every wire, I cut carefully, then stapled, and routed neatly inside the box. Some of the wires I fixed while turning off that breaker, but others I had to wire with all the power off and install by lantern light because of the number of wires requiring moving simultaneously. I painstaking shortened and pulled all the wires taut, re-doing all the wires that didn’t lay quite right. The ultra neat job at the completion proved worth the effort. The wires were clamped tightly in the box’s holes, and the wires lay tidily in groups with neat ninety-degree bends. It proved to be one of those jobs that needed fussing at, even considering that I put the breaker box cover on for the very first and last time covering up all that time-consuming but perfect, gratifying work.

One other electrical job that I had put off was wiring the recessed lighting in the laundry room. I had screwed up a single bulb fixture just to provide light when the washer and dryer went in. The recessed lights would go in between the ceiling joists like the two banks of lights in the kitchen. Maybe this was overkill, having recessed lights in the laundry room, especially considering, I did not enjoy dealing with the armored cable, but I was an old hand at this now.

Mounting the lights always proved tedious because of needing to fit cross braces between the joists for the lights’ supports, and the fact-armored cables were stiff and dangerously sharp. With the lights up, I began wiring the armored jumpers to hook the three lights together. The armoring on the cables had to be snipped off with wire cutters, and then the spiral waste slipped off the wires�"easy enough.

My mind was not on the chore, somewhere else, maybe chasing pine martens, making firewood, or something. I stripped the wire’s insulation with the tool for the job, and one wire was up close to the light behind a crossbar. I wiggled around, clamped on the wire and pulled like usual, except my right hand slipped and my index knuckle jammed into that razor sharp armoring.

Whenever I hurt myself, like the many scrapes and punctures I encountered, I just couldn’t look, but in this case, the pain told me the damage done. I looked and saw the flap of skin hanging and the blood pouring all over immediately. Usually, it took a minute for my blood to run after an injury. I ran to the bathroom, reeled off a bunch of TP, and wrapped my knuckle. It hurt like hell. Doctor Karen washed, examined it, and said it needed stitches. I never get stitches, and adamantly said it didn’t need them. I wrapped up my knuckle with a dry washcloth and secured it with a few lengths of duct tape. I went back to work and finished the recessed lights, but the knuckle really ached and went numb. When I took the cloth off later, it began bleeding again. I thought I should have gotten stitches, but I didn’t say so out loud.      

            To end this already too long account, I went a week and noticed the pain hadn’t subsided all that much. The bleeding had stopped after two days, but a new lump developed in the middle of the back of my hand. I went to the walk in clinic and they x-rayed my hand. They told me I had cut one of the two tendons; luckily, it was only one because if both were cut, my finger wouldn’t have worked anymore. The lump was the tendon that had snapped back into my hand like a rubber band. They couldn’t do anything about it since I had waited too long, and the bottom line that I now admit: I didn’t listen to Karen.

            Halloween came and we prepared with chocolate fare this year for the first time. We re-treated the neighbor kids and the costumed adults from down the street, who were not all there.

            Christmas came and like years past, we went down into our swamp and dragged up a balsam tree. Bonnie loved these trips when we hauled trees because she wanted to act as chipper/shredder and tear the branches off the tree. The balsam wasn’t anywhere near the size of trees of the past, but decorated and lit up, it put a nice festive glow in the Great Room. Also a Christmas tradition since the second year, Karen wrapped those long suspended logs under the loft with strings of white lights that added to the glow. Returned due to popular demand was the moose we always put out by the street and lit up. It had gotten a bit rotten over the past years, so we reinforced him, Karen covered him with fresh cedar, added a new blanket of lights, and we hauled him to the roadside. In the pitch dark, the moose threw a glow for yards around and illuminated the trees above. He looked especially nice when a light snowfall covered the lights.

            We celebrated with a little post-Christmas and New Year cheer, but we couldn’t say we were happy. We took stock and the Yooper Schooner looked mighty fine with only a few major jobs yet to finish, but we wondered if we wanted to stay here with the constant noise and harassment from across the street. We lived everyday stressed and unhappy, somewhat taking a cue from Big Kate, the paranoid horse.

 

 

Chapter 26 Still Stairing

 

            In this New Year, worldwide aid poured in to help the 11 Asian countries devastated by the huge tsunami. No aid came to Karen and me, so we decided to drive off and look around for real estate. Don’t get me wrong, I loved our land since we had parked on the road side back in the eighties, when I sprinted into the woods and took it all in awe. I still walked the trails twice a day with Bonnie. I loved our hills and dales, ravines and hillocks, swamps, and groves. Nevertheless, we had changed since the 1980’s and changed even more since we began building. Marquette didn’t seem as friendly; the old Yooper charm had disappeared. The fact that we went from tree hugging to agriculture people became the strongest factor for change, and we could never farm our rolling property, though if I could have only moved our forth-three acres…

            Therefore, we checked online for real estate or just drove around. Marquette County didn’t have much in farming-type land as demonstrated by the neighbor. We saw primarily residential property or maybe a house with hunting land pretty much what we had without a farmer across the street. We even scouted out toward Sault Saint Marie, which surprised us because it appeared much like the Midwest, not many trees and flat. The Lake Superior lake effect snow around that area is notoriously heavy. Well, if we ever moved away the house would have to be completed and to complete it a couple big jobs remained, the spiral stairs and my major mistake with the front windows. I didn’t mention that before, did I? Well, I’ll get to it later just the same as fixing said mistake.  

            Our little Dakota started to limp along, and we thought we could afford a new truck. In midwinter, we bought a new Chevy Silverado. The dealer had found for us from Lower Michigan. It was a work truck with standard transmission, snowplow package, and heavy-duty suspension. No cushy luxury trucks for us!

            Karen still worked cleaning houses to help fund Isaiah and Katherine Hepburn. When she got brave, she walked down and rode with Suzy. After all that time we spent helping build Jim and Suzy’s arena, I didn’t feel welcome enough or had a real need to visit them.

            As the winter began to warm once again and the snow began to melt, I eyed up that huge brush pile in the ravine. The lower layer of brush, stumps, and leaves was now approaching seven years old. I never threw any construction materials in there, but most of the debris was tinder dry despite the layer of melting snow on top. Needing some excitement, I decided to light the pile off. With a wad of paper and box of matches, I made my way to the bottom of the pile and underneath. With one match that tinder dry brush took off and fast! The breeze rushed up the ravine into the fire and pushed the flames through the pile in minutes! The snow on top didn’t slow it one bit, and even though my plan was to shovel snow on the fire if it needed control. I didn’t bother because we had to back off twenty-thirty feet. The maples that circled the ravine began to smoke, and I worried they might catch fire. With the rush of wind coming up the ravine, the flames rose in a maelstrom of red-hot pillar above those trees, and it grew! The trees’ bark began to burn with the fire rising up the trucks, only on one side of course. I really worried about the fire spreading to the rest of the woods. This bonfire of untold dimensions though, only burned huge for about thirty minutes before it began to die down, much to our relief. Three in the group of about dozen trees burnt far enough to break off, but by this point with the fire subsiding only the stumps and log pieces remained in the pile burning. The stumps burned into the next day, and the area remained hot for six days! I think I was cured of needing any more excitement after that episode.

With time to think, I decided to take the “bull by the horns” so to speak, and tackle the final step (sorry) in completing spiral stairs. The first part of this phase proved time-consuming but in an empirically, engineering point of view, easy. We already had the basis for the protective panels around the spiral stairs in the example of the loft lift gate. Remember, this had the steel frame with screen welded in, all painted black. I would continue this design by repeating it on each stair step. I still didn’t have an idea for the railing, mind you.

 First, I took square tubing balusters, welded on tabs, and bolted them to each stair support. Then, I mocked up a trial panel with cardboard. I followed the Marquette County code in height and the allowable gaps in stair enclosures. At one time, I really considered just putting vertical balusters all around, but following the code, these have to be less than four inches apart, appearing very much like prison bars. I asked the inspectors about the four inches. Why? The answer I got was so children couldn’t get their heads stuck in there and strangle. Less than four inches? I don’t think premature newborns would be on the stairs, and they’re the only babies with heads small enough to fit through four inch gaps. Whatever. I never argued with the inspectors, and so that is how I built the panels following the code rules.

Making sure the gaps on sides and bottoms were safely within the four-inch spacing, I transferred the pattern to steel. The panels had to have an angled top to match the future railing, but the remainder was rectangular. With mounting tabs on sides, top and bottom, I built this first out of flat one-inch steel, sandwiching the screen in between. I welded the first trial panel too well because when I found the angle on top was off a little, the welding proved too tough to disassemble and adjust the angle. After modifying my cardboard and welding up a second one, the first one went in the scrap heap. After double-checking the fit, angle, and gaps, I made thirteen of them and considering there were eight pieces of strap steel in each one, my right-hacksawing arm grew sore. It did not do my sore elbow any good. 

After installing the panels with four bolts each, the stairs appeared more like a spiral-tube, especially when I painted them black. It looked downright handsome. Still having no idea for the railing, I grasped, even cutting down a small tree and attempting to wrap it around the balusters with rope. In the process of tying the tree bowed, it slipped out of the ties and bashed against the wall just missing the big side window and gouging the wall!

We were disconnected from relatives and what once used to be home. My father’s cancer grew progressively worse and talking to him on the phone became difficult because of his dosing on heavy painkillers. My sister from Florida went to New York to visit him, and my sisters asked when I would come to see him, now in his final days according to the doctors. I decided that we had too much work to do around the house to visit.

            While I welded and fitted all those stair panels, Karen sanded the finish off the patio, bedroom, and bathroom doors. She couldn’t stand looking at the damage any longer. The doors had long deep gouges from our summertime visitors’ dog suffering separation anxiety and going hysterical when its master left it alone in our house. We muttered under our breaths whenever we thought about the mess the dog made, especially on the bathroom door where Karen had painted her signature vines under thick, shiny sealer.

            Karen needed a break one weekend and went for a horse trail ride with some friends. She borrowed a horse named Brie. Brie was a bomb-proofed mild-mannered horse that could be ridden on trails anywhere. Brie’s owner told Karen she considered selling her. Meanwhile, Kate had her own problems with the muscle disease, so she would have mood swings, generally making her unreliable as a riding horse. Then, consider Kate’s paranoid staring across street until she’d break and bolt running around like Satan himself had attempted to mount her. Another horse besides donkey Isaiah might be good with added safety in numbers. Karen set up the purchase and delivery with a caveat of a guaranteed return policy, which the owner agreed to wholeheartedly.

            Shiny black Brie came in a trailer, and the nosy farmer stopped on the street to stare while we unloaded Brie. Over a day or two Brie fit in with the other two guys in the turnout by the house with Kate keeping close watch as usual to across the street. Before Brie came, we usually walked Kate and Isaiah down to the meadow pasture and after a few days of acclimatizing thought Brie would be fine. She acted fine for three days, and then on the fourth day, Kate could not care less about across the street anymore. Brie took over watch horse duties keeping a wary eye on the perimeter and across the street. We just thought that Brie had become the alpha horse and being lookout became her duty. On the fifth day, we heard the horses running. I ran over through our woods, and a figure ran and disappeared into the woods across the street. Brie stood in the turnout corner wide-eyed and frantic. She reared and spun repeatedly. Her coat foamed from perfuse sweating, and she was terrified even though Kate didn’t seem to care. We couldn’t turn Brie out over there again because she would just go crazy. She then developed a lameness issue and after three weeks, she went back to her owner, who by the way, didn’t return all the money we paid for her. Horse trading and crazy neighbors made us sick, probably pushing us closer to the edge of something in our future.

            My father died that late, hot, humid summer. I felt confused over what I felt and really wondered if Karen, and I needed to go to the funeral. My sisters convinced me that I should not necessarily for the corpse who was once my father, but I should come to reconnect with relatives and friends. We went. Perhaps in a strange way his death added another excuse to move. (Read the short story, Three Belated Father and Son Reunions).

            By the time we returned to our property and the empirical house, the two big main jobs to finish the house remained the spiral stairs railing and the infamous front window mistake. I suppose an explanation of the front window mistake now becomes warranted. It stemmed from a lack of focus and forethought back in the second year when we put those first two big windows in the front prow wall. In my point of view, rough openings proved relatively easy to calculate and frame up, and the only incorrect rough opening kin the entire house was that huge wide window in the master bedroom. We had a witness for that one, but otherwise all the other windows fit, some tighter than others, but all slid into place nevertheless.

 However, window depths (thicknesses) proved a problem in the front prow wall. I am not one-hundred percent sure why the problem arose, but all eight windows were the wrong depth. If they had been too thick, it would’ve been easily remedied with a quick trim to the window frame. No, these eight windows were too shallow, so since two years ago when we finished the drywall, the frames of the windows remained sunk in below the drywall surface about a half an inch. If the one wall that had fallen, almost killing Ben, proved too thick and the other fine, I would believe the wall was misshapen or bent, but both sides were equally wrong. On the other hand, maybe I ordered the wrong depth with the first two windows and propagated the miss-measurement to the remaining six big windows. I failed to mention this earlier because of embarrassment over my huge mistake.

To initially calculate the window depth before a wall existed in any form, I had to figure the thickness of the finished wall including stud thickness, outside sheathing and drywall thickness, a not too difficult procedure except those two last measurements can vary depending on materials used. Neighbor Dan, who was building the “high-dollar, professionally built home” up the street noticed (I never point out my own mistakes, and God knows I made plenty) and, he mentioned that he had to pull and reinstall some of his windows because they didn’t fit tight the first time. Well, I ran into that too here and there throughout the house, but they were not as bad as all these front windows because I already had tried readjusting them.

I tried retro-fixes like narrow shims on the window frames, so moldings would fit flush, but you could see these shims. They proved difficult to manufacture and install. I also tried cutting the moldings’ backs in the table saw but that proved tedious and dangerous. I attempted trimming a portion off the moldings with the power planer, also a dangerous and tedious proposition. Worried over losing a finger or two, I went ahead and tried one method on the left window and the other method on the right. They stayed that way for months to see if I could live with either one or managed enough ambition to find another solution to rectify the infamous big window mistake. Meanwhile, I worked on all the other windows in the house one at a time, carefully measuring, cutting, and finishing the moldings that pretty much went bang, bang, right into place. Finishing the window moldings felt like closure for the house, but geez, there were a lot of them with hundreds of feet of moldings.

Another job that needed attention was the ravine retaining wall. It had held well over the past three years, but admittedly, it was ugly. I had made it relatively quickly with rough-cut aspen planks, scraps, and nailed them together. The unacceptable part was that it leaned out away from the bank it was meant to keep in place. I pulled the whole wall out and burned it right there on the steep bank. Then, I dug the bank back to a suitable slope into solid ground and threw all the dirt up on top of the bank. I purchased thirty-eight used railroad ties, a few lengths of rebar and boxes of lag bolts and polebarn nails.

I began by digging a level, flat platform by cutting down into the slope, lower than the old wall, so a tie would end up at a solid ground level. I used the chainsaw to bevel cut the ends so the ties would more or less follow the slopes’ contours. Then with an inch step back on the next layer of ties, I started up the bank, securing the ties and backfilling dirt in behind them as I went. I ran out of ties before reaching the top, so purchased a dozen more to finish the job in a week and a half. It was solid and a beautiful landscaping professional job with the line of ties following nice smooth bows and crooks around the ravine’s bank and a couple trees.

Transitioning into more of a fine wood carpentry trend, I built a corner shelf unit in the kitchen opposite the refrigerator. This proved necessary in a sense, because I had to hide the kitchen sink’s vent pipe that stuck way out when it exited from under the counter and over the concrete wall up to the point it turned back to disappear within the wall. To solve this in with corner shelf unit, I made a false back on the bottom shelf to cover the pipe, then above, the shelves extended back into the corner. The false-backed corner wasn’t noticeable unless you studied and compared the sizes of the shelves. I built a wall length shelf close to the ceiling across the back to display knick-knacks, but this too, hid the vent pipe that ran along the ceiling. The stained and sealed shelves looked nice on the otherwise plain wall. 

            With the window problem on the hard drive back burner for now, I sat on the spiral stairs watching the leaves fall outside through those nice, big ill-fitting windows. It proved difficult to keep my mind off those problems, but it usually helped to focus on something else that used my full attention and hard drive space, like where I sat, on the spiral stairs with no railing! I always remembered what Ben had suggested about how to construct a railing in the Master Woodworker magazine.

            We progressed with some drywall in those areas we hadn’t worried about up to this point like inside closets and the utility room. We went through our third five-gallon pail of mud, so made another trip to Menards. While I was there, I purchased several lengths of three-sixteenths by two-inch pine molding strips and two more wood clamps.

Empirically messing around, I clamped various combinations of the molding on to the balusters’ tops. The moldings seemed to work well for this experiment because they allowed the necessary bending both around and down, where other materials wouldn’t bend two directions simultaneously. You see, the challenge in the railing construction came with the curve around the big tube, but at the same time rose, so the materials had to bend two ways at once, something thicker wood and steel would not do. I tried various ways of installing, one, two or three strips on the outside, inside or on top of the balusters. On top surely wouldn’t work.

Finally, on a whim, I pondered more on Ben’s lamination suggestion. Moldings never come in exact length anyway, so end seams lining up weren’t a problem. I gathered up five or six moldings together and clamped them on a baluster but instantly understood why the Master Woodworker had a hundred or so clamps to do the job but another ah, ha option arose! Another one of my building tenets:

On a extremely daunting and unusual problem, the final solution usually does not present itself no matter how long I thought about it until I tried something�"anything�"everything on the problem!

But, in truth, I found�"Sometimes you should listen to your children…

            I lined the strips up, clamped them together and cut a cavity underneath the potential railing for the baluster top to fit into, then drilled through inner and outer moldings and the baluster to install a carriage bolt that acted like a clamp. This could work, I reflected. Buying up more than enough moldings, bolts, and glue, I started at the top making sure none of the molding ends ended together.

At first, the stack of six molding proved a little unruly to handle, and then slobbering glue on each length added a critical time constraint and a huge sticky mess aspect. Working from top down, that first bundle proved most difficult because after that section, I always had to use less than six moldings, but they all proved labor intensive like I needed four more hands. The bolts went every two feet on a baluster with clamps holding in between. After a full day’s work, it was completed, all glued up and solid, albeit rough especially along the top edge where the individual moldings didn’t perfectly match up.

All those bolts through the moldings holding them together remained because of course they had holes in them. I cut the threaded ends off flush and filed off the sharp edges. The uneven railing top I solved by running the trusty belt sander on it, then the orbital sander, and then finished fine-sanding the railing by hand. After staining and sealing, the railing looked gorgeous because of the various tones of wood laying side by side in all those strips. After so many years of doing without stairs or using them dangerously, the spiral stairs were now finished and a joy to walk around and down while running your hand down that highly polished railing.

The world continued to turn three-hundred and sixty degrees almost like a trip up the stairs, which in fact was only three-hundred and fifteen degrees. At this point, we had all the wall building, drywalling, painting, electrical, and plumbing completed, but I still didn’t arrange any final inspections for the house. We took stock as Christmas closed in. Jaded and tired, we decided that in the spring we would put the house on the real estate market. The market appeared quite strong with suburban houses selling well and unique houses with acreage rare and expensive.

Christmas proved very uneventful, and for the first year since we moved there, we celebrated, if you can call it that, sadly without a Christmas tree. Our lives, home, and Christmas felt empty. As the year came to a close, Karen and I reflected, now considering the Yooper Schooner, our empirically hand-built home, only as a commodity�"how distressingly sad.

 

 

Reviews

[wondering]

Yes you are a story teller, I think you need to losen up and let life in. sounds like you stress too much. You much more enjoy the pleasures of life. I like this part, it is the wrapping up stage I guess.