The Yooper Schooner (Final)

Yes, readers, this is the end. It may seem anticlimatic and all, but this is exactly how we felt about our home's progression. and the reasons, or lack of reasons, we left it.

Final Decisions, Details, Days, and Departure

 

          Beginning this year, I pondered the window mistake but worked on other details needing attention too. One detail entailing the entire house was the lack of moldings covering the bottom of the walls. I was extremely careful when putting up the drywall, but some still had significant (half-inch) wall-floor gaps that required hiding. A detail more obvious than the moldings, the spiral stairs needed a little more work like finishing the base. This task could have been done a long time ago.

The circular base of the stairs or the first step, actually the same thing, didn’t have an acceptable covering on it, just the bare cat-clawed, dog-chewed plywood. Under the plywood’s edge, the ends of the two by sixes remained exposed from when we stood up the finished log. I solved that latter problem with more of our now favorite wall covering, pine veneer. By cutting it in long lengths and wrapping it around the base, I glued and air nailed it onto the two by sixes. For the top surface, nothing thick such as boards of any kind could be used to maintain the proper distance between steps. On a fluke, we spotted some imitation wood vinyl tiles at Best Buy that would fit in with our on going textures and shades. It went against our adamant natural wood stance, but we were running on a self-imposed timetable. These tiles went on easily but produced a lot of scrap because of the circular edges of the spiral’s base. To cover the two adjoining cut edges between the horizontal tiles and vertical veneer, I wrapped it with a flexible piece of molding.

            In a little more than a week, the upstairs closet went from a dusty, cluttered, unfinished storage room to an elegant walk-in master closet. Inside, there was the raised two-foot high, four by six feet rectangle section. The reason for this raised section proved necessary when building the backdoor entry in Year Two in providing the headroom needed when you went came in from outside and down the entry stairs. We liked the tiles from the stair’s base so much that we decided they would work well to finish the closet’s floor. I installed tiles on both the top of the raised and the floor sections. I covered the two vertical sides with our favorite pine veneer. The closet received a two-wall wrap-around closet rod and storage shelf. I air-nailed nice-smelling tongue and groove cedar to the ceiling and finished it by trimming out the trapdoor to the roof crawl space. The plumbing vents from the kitchen ran along two walls of the closet, and the main sewer vent rose from floor to ceiling, and because they didn’t look all that bad; I left them exposed and painted them glossy black.

The dumbwaiter Karen wanted so badly from her initial dreams would never come to be. The dumbwaiter’s framing both downstairs and up was done and covered, but inside the shaft, the framing was still exposed. Paneling covered the mini-elevator channel nicely, and I built doors for the bathroom and laundry accesses, thereby completing work on the dumbwaiter. 

            Even though it was still winter, Karen and I knew spring approached and considered our schemes around the place. Through one of her clients, Karen spoke with Kristine about selling our house. Kristine worked for ReMax of Marquette and promised to stop by to set up the preliminaries for selling our house.

            With that in mind, I knew the problem windows had to be finished somehow with moldings, and I estimated one-hundred, thirteen feet of moldings were required. Almost all the other windows in the house had moldings on them by this time, but those trial pieces on the prow front still didn’t look all that acceptable despite being up there for months. The moldings installed with shims, I decided would never look good, while the other moldings that I trimmed off the backs appeared somewhat better but had gaps. I pressed on with that idea knowing that the empirical method would most likely provide plenty of waste.

            Beginning with the window moldings pieces already tacked up, I took them out to the snow-covered patio, plugged in the planer, and “went to town” grinding on the molding, the shavings just flying. It proved not such a good idea to “go to town,” because I cut too deep and made the moldings paper-thin in places. These pieces went into the stove’s kindling pile. I miter cut four more pieces. This time I held each board up and scribbled with a pencil an eyeball’s worth of trimming. Back outside, I buzzed away at them. Back inside, I tried them�"not enough. I scribbled another line. Back outside, I trimmed some more. Back inside, I tried them, and the moldings fit satisfactorily. Now, if you closely examined the molding, you’d notice that the molding was uneven tilted out a little from the wall surface. Where the molding rested on the drywall, it was thin, and the narrow portion overlapping the window was thick. A vigorous trimming fitted the remaining three, traveling outside at least twice, sometimes three or four times each to get the fit correct. Talk of empirical methods! I had a path of melting snow coming into the house. I wondered if by the time I finished this job, I would wear out the patio door and another hand planer seeing I had burned one out years ago.

 The woodstove remained blazing because of the door opening and closing so many times and letting all the cold, damp air in. Those blasted moldings took me two weeks to complete, though boy, did they look good finished with all those raw drywall edges covered up. Years had gone by without window moldings, and now we were selling the house and getting around to finishing it. Sad.

There remained a few jobs to frantically finish. The kitchen didn’t have any wall cabinets except the corner and wall length shelf units I built last fall. I built a plate and cup rack for over there kitchen sink and a shelf unit on the wall above where the microwave and Mr. Coffee resided. Using quality pine boards and dowels, I assembled this with the air nailer and carpenters glue. I spaced the dowels according to the thickness of our plates and saucers with bars across the bottoms instead of shelves. The drying plate rack idea actually came from the drying racks the Spanish built in over kitchen sinks, a very efficient idea we had originally stored in our dream home database. Cups hung on racks along the sculpted bottom mounting board.       

          Karen took some pictures of the house to incorporate into a brochure to sell the house. Kristine came over to fill out the real estate forms and took some house pictures herself. I continued installing moldings. One aspect that bothered me about selling the house was the fact we never pursued the electrical, plumbing, and final inspections. We had all the required inspections up to date on the foundation, sewer, plumbing, electrical, mechanical and framing but never coordinated on these final inspections. We asked Kristine about this and she said that houses sold all the time without final inspections. The fact just had to be acknowledged on the seller’s statement. Fine, so we did. The property listed on April 1, and we hoped we weren’t fools.

            With time growing short, we contacted movers but still planned to haul heavy things like tools, lawn mower, and four-wheeler on the trailer. Trouble though the trailer had gotten quite decrepit over the years. In a week, Karen and I chain sawed the floorboards off, repaired damage, sanded the medal parts, painted them blue, and installed new sealed floorboards. It looked new and after packing the wheel bearings, it was road-ready.

            A couple families looked at the property but maybe the fact that the house only had two bedrooms, and the spiral stairs or perhaps, the asking price turned people off. One big family wanted the house because of the hilly terrain and wanted to build a luge run, one thing I had considered early on. A young couple fell in love with the house and property and put an offer on it. They had an inspector look over the house, and he commented positively on many of the features and the quality of work done. He even said some of the ideas we built in were so innovative he had never seen them before and wished he knew about them for incorporating into his own house! That made us feel hopeful. The potential buyers followed through by agreeing to buy.

            We arranged movers for our furniture, a temporary home for the horses, and readied for the move with yard sales and giveaways. I advertised the yard sale and included that there were “freebies.” I don’t know how many people came asking only to see the freebies. One old Yooper got testy with me because all the free stuff was gone, the nerve of me!

            I advertised the old yellow clunky John Deere tractor for months. Two husbands of Karen’s horse friends said they might be interested. When I didn’t hear anything and we approached ten days of leaving, I contacted them. They each said that they didn’t want to buy it because they thought the other guy wanted it, but now, neither of them wanted it. Tell the truth in the first place, huh?  

            Kate and Isaiah moved out and stayed at stables in Ishpeming until we found a new home for them and us. The cats, Cleocatra and Dynamite moved to new homes. Cleo had been with us for twenty years, but we just couldn’t live with the cats in the truck with Bonnie the blue dog. Bonnie acted confused sometimes with all the activity, mad other times wanting desperately to bite someone, or she left, going into seclusion. She didn’t understand our emotions�"we didn’t either.

With three days to go, Suzy’s father expressed interest in the clunky tractor, and almost giving it away, I drove it down to Jim and Suzy’s house. I said goodbye to the old unreliable beast of a tractor. Our furniture moved out on May 26, and for the next couple of days, we vacuumed, dusted, mopped, and slept on the floor. Bonnie, at least, was having a good time sleeping on top of our sleeping bags. Bonnie loves night-night time no matter where it is especially if she can sleep on top of her warm humans.

On one of those intense cleaning days, Karen sprayed the Ultra Granite sink with some sort of cleaner we used all around, maybe it was Windex, and left it on the sink for a while. When she returned, the sink had turned a sickly dark gray where she sprayed it. She rinsed the sink, she wiped it down, and the stain wouldn’t come off. We imagined a last minute delay because the sink was destroyed, stained forever, and we had to pay or replace it! What a mess. Armed with scrubbies and some other scouring cleaner, we scrubbed and scrubbed. With a lot more hard work, it finally came completely clean, whew!

I swept out the polebarn and threw away the rest of my precious collected junk. With a deep breath, I buried my friends of the home building battle: the seam-split suede combat boots, two holey pairs of BDU pants, and the gooey field jacket in a shallow, unmarked grave behind the house. The tore up sneakers had been long gone in the trash. I left a couple pieces of furniture and the electric heater that kept us warm those months that weren’t so cold in the polebarn room. I left my barbell set, which was a mistake because we could’ve put those on the trailer too.  I could use the exercise now as I write.

***    

            The day we signed away the Yooper Schooner proved sad, and the afternoon was fitting�"dark and stormy. Silent, we drove from Marquette back to where the project began the brown and white polebarn. As we hooked onto the loaded trailer, lightning flashed about and thunder rumbled around. The cold rain showers fell in curtains through the fledging springtime aspen and maple leaves that bounced and waved in the gusty breezes. The weather reminded me of the heavy September rains and blue chainsaw haze under a big green tarp, and the huge strong winds when we felt our future was in question. It felt like UP weather, which I loved; it did not want us to leave, we belonged there. I honestly believed that then, and I still do now.

            We departed from where it all began in the driveway of the brown and white polebarn that housed our little cozy room while we frantically built our home we had dreamt about so long. The polebarn stood empty nestled in a grove of maples on the edge of the beautiful ravine where we watched the orange punk-haired pilated woodpeckers, Marty the marten, and surprised a newborn fawn.

Behind us, my father’s concrete garden gnome watches over the grave of Bonnie’s 1980’s predecessor that died back when there was no polebarn, no house, back when we camped around the fire pit, still there now in a gully behind the house. A concrete chicken stands behind a cedar tree, behind the outhouse, behind the polebarn. The concrete figures deemed a reminder I didn’t want to shoulder, too heavy to warrant a ride on my mind and the already over-weighted trailer.

A different truck pulled the same trailer that had first pulled in there over eight years prior, red then, blue now. Those eight years, a month, and thirteen days passed fast, or dragged, depending on what we were doing at the time. Some things felt the same but so much had changed on the property that was now no longer ours. 

With Bonnie unusually calm and snuggled in the seat between Karen and me, we looked out ahead to the open road, no one made eye contact; no one said a word. What did we lose or miss in our lives over those eight years when we worked so hard and what pleasures or horrors would we miss by leaving our empirically hand-built home I nick-named the Yooper Schooner?

Still, still and all, from the long-dreamt dreams, to scribbled doodles, to daring doing, gosh darn it, we did it. After all is said here and done there remember how I began the Yooper Schooner Empirically-built House Project with eyes welling, though enduring it all, definitely changed body, mind, and soul... 

 

Postscript: Not a day goes by when something doesn’t remind me of the Yooper Schooner, whether it be carpentry, walking Bonnie, or just daydreaming. Not many people understand what Karen and I went through those years, the dream, the passion, the doodles and doing. I wanted to remember our doing and doing without and those long, sometimes painful, laborious hours. Maybe this chronicle will help us to remember and to explain to you. Not all the minute details are here, they would double the number of pages, but I included what I remembered and deemed as the most important facts. I hope the story enlightens, entertains you, but right now, Karen, Bonnie, Kate, Isaiah, and I are experiencing another adventure.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading everyone, especially you, Wondering. Any final thoughts or overall comments, please pass them along.

Reviews

[wondering]

sounds like you learned alot along the way about building and yourselves. I dare say most would have given up in the beginning with the trying to get a permit. shows that you never give up on what you want and that is a quality too many today do not have. So never give up on your writing, I will be here to read it along the journey. Thanks for the store and look forward to the next.