When it’s ninety percent finished, it’s finished.
I once interviewed a woman who, over the course of a forty-year career, had dreamt up over 10,000 names for paint. Included were “My Place or Yours,” “The Ego Has Landed,” and “What Inheritance?” — offbeat names, but when Pat Verlodt showed me the swatches, I realized she’d nailed ’em.
“A woman doesn’t want to call her neighbor and tell her to run over to look at paint #8260,” Pat explained. “She wants to tell her she’s painted her kitchen ‘Moon Goddess’ or ‘3 a.m. Latte.’ There’s romance in a paint name.”
But there’s more than romance; there’s psychology. And Pat gave me the Cliff’s Notes version.
Yellow is a happy color. But an overly vibrant yellow can wear you down or stimulate feelings of frustration. “And some shades of yellow do not reflect well on humanity in the early morning,” Pat added. Greens, associated with grass, trees, and nature, conjure up feelings of growth and vitality, yet are calming at the same time. Blues — the most beloved colors, but not the most popular paintwise — make people think about water, blue skies, and relaxing things. “But it’s not a good kitchen color,” Verlodt clarified. “It’s so anti-appetite that some weight loss plans have their clients eat off blue plates.”
Reds, on the other hand, can stimulate appetite and heart rate. Note the color in the logos of McDonald’s, KFC, Dairy Queen, and Burger King. But it can be overstimulating; you can’t live with red for long. The same red that draws you into a restaurant pushes you out quickly — fine for a fast-food joint but not for Oma Tupa.
Beiges — the best-selling paint colors of all — are conservative. They may not get your room into Architectural Digest, but they’re livable and provide a nice backdrop for other colorful things.
“But there’s no wrong color,” Pat explained. “The best way to tell if you like a color is to live with it for a while.” So that’s what we do. The cabin is so wide open from top to bottom that we only get one shot at a color for the main space. And one for the bathroom — the only room with a door on it.
Kat’s been reading articles by homeowners who have become downright suicidal after painting a whole room a certain color based on what a 2-by-3-inch paint swatch looked like. She starts buying quarts and painting card table–size swatches on the walls. The colors change like a chameleon based on the time of day, the cloud cover, how many lights are on, even the kind of bulb in the fixture. We’ve already got a riot — or at least a small demonstration — of color going on: a bright blue stove, a Technicolor stained glass parrot window, zingy Fiestaware plates, woods of several hues, a bright orange couch on order. We start thinking the “beige backdrop” route.
We know we want wood paneling on the tall wall facing the lake; there’s just something woodish about it. So one Saturday on the way to the cabin, daughter Sarah and I make a side trip to Aurora, Minnesota, home of Jim’s Native Wood.
It gives us plenty of time to talk and reflect. Kat and I married and merged lives when Sarah was fifteen. Fifteen is hard enough without moving twenty miles and starting sophomore year at a new school. Hard enough without inheriting one sister in the same grade, another sister six years younger, and a brother — a thing you’d never before had in your life, and surely not had in your house before. Hard enough when you already have one dad and this forty-two-year-old stranger with a Fu Manchu mustache and a basketball hoop in his kitchen suddenly gets Velcroed to your life and holds sway over what you do. It’s not like it was a kidnapping; there were plenty of discussions. But when you’re only fourteen percent of the vote and running the corn maze between childhood and adulthood, it sure adds some twists and turns to the course.
We fought our battles. We had our stare downs. Sarah was a tough kid. She played hockey, pitched softball, and knew how to replace brake linings before she could drive. We busted a few tie-rods on the road to figuring out who we were to each other. But the road’s smoothed out. I love her as a daughter and, no small matter, like her as a person.
Jim’s is a one-man show. He has a small sawmill, a small kiln for drying, and a small machine for planing and edging. His output is antlike by Boise Cascade standards, but while their wood is white bread, Jim’s is a hearty whole wheat.
The smell of ash, birch, cedar, and maple permanently perfumes the air. The kiln bakes away silently in the corner. There are neatly stacked piles of tongue-and-groove paneling and neatly organized bins of trim. I’m most intrigued by little piles of oddball woods, many with big knots that some people consider junk but I consider character filled.
When I tell him there’s a chance we’ll paint some of the paneling, he directs me to a pile of poplar in the “oddball area.” He doesn’t sell enough of it, so he’s trying to get rid of what’s left. We only need enough for the tall wall. It’ll paint up nice, it’s knot-free, and he has just the quantity we need. We load it up. We install it, stand back, and realize its natural color is nearly identical to the color we were going to paint it. We slap on a coat of clear water-based polyurethane and leave it in the nude. We cover the ceilings in tongue-and-groove pine and finish it with ambered polyurethane to give it that old shellac cabin look.
We’ve plotted and tweaked the position of the cabin, windows, and doors to breathe in as much of Lake Superior as possible. So when it comes time to build the loft railing, we’re chary. The entire time we’ve worked on the cabin, a lone 2×2 tacked between a few uprights has served as the railing. The view — as well as any potential fall — has been unimpeded. We want a minimalist railing, but a 2×2 lacks certain safety and aesthetic measures.
The railing will be 2 feet away from the side of the bed. Whatever it’s made of, it will be the first thing we see in the morning and the last thing we see at night. Building codes dictate a railing should have no spaces large enough for a 4-inch ball to fit through. This is based on the size of a toddler’s noggin. Codes also dictate a minimum height of 36 inches, a height where most people feel safe standing next to a railing without fear of ass-over-teakettling over the side. And a railing must be able to withstand 200 pounds of sideways force; no one knows where that number came from. What if you weigh 201? Since there are no building inspections for our cabin, we don’t have to follow the codes, but they offer a target.
We contemplate our options. A solid wall? Zero chance. A railing with vertical pickets spaced every few inches is easy to build and common fare but can feel like a jail cell or playpen. Horizontal cable railings are unobtrusive but industrial looking. Turned spindles would be out of character. So in the end we decide on nothing — we use glass. I install 4×4 posts every 4 feet, then have a glass company cut laminated glass, the stuff used to make car windshields, to fit. I picture-frame each glass panel with three bands of trim to give a heavier feel. Picture perfect. As a bonus the glass panels help buffer the noise between the loft and the lower level.
Glass panels were the perfect solution to the loft railing dilemma — they blocked the sound but not the view.
When it comes to the deck railing outside, we maintain the minimalist approach — both in looks and cost. We buy 3-foot lengths of threaded iron pipe, drill holes through the sides every 6 inches, secure them to the deck with $1.29 pipe flanges, stick a wood rail on top, then run braided cable through the holes to create a can-hardly-tell-it’s-there railing.
No cabin is complete without a woodburning stove or fireplace, even if that cabin is in Death Valley. Gas won’t suffice; you need wood so you have something to chop, carry, split, carry, stack, carry, light, poke at, stare at. You need a damper to fiddle with and ashes to clean out. Gloves dried by the fire feel warmer, bread risen by the fire tastes better, tea made from water heated in a kettle over the fire makes you cozier.
Firewood is not a problem. The thirty or forty birch trees we had to take out for the driveway and cabin lay in a pick-up-sticks pile off to the side. Birch is a curious wood. The bark can be used for everything from baskets to roofing to canoes to hats, but the same water-resistant qualities that make it so useful also contribute to its early demise. Within a year or two of being downed, it starts rotting from the inside out; it can’t breathe and quickly becomes “punky.” Once it’s cut and split, it’s fine, but you only have a few years to get on it. We need to get on it.
Dick and Jean tow their homemade log splitter over. Nothing Dick makes is wimpy; it’s a gas-powered hydraulic monster that resembles a pile driver. It could split the Rock of Gibraltar. We take pause when Jean asks Dick, “Isn’t that the splitter Benson was using when he lost three fingers?” But it is ten times faster and one-tenth as exhausting as swinging a maul. It wedges its way through even the crotchetiest wood. At the end of the afternoon we stand back and admire two years’ worth of split wood. We feel rich. Let the power go out, let the price of propane quadruple, we’ve got heat.
We select a small, blue, Scandinavian-made Jøtul stove. It’s built like a Rolex — functional to its core, but a little work of art all the same. The arches in the door mimic the arches in the two Gothic-arch windows in the gable ends. There are no computer chips or wires; only two small levers, one to control air intake, one to control the damper.
It’s small, about the size of a car tire, but weighs 265 pounds. When they use a forklift to load it into my truck at the store, the leaf springs crouch on their haunches. At the cabin we slide it out of the truck bed onto a pair of 2×10s, then onto our Walmart dolly. The axle breaks halfway down the hill, so we wiggle, nudge, and grunt it down the hill, through the door, and onto the quarter-round hearth in the corner. Whether your cabin is 8,000 square feet with a fieldstone fireplace or 800 square feet with a dinky hearth, fire becomes the epicenter of the room.
Tom and Nan, our neighbors from the big city, come up for the weekend. We spend a few hours installing the black pipe connecting the stove to the stainless steel pipe poking through the roof. We build a small fire and stand back to watch her glow. She doesn’t glow, she smokes. A lot. After a minute I remember the fiberglass insulation I’d stuffed up the stainless steel chimney to keep bugs out during construction. We don gloves, disassemble the stovepipe, pluck out the offending fiberglass, reassemble things, air out the cabin, then settle in for the first burn. It’s everything we want — small, functional, delightful to the eye — smiley faces reflected in the glass door.
Kat looks up from a ragtag assortment of papers scattered across the kitchen counter. “Aah, so where did you come up with those estimates for what you thought the cabin was going to cost? From that tree house you built when you were eight?” One of the reasons we’d been able to rationalize paying an absurdly high amount for the land was that I had assured Kat that by doing the work ourselves and shopping smart we could build the cabin for an absurdly low amount.
I look over her shoulder at the tally, and it’s confirmed: My cost-estimating skills are on a par with my pasta noodle estimating skills. I’m wildly off. It seemed about right. But what are you going to do now? Space the shingles twice as far apart? Thin the paint? Leave off every other deck board? Nope. Suck it up and git ’er done.
We look at reclaimed Douglas fir flooring and are floored by the price. At five dollars per square foot, the math isn’t sitting right with our withering checkbook. We look at the Douglas fir flooring at a local home center, figure it’s one-fourth the price and go Scroogey. It’s a mistake. Douglas fir flooring from old, slow-growth trees has tight growth rings and is hard as oak. The new stuff, milled from fast-growing plantation trees, is spineless. Anything — a dragged stool, a dropped loaf of bread — leaves dents.
The floor may need to be replaced at some point, but my memories of installing it are irreplaceable. For starters, before we can lay it we need to clear everything out. It’s been a hodgepodge of ladders, work lights, Frito bags, and rolls of insulation. We’ve never had a true sense of how the interior space would look because of the clutter. Clearing out forces us to toss, burn, and organize. At the end of the day we stand back and again see what no blueprint or architect can reveal: how a space that once existed only on paper looks in the flesh.
Kellie and I lay the floor one Saturday afternoon. She can be quiet, but when she busts loose her laugh can melt limestone. Of all the kids, she has the strongest carpentry skills. She has a great sense of design, works hard, and gets how things go together. She has “youngest child” traits — creativity, humor, idealism. She too has had to weather the uproot, the transplant, and all the compost that’s gone along with it — at the age of twelve, nonetheless, when it’s hard to even figure out what you’re trying to figure out. It took her a while to write “Dad” instead of “Spike” on my birthday card. Sometimes I ponder how it’s possible to love five kids with “all your heart” all at the same time, but that’s what’s happened. The math doesn’t add up. Pure science will never be able to figure that one out; that’s why families are magic.
We establish a routine: I cut the boards to length on the miter saw, we tap and prod the tongue-and-groove boards to fit snug, then Kellie blind-nails them to the plywood subfloor with a power nailer. She revels in the power of power nailing. It’s fast, clean, noisy, and macho.
Progress is fast. The cabin is so small that 16-footers span the entire distance, meaning few seams or splices. We cut out the loose knots but leave the tighter ones because they look cool. We get the floor laid in a day.
I rent a floor sander — a bucking bronco of a thing — from Julie’s Hardware. I sand the floor starting with the coarsest belts, then work my way through medium and fine grits, each grit leaving progressively smaller scratches until, to the naked eye, the floor is flat, smooth, and ready for finish. We roll on a couple of coats of water-based poly.
Building the kitchen cabinets is my initiation into the secret brotherhood of cabinetmaking. It’s a task that requires not only a different set of tools from carpentry, but also a different mind-set. Everything is exposed inside and out, so the goal is to use glue and joinery, rather than screws or nails, to do most of the work. Unlike 2×4 walls that just stand there, cabinets have doors and drawers that move, bang, and swing. Not only do the components move, but the wood itself moves.
Accommodating this wood movement is one of the great puzzles woodworkers face. Though wood is clinically dead, it keeps moving. It swells in the humid summer and shrinks in the dry winter, especially across the grain. Large panels will warp if left unconfined, but crack if too rigorously contained. The challenge is clear: how does one create large doors, panels, and cabinets while controlling this irrepressible material?
Medieval cabinetmakers figured it out. They developed a system of “frame and panel” construction for creating crack-free cabinets, doors, chests, wainscot paneling, even caskets. The approach involved constructing a wood frame with grooves along the inner edges in which a large panel can float. Left free to float — unhindered by glue or nails — the panel can shrink and expand to its heart’s content. Yet at the same time the frame keeps the panel from warping. Walk through any museum or antique store, and you’ll find most of the surviving furniture is made of frame and panel construction. The few pieces of old solid-wood furniture you will find will be either very, very small or very, very cracked.
So when it comes time to build the cabinets it’s time to put this ancient art to work. Since the floor and beams are Douglas fir, it seems fitting the kitchen cabinets should be the same. I find the perfect material by way of a two-line ad in the Building Material section: “Straight grain Doug fir, 16 ft. long, 300 boards.” The salvager is an industrial arts teacher at a local high school who’d passed by the gym and heard the whining of saws and splintering of wood. He peeked his head in to find sledgehammers and circular saws annihilating the bleachers. He knew wasted wood, wasted energy, and a wasted chance when he saw them. He gained a twenty-four-hour reprieve, then, bolt by bolt, disassembled the bleachers. To the unpracticed eye these are simply old boards with three generations of bubblegum smooshed to the bottom. They’re painted, and the edges are rounded over from forty years of pep rallies. Thunk one and you can hear, “Lean to the left, lean to the right . . .”
I can read Kat’s eyes when I pull up with my bounty. “These don’t look like kitchen cabinets to me.” But under the blades of a benchtop planer the beauty is revealed. Planks that once held the adrenaline of pounding feet will soon hold our spices and Fiestaware.
I use the well-appointed workshop at the magazine — as well as the well-appointed wisdom of the editors of a woodworking magazine that share the space — to build the cabinets, doors, and drawers. I install them, then top them off with a maple butcher block top — a surface that’s a countertop when you’re cooking and a dining room table when you’re eating.
The remaining bleacher planks I use to create the built-in window seat and surrounding shelves. The bleacher bolt holes add a nice rustic touch. It’s library, guest room, and dining spot rolled into one. We’ve designed the seat to be long enough and wide enough for one person to sleep on, or for two people to sit face to face when eating or playing cribbage. It nestles in a little bump-out, with a 4-by-5-foot picture window overlooking the lake. We build a coffee-cup ledge into the windowsill and have cushions made from material with dragonflies on it.
The seat becomes the magnetic north of the cabin. There is no better place in the universe for reading or thinking. One friend declares it her “favorite place in the world.” I sit on it now as I write these words. If I could choose one place on earth to watch a storm, read, write, ponder life, have a conversation, play gin, do nothing, play the guitar, discuss the future with one of our kids, take a nap, fool around, watch birds, do yoga, it would be this window seat. And I’ve done ’em all.
We buy carpet over the Internet and hire a friend of a friend of a friend to lay it. He gets started, then — maybe he’s related to the plumber — disappears. He doesn’t answer his phone. He doesn’t return messages. We try another number and get ahold of his ex — a woman with some built-up venom. Finally we track him down — he’s in jail. But his sentence is short, and he finally gets the carpet laid.
Kat begins chomping at the bit to move stuff in. I resist. Prematurely move in bar stools, and they become sawhorses. Move in a rug, and it becomes a fine place to lay a cabinet while you’re belt-sanding it. Move a bed in, and those last three pieces of baseboard never, ever, ever, get installed. When it’s ninety percent done, it’s done — but we’re at about eighty-seven.
As the cabin nears completion, I attend the National Kitchen and Bath Show in Chicago to cover new products for the magazine. It’s an orgy of people, products, and flesh pressing. You can get your picture taken with the Maytag repairman, watch the Kohler shower girls twist knobs, and test drive a self-cleaning toilet with a built-in ventilation fan. Kitchen designers kick new appliance tires, and homebuilders look for new trends. There are little companies, like Vermont Soapstone, where the guy at the booth looks tortured in a suit. And there are multi-billion-dollar companies like Masco, where those manning the booth look tortured after being asked the same questions forty times.
All the basic requirements of a kitchen — refrigeration, running water, storage, appliances for cooking — were established long ago. So kitchen products have become more and more esoteric. There are lizard-shaped drawer pulls, refrigerators with built-in computers, countertops made of lava, molds for making square hard-boiled eggs. I keep an eye out for cool stuff for Oma Tupa, but we pass on the bathtub carved from solid marble and the $48,000 Grand Palais 180 stove.
I take satisfaction in a job well done, but the true moments of savoring an accomplishment are fleeting. I work two days installing landscape timbers to create stairs from the driveway down to the cabin. Cutting each 90-pound, 5-by-6-inch timber involves marking, cutting through all four sides with a circular saw, then completing the cut with a handsaw. Each step must be level, which involves hollowing out a spot with a pickax in some places and building up and compacting the earth in others. The steps, each made from five timbers, are nailed together with 10-inch spikes; this involves drilling holes, then pounding the suckers home with a 4-pound hand sledge. I treat the cut ends of the timbers with preservative to slow the inevitable rotting process. The steps need to curve so they end up square to both the deck and driveway, so I make repeated calculations and stick drawings to make sure the top step will end up at the right height and angle. I stack 100-pound boulders along the sides to hold the earth in place. It takes two hours per step and there are eleven steps.
I see progress along the way, but it isn’t until the stairs are finished, swept off, the surrounding area cleaned up, and I’m sitting on the deck that I savor the completed project. That keen sense of pride lasts for the duration of one of my monthly cigarettes. The sweat on my brow and the ache in my legs makes it look, feel, and smell better than it ever will again.
Dick and Jean stop by. Since Jean’s always complaining about having to slide and shuffle down the hill when visiting the cabin, I proudly announce: “I’m christening these the Jean Thorngren Memorial Steps.” Dick smiles at me and says, “‘Honorary’ would be better. She’s still got some juice left in her.”
