If designing a cabin is akin to conception and driving the last nail is tantamount to retiring, then somewhere in between comes middle age. It’s that stage where the excitement of planning has passed, the direction has been established, yet the finish is a long way off. It is yeoman service: hard, straightforward, monotonous work. It’s staining and putting up siding, installing shingles, finishing the little details that were so easy to put off earlier. There’s no Viagra made for these tasks. One day looks an awful lot like the next. There are regrets and things you’d change, but at this point, for the most part, the course is set. It’s nose to the grindstone.
Getting the windows and doors installed will give the cabin — and us — a sense of shelter and stability. Being closed in will mean we’re safe from rain, sleet, and snow. Also from, strange as it sounds, building material bandits. Windows and doors on a “per square inch” basis are among the most expensive materials in a cabin. Many are the tales of windows being delivered, stacked in the garage, only to disappear that night. My insurance agent told me about one contractor who installed a pair of expensive arched-top windows the day they were delivered so that wouldn’t happen; pry bar–wielding construction pirates removed them and hauled them away that night. If you think standing guard will solve the problem, you’re wrong. One homeowner pitched a tent on the job site to prevent theft. He ran to the store one afternoon and returned to find . . . drum roll here . . . his tent and Coleman stove missing.
But if your windows and doors don’t walk, if you’ve framed the rough openings so they’re square and the right size, the windows and doors go in bam, bam, bam. We muster the troops: the full contingent of kids and a miscellaneous boyfriend. Maggie and Sarah staple Tyvek — a special paper that’s equivalent to a house windbreaker — around the window openings. Everyone else starts hauling windows and setting ladders. The small windows go in easily. One person hoists them into place from the outside. Another on the inside, with a level and wood shims, squares and centers the window in the opening. A nod of the head signals the okay to nail the window in place through the exterior fins. It’s hoist, adjust, nod, and bang. The large bank of three windows above the patio door falls into the same installation rhythm but requires three extension ladders, three grunting bodies and a one-two-three coordinated effort to lift it in place. The windows enhance the look of the cabin, yet diminish the size of the openings to which we’ve become accustomed. A 20-by-30-inch “air window” is reduced to a 15-by-25-inch glass window because of the frame and sash. Plus suddenly, nature becomes “out there”; there’s a barrier. Prior to installing windows you’re working outside, even if you’re working inside.
Amid all the window activity, the shingles and tar paper are delivered. Again I have to lure the truck driver down the driveway of death with a twenty-dollar gratuity. We unload the three tons of shingles by hand and stack them on the ground.
Minutes after the truck leaves, John, who I’ve known since junior high, pops in while his wife is at a seminar in Ely. Somewhere in his haste to turn his Jeep around, he misjudges his whereabouts. Two right wheels go over the steep embankment; the Jeep readies itself for the 200-foot cartwheel into the lake. The scenario has catastrophe written all over it. John puts in a gold medal performance in the “grab the dog and catapult out the passenger side door” competition. He dusts himself off, then looks around in hopes no one has seen this ham-fisted move. No such luck. The Jeep lists so far downhill that it defies physics. It would be bad feng shui — a very bad example of the “art of placement”— to have a Jeep parked in the lake. But some greater power — God or gravity — keeps a finger against the side of the Jeep, and the embankment holds.
By sheer providence I’m driving a truck of titanic proportions with a winch on the front that Ford has loaned to the editors of the magazine to use for a promotional stint. But before we can extract the Jeep from death’s teeter-totter, we gotta move the shingles that are in the way. Guys being guys, it’s, “Well, if you can fling an eighty-pound bundle of shingles over your shoulder, so can I.”
“Oh, you carried two at once? Screw this hernia and bad back; watch this!” When we’re done, we all slowly drift in different directions so the others can’t see how hard we’re panting and trying to catch our breath.
We connect the winch to the Jeep and start winding. I imagine the Jeep sliding out of control, pulling the truck along with it down and over the embankment; two climbers connected by a safety rope which, rather than saving both, pulls both to their deaths. After a few twitchy moments the Jeep is on solid ground.
We decide to stain the siding before it goes up. Rolling stain onto sheets of siding lying horizontally on sawhorses is way easier than rolling it on vertically while you’re perched 16 feet in the air on an extension ladder. We decide to do it right, which means priming both sides, then applying two coats of stain to the front. By priming both sides, then standing the 4-by-8-foot sheets of siding against trees, we can work without having to wait for one side to dry. We’ve tinted the primer blue so the topcoats of stain don’t have to cover bright white. At the end of the day forty sheets of blue plywood siding dot the woods. The landscape looks like a Christo sculpture on acid.
Kat oversees quality control of our domestic workforce, while I get other things ready. I may be lifting more, but her job clearly requires more management skills. The kids get the notion that this is their cabin, too; that hard work will not only push the project along faster but also secure cabin usage rights in the future. At first, our neatest daughters try to keep their clothes paint free — they have to look cool, even when painting in the wilderness. But after the first few splatters, it becomes clear their clothes are beyond recovery. Pretty soon they’re having roller fights; warring with oil-based stain and primer. Everyone has streaked blue punk rock hair, a sort of northwoods Blue Man Group. We go through two gallons of mineral spirits cleaning bodies and brushes.
Katie — Kat’s Pekingese that came with the marriage — hangs in there through it all. The breed originated in China, where they served as companions and protectors for the imperial court. They were treated as royalty; commoners had to bow to them. Katie knows all this. To show her fierce protective side she darts off the deck to chase an occasional chipmunk. Having performed her duties, she returns and waits for us to lift her back onto the deck. She gives that little head tilt. “Excuse me, I’ve already been waiting seven whole seconds here.” It’s all in a day.
Bruce, the woodworker who’d helped us get the rafters in place, comes up the next weekend. From the furniture he creates you can tell he’s a ten on the perfectionist scale. You need X-rays to find the fasteners in his work — if he uses them at all. Bruce’s cedar strip canoe looks nicer than most dining room tables. When he fillets a walleye he’s landed from it, it’s like he’s transplanting a cornea.
So I know his work will be five star. He cuts loose on making the trim for the exterior of the windows. The top pieces have a slight arch. The week before, when I created the trim above the entry door, I took a thin scrap of wood, bent it in a rough arc, traced the outline onto the cedar board, traced around a pint paint can to establish the round ends, and cut the thing out with a jigsaw. I rounded the edges with a router and in twenty minutes, bam, I’m done.
Bruce does not operate in this seat-of-the-pants world. He asks me where my band saw is (don’t have one), where my planer is (see that rusted thing under the sawhorses?), where my miter box is (at home in the garage). He half-jokingly, half-seriously asks me how he can create trim without these essentials. He is a woodworker; I’m a carpenter. We both work wood, but the way we approach it, and the tools we use, differ greatly.
So he creates his own miniworkshop from the crude tools at hand. He creates a workbench from two sawhorses and concocts a vice from a couple of Quik-Grip clamps. He traces, cuts, planes, sands, routs, test fits, fine tunes, sands a little more, then predrills holes, and tacks the trim in place using finish nails. He stands back, takes ’em down, and shapes them a hair differently. Each piece is perfect. In the end, few will notice the difference between my seat-of-the-pants arches and Bruce’s picture-perfect ones, but that’s simply the way we work.
Laying shingles is like laying sod; the materials are heavy, the actions are mechanical, the payoff is rapid. You see progress by the minute. However, unlike laying sod — where the biggest mistake you can make is green side down — a mistake shingling can land you a quadriplegic, even a dead quadriplegic. Shingling involves high-altitude tasks, heavy materials, and tall ladders; not a great combination. Ladders falling over, kicking out, hitting a power line, or falling on you will injure you quicker than any other building task. Statistically, the chances of ladder injuries are greatest if you’re (1) male (can’t help that much), (2) between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four (can’t help that much), (3) on a ladder set at the wrong angle so the bottom can kick out (that I can help).
There aren’t that many true ladder accidents. There are hurry-dents, there are stupi-dents, there are reaching-too-far-past-the-side-rail-dents. But most accidents don’t have to happen. One second can change your life when you’re on a ladder — and that change is rarely for the good. A friend of mine who’d painted house interiors for twenty years reached a little too far to dab a spot he’d missed near the ceiling and is now in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
So I’m near-paranoid when it comes to ladder safety. When working from the deck, I screw a big cleat to the deck to keep the legs from kicking out. When I’m working from earth, I make sure the spurs on the bottom of the ladder are pointing down and digging in firmly. I make sure there’s nothing mooshy under foot. When I get to the top, I spend a minute securing the top of the ladder to the eaves with a chunk of rope.
Roof pitches are measured in terms of x/12 pitches. A 4/12 pitch is a roof that rises 4 inches vertically for every 12 inches it runs horizontally. This is an 18-degree angle, the angle of many ramblers and ranch homes. A 12/12 pitch is a 45-degree slant. That’s what Oma Tupa has. It’s formidable.
Shingling a single-story home with a 4/12 pitch is a walk in the park, albeit a hilly one. The nine steps up the ladder, even with an eighty-pound bundle of shingles draped over your shoulder, is short and sweet. You can plop shingles, rolls of tar paper, nails, and your chalk box on the roof, and they stay put. By twisting your ankles you can walk up, down, and across the roof without much fear of sliding. A world-class roofer, with air equipment, good knees, and someone feeding him shingles from above can install three or four squares of shingles (a square being 100 square feet of shingles) an hour, all day long.
As the roof pitch and wall height increase, so does the level of shingling difficulty. It requires more shingles, more tar paper, more nails, more time, more cohones, more roof brackets, and taller ladders to get you where you need to go and stay there.
Installing the chimney, skylight, shingles, and dormers involved lots of high-altitude work and sore muscles.
I go at it. While shingling I also install the barge rafters that support the eaves — putzy work. And the siding for the dormers. Putzy work. As long as I have roof brackets set, I use my little electric paint sprayer to paint the underside of the roof plywood on the eaves. More putzy work. There’s flashing to install, a couple of skylights to put in, a chimney to erect for the woodstove. Putzy, putzy. There’s a ridge vent to install for venting the roof. When I’m working on the downhill side of the cabin I’m 25 feet above the ground, which is pushing the limits of my comfort level. Each trip up the ladder takes its toll on my knees and nerves. My progress is glacial.
For high-altitude work you need redundancy for safety; if your main means of support breaks, tilts, or cuts loose, you need a secondary way of preventing yourself from plummeting. If one leg of your ladder suddenly sinks into a soft spot, the rope you’ve used to secure the top to the rafters buys you a little thinking time. If an upper roof bracket gives way, the set of brackets below will catch you. The ultimate in safety is a harness system similar to what mountain climbers wear. Harnesses can be lifesaving, but they’re a hassle to use; the rope gets in the way, they’re ball pinchers, you need to unclick yourself each time you go down the ladder. I borrow one from work, never wear the actual harness, but secure the safety rope at the peak so I have something right in front of me to grab in case something busts loose. Plus I keep my cell phone on my hip. When Kat asks, “Are you being careful?” I respond, “Careful? My safety harness is right here.”
A typical fifteen minutes goes like this: break open a bundle of shingles, grab 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 shingles, climb the extension ladder (chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib), crawl onto the roof brackets, connect the gun to the hose (phhhhip), position a shingle and nail it in place (pht, pht, pht, pht), grab and nail another shingle (pht, pht, pht, pht), grab and nail another shingle (pht, pht, pht, ph—), oops — outa nails, climb down the ladder (chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib), stick 1-2-3 coils of nails in my pouch, grab 1-2-3-4-5-6 more shingles while I’m at it, then back up the ladder (chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib), shimmy back onto the roof jacks, cut a shingle to fit (shhhhhwip), then pht, pht, pht, pht; damn, those didn’t sink all the way, take out the hammer and whap, whap, whap, whap, and pht, pht, pht, pht, oops — outa shingle tin flashing (chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib, chib) — and if you think it’s boring and tedious reading this, try doing it.
After a solid week of fifty-trips-up-and-down-the-ladder-per-day, I’ve had it. I’ve got all the weird stuff done, skylights in, flashing installed. My knees are shot, the fingers that aren’t calloused are blistered. I feel mule kicked. My knees are considering going on strike. I pull out a scrap of paper my friend John has given me with the name of a shingler who lives up the road. I pick up the phone (dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit). Yah, he can finish the job this Saturday (aaaaaaaaah). When he’s done I write a check (scrib, scrib, scribble). Then the sounds of silence.
Installing the siding takes just as long hourwise as shingling, but since the cabin is weathertight with or without it, there’s less urgency. We’re going for the quaint seaside board-and-batten look. It involves installing 4-by-8-foot sheets of rough-sawn plywood, then nailing vertical 1-by-2-inch cedar battens every 12 inches on top. Because the cabin is small, with lots of windows, doors, and dormers, every piece involves measuring, cutting, fitting, recutting, then re-recutting. A few pieces are squarish, shaped like Wyoming, but most are shaped like Nevada doing a headstand. Or Georgia. Some pieces have an angled cut on top to accommodate the roof pitch, a notch on the side to accommodate a window, and a cutout near the bottom to accommodate an electrical box. For these I measure and sketch little pictures on scraps of wood or on masking tape I keep stuck to the side of my tape measure, then plot out the geometric puzzle, cut, and pray.
We get the plywood siding installed, then, starting on the back of the cabin, install the battens at 12-inch intervals; at least from the driveway it looks done. Some friends come up the following spring to help finish the siding. It’s been so long since I installed the first batch of battens that I forget the 12-inch spacing, and we install the remainder at 16-inch intervals. If I were a contractor building this for a customer, I’d have to fix it. But I don’t think these customers will mind.