Keep an open mind — you never know what might crawl in.
Ask people to name their favorite childhood book, and many will say Charlotte’s Web, The Little Engine That Could, or The Cat in the Hat. I remember not entire books but a single chapter from a Pippi Longstocking book. In this chapter Pippi starts a “Thingfinders Club.” The only rule of membership is that when you find an item in the street — a large bolt, an apron pocket, a bicycle reflector, a hubcap — you save it and turn it into something fun or fantastic. I’m still a card-carrying member of the Thingfinders Club.
There are few things that hit my pleasure center more swiftly than a unique, inexpensive, and (at least potentially) useful find, whether it’s in the street, online, or at an estate sale. I’ve had things tucked between the studs and rafters of our garages for twenty years — an oak swinging half-door from a men’s room stall, ancient moldings, four stair spindles hung over from a job completed years ago, boxes labeled MISC. NAILS, old light fixtures. If you belong to the Thingfinders Club, I don’t need to extend the list — you know what’s on it.
This is not a Johnny-come-lately compulsion. When I was in college, walking from apartment to classroom, I rescued the round window from the door of a junked Maytag dryer and kept it in my possession for fifteen years, moving it twelve times. Not having land, financing, a design, or even a burning urge to build a home, I knew I at least had a cheap, interesting, and presumably heat-resistant window.
Part of this thriftiness is genetic. I’ve watched my mother, eighty years old, self-made, bad back, in Gucci heels, bend over to pick up a penny in our driveway, amazed that she can even straighten back up under the weight of her diamond tennis bracelet. Brought up poor, working to support her mother while in high school, when society was still trembling from the aftershock of the Great Depression, she knows the value of a penny.
My father’s thriftiness was more time based. He didn’t buy much, but when he did, he struck with cobralike quickness. When an encyclopedia salesman came to our door, before he got out the “Do you know that children in families with encyclopedias get higher grades than those that don’t” speech, my father was writing the check. Didn’t even know about the free atlas of the world. He did all his Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve. Though a lawyer and firmly ensconced in the upper middle class, he bought only one new car in his life, that in a special package deal that involved picking it up at the factory in Detroit.
And it’s generational. My mother’s mother, who lived with us, used to pilfer little plastic tubs of jelly from restaurants. I know this weighed heavily on her Catholic-value conscience but assume she found peace in rationalizing she was only delaying consumption. When we sorted through her room after she died, we found hundreds of jelly packets in the bottom of her underwear drawer, in shoeboxes, in the pockets of a housecoat — signs of a virtual jellyholic. When we helped my other grandmother move, we discovered a cache of over a hundred turkey wishbones. I come from thrifty stock.
The other half of my bargain-collecting impulses come from my addictive nature. I just love the flea-market rush.
So when it comes time to build, my “finding stuff” radar is fully activated. We have the time and flexibility, so we can build backward a little — find materials, then design the structure around those things. We not only save thousands but wind up with materials with character and history. Even some of the wood we use has stories to tell.
Wood you buy today at Home Depot or your local lumberyard is cut from thirty-year-old trees, planted and harvested like corn. It’s the arboreal equivalent of steroid-pumped chicken; bland, predictable, but unarguably functional. But old wood that’s been cut from virgin timber is rich, luxurious, experienced. The virgin white pine that once covered most of northern Minnesota grew for 100, 200, 300 years and big around as tollbooths. If you read the growth rings you discover stories of droughts, lightning strikes, and glory days. Old wood has had a chance to mellow like a fine whiskey, acquire a patina, and exude the rich aura of an old master’s painting. So I keep dragging piles of old wood home.
We know we want large exposed beams to support the loft, so I keep my eyes open. I learn a salvage company is dismantling buildings at the Twin Cities Arsenal, a sprawling complex where bombs, bullets, torpedoes, and armaments had been manufactured from World War I to Vietnam. I carefully weigh the karma of the timbers. Do we want beams that have sheltered shrapnel, firebombs, and Bouncing Betties? I feel the beams are most heavily weighted on the side of righteousness and buy ten beams, 4 by 12 inches and 16 feet long, at forty dollars each; five for the floor beams, two for the stair jacks, and three for the exposed ceiling cross ties.
Some are painted, others are gray from old age; to the unimagined eye they’re just plain ugly. Kat accepts these homely timbers with a leap of faith, trusting me when I tell her that beauty lies beneath the crud. I spend two to three hours on each beam, shaving away the outer skin with an electric hand planer. I love it in a way only a wood junkie can understand. Each swipe of the plane is like chopping open a geode; you don’t know what’s beyond the outer shell. I find impossible knots, gorgeous burls, grain figure that dances.
I come to a section on one beam signed, “Bud Wilhomen, The Guckenheimer Kid” in crayon and can’t get myself to run the plane across it. Eighty years ago a carpenter signed this beam as an act of pride and immortality, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to plane that away. Later on when we install this beam in the cabin, the Guckenheimer Kid’s signature becomes a topic of hot contention. Kat doesn’t love the idea of the Guckenheimer Kid’s signature and surrounding patch of unplaned timber staring down into the kitchen. I do. It brings to a head one of our major differences: I love the quirky and the odd; Kat, the organized and predictable.
When Dick sees the Guckenheimer Kid’s signature, he howls. He tells us Guckenheimer was a whiskey made long ago. Ha, here is even more history. It makes me want to leave the signature even more. The Guckenheimer signature stands unscathed and unplaned through most of the project. Then comes the moment of truth; Kat is sanding and applying polyurethane to the beams. Will we immortalize the crayoned name under three layers of clear finish — or sand it away? I realize I’ve made a strategic error in the placement of the beam. If I’d positioned it in a different part of the cabin I might have a stronger argument for preservation. But the Guckenheimer Kid is overlooking the kitchen — clearly Kat’s domain. We both dig in our heels, but I can already tell Kat’s got her spurs on. After living, loving, and arguing with someone for seven years, you know when you’re going to lose an argument, even if you win the first round. The resistance is all window dressing, a mere marker for future negotiations. “Okay, I’ll trade you one Guckenheimer Kid signature for one section of deck rail made from gnarly branches.” Deal closed. We preserve the Guckenheimer Kid’s memory with the digital camera and break out the belt sander.
There are places where you can buy reclaimed timber, cut to size, planed, and ready to go. But the cost is scandalous. Within the Duluth harbor sits the Duluth Timber Company; their motto is “Harvesting the Industrial Forest,” and that’s exactly what they do. They buy the salvage rights to old warehouses, wine vats, and water towers; dismantle them timber by timber; load them on barges; and ship them up through the Great Lakes to their mill. Driving in, you pass through a quarter mile of horizontal forest with a few deteriorating boats thrown in for good measure. Some timbers are 24 by 24 inches in girth and 30 feet long, cut from trees that might have taken a bullet in the Revolutionary War or witnessed Pilgrims landing. There are dismantled pickle barrels made from old-growth cypress, 5-foot-wide slabs of redwood cut from stumps found in California farm fields. They even have the bulk of the wood from the Twin Cities Arsenal where we bought the Guckenheimer Kid beams — but with a price tag of four times what we paid.
It would not be an unusual biography for the timbers stacked in the yard to have taken seed in Maine in the 1600s, been cut, then milled and transported to Boston in the 1800s, where they faithfully supported hundreds of tons of grain in a warehouse for ninety years, after which they were dismantled and shipped to Duluth, resawn and planed, then shipped to the West Coast to become cross ties in a million-dollar timber frame home overlooking Puget Sound. These timbers are part of history; you simply can’t buy, find, or grow timbers of that stature any more. The stuff just doesn’t grow on trees.
Trees can teach us something about ourselves. Different woods excel at different things, depending on their personalities. Windsor chair makers use a variety of woods: hickory for spindles because of its strength; ash for the hooped back because of its bendability; basswood for the contoured seat because of its availability in thick, wide planks; and maple for the legs because its fine grain is easy to work with on the lathe. You can flip-flop the roles of these woods, but a true craftsman understands the strengths and weaknesses of his woods and uses them wisely. He could try to force these woods to be something they’re not, but why?
We can grab a lesson from that. We need to take time to find out what species we are; what our natural strengths and weaknesses are. Rather than going against the grain to be something we’re not, maybe we should let ourselves grow in a more natural direction. We should be better craftsmen of our own lives.
A typical floor constructed with 2×10s spaced every 16 inches can be sheathed with 1⁄2- or 3⁄4-inch plywood. It doesn’t matter what this plywood looks like since it’s concealed by carpeting above and drywall below. But with exposed beams, the boards that create the floor also create the ceiling for the rooms below. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. We need something that looks good and — since our beams are spaced every 3 feet — something substantial. I find what we’re looking for in a field littered with 2×8 tongue-and-groove pine salvaged from the floor of an old brewery. It’s been stored carelessly; for every good board I stack in the back of my truck I sort out ten rotting ones. I almost feel like I should apologize to the boards that don’t make the cut; they’re at the end of the trail.
At fifty cents a board foot, the pine is cheaper than plywood, but it’s labor intensive to revive. I scan each board with a Radio Shack treasure hunting metal detector to find concealed nails. Removing the paint and grayness involves running each side of each board three or four times through my little portable planer. It’s loud as hell, and I imagine myself sucking in lead paint particles as fast as my lungs and bloodstream can absorb them. I need to change planer blades every dozen boards or so, which essentially doubles the cost of the wood. Where a plywood floor would have gone down in an hour, this takes eight. But when we look up between the beams we find wood of stature and character to match the beams.
There are no local lumberyards, and those forty-five miles away in Grand Marais and Two Harbors are expensive and don’t carry everything we need. We buy most of the lumber, plywood, shingles, fasteners, insulation, drywall, and siding materials from a home center in Duluth. Even with the eighty-five-dollar delivery charge, the prices are irresistibly lower. We buy the materials we need when they go on sale, then have them delivered when we need them. Two dollars off the price of a sheet of plywood is no big deal, but two dollars off each of eighty sheets is.
The truck driver is less than thrilled about backing down our driveway of death with a full load of lumber. On the first load he hollers down the driveway that he’s gonna “dump it at the top.” No way I’m reloading and lugging four tons of lumber down a 300-foot driveway. I flash him a twenty like a big shot to a maître d’ in an overbooked restaurant. He creeps his way down. We repeat this bribe-and-drive ritual four times over the summer.
Just as eyes are the windows to the soul, windows add soul to a dwelling. They provide character and light — as well as a healthy dent in the checkbook. We know we want lots of light. We know we want big doors overlooking the lake. We know we want arched or circular windows to add to the cottage look. So we know we have to scrounge.
The first find — a 9-foot-wide patio door — comes via the good old-fashioned classifieds. The asking price is $400, about one-sixth of the cost of a new door. Here I come. The gleaming white door has a history. It’s been cratered in a hailstorm. The guy selling it is the contractor who’d replaced it. He’s also an auto-body repairman, and he’s put those skills to work on the door. He’s sanded it down, filled the dents with Bondo, sanded the surface, applied primer, then sprayed the door with auto-body enamel. I can tell from the restored Willys Jeep the door is leaning against that the guy is a perfectionist. I buy it and tuck $2,000 into a mythical savings account.
The large round-top window in the bedroom loft comes from a window display closeout sale at a home center. The $1,200 window has been marked down to $300. We negotiate that down to $150, then take another ten percent off by opening a charge account. The mythical savings account grows.
I purchase a stained-glass window with a parrot (toucan, if you’re feeling tropical) on it that had once graced a local bar. At sixty bucks it’s irresistible. Building the frame and trim for it consumes a weekend and ten jigsaw blades, but it greets us every time we climb the stairs.
When Home Depot runs a promotion offering “10% off the price of any purchase over $1,000 when you open a charge account” — another charge account — we do just that, then buy the rest of the windows. We decide to splurge on two Gothic arch windows, one nestled into the gable end overlooking the lake, the other nestled into the peak opposite that. Anything not square in the window world is subject to highway robbery. But there’s no other way. The fancy-pants grills that divide the windows into smaller arched panes cost more than my first car.
We even import some materials. While vacationing in Maui, we fall in love with a porcelain bathroom sink, decorated with frolicking fish and dolphins in primary colors. We buy a hammered metal mermaid with copper-wire hair and two fish with Marilyn Monroe lips at the same time. The fish and mermaid we ship, but since we haven’t reached our luggage quota for the return trip home, we decide to save the hundred-dollar shipping charge and check the seventy-pound sink like normal baggage. Along with a case of pineapple.
Depending on the story you choose to believe, an hour over the Pacific the left engine of our plane is either (a) hit by lightning or (b) receives a jolt of static electricity that had built up around the nose of the plane. Either way, the engine fries. With a third of our horsepower in cardiac arrest, the pilot turns back for Honolulu. The worst part isn’t dumping thousands of gallons of jet fuel into the Pacific to lighten the plane for landing. It isn’t the roller-coaster ride back. It isn’t landing on a runway lined with fire trucks and ambulances. It isn’t even the claw marks Kat leaves on my thigh. The worst part is lugging the damn seventy-pound sink, the case of pineapple, and our luggage around for the next thirty-six hours.
We haul the sink from the luggage conveyer belt to the bus that drives us to the hotel where the airline puts us up for the night. We haul it up the thirty concrete stairs to the hotel entrance, into our room, back down the stairs a few hours later to the taxi that takes us to the airport, back to the luggage check-in. That airplane is three hours late in taking off, and when a passenger who’d been on the aborted flight the night before goes into hysterics over the probability of another mishap, there’s another delay while the plane taxies back to the terminal to deposit her. We miss our connecting flight in LA, so we lug seventy pounds’ worth of sink along with our luggage and case of pineapple around for another night of cab rides, hotels, and check-ins.
The irony is the artist who made the sink had painted it in Oregon and shipped it to Hawaii. It’s the best damn traveled bathroom sink in the annals of aviation or building history. But it’s ensconced in the bathroom at Oma Tupa, Oma Lupa, unbroken and rich in history. The pineapple didn’t fare as well.
And so it goes. The cabinet for the bathroom sink is a revamped 1950s dining room serving table. The kitchen cabinets are from bleacher seats salvaged from a local high school. (If you ever need to know how to get bubble gum off planer blades, I’m the one to ask.) The wood for the deck is 200-year-old clear redwood salvaged from a house I remodeled 12 years ago. In a land where over a quarter of the space in landfills is occupied by construction scraps and demolished buildings, recycling building parts is a good thing. Oma Tupa has done her part.