When you build, build with hands, head, and heart.
We don’t start with a written list of rules; nor do we end with one. We never post them anywhere, except the backs of our brains. We never refer to them as rule number such and such. There are no fines for breaking them; no sitting in the corner. Yet they hover. We use them to remind each other and ourselves that this cabin project is a slowing down, a shifting of gears, an adventure.
The rules are simple:
The first rule guides our minds; the second, our hands; the third, our hearts. And the fourth? Well, that’s what the angel with a tool belt whispered in our ears when we got sidetracked. The rules got bent — in some cases annihilated — but they kept us moving in the right direction.
Kat and I are both hopelessly Scandinavian. Worse yet, Minnesota Scandinavian. We’re most comfortable when we suffer. This trait was handed down by our Swedish and Norwegian ancestors, who endured depressing twenty-hour nights, only to be rewarded by sleep-deprived twenty-hour days. It comes from the cold that makes our blood run slower and from the frostbite that makes smiling painful. Minnesota has one of the largest populations of Scandinavians in the United States. The inclination toward hard work is embedded like a wood tick. Just as you hear tales of immigrant Swedes clearing forty acres with an axe and a three-legged ox, you’ll find their modern-day counterpart snowblowing his driveway at one in the morning or hand-scraping every square inch of his house before repainting it.
Minnesotans’ idea of fun is eating lutefisk — a dried cod soaked in lye — with in-laws. We endured Walter Mondale, a favorite son who won the electoral votes of only one state in the 1980 election — Minnesota. “Living on the edge” means driving onto a lake to ice fish after only three hard freezes. We golf on courses that are converted to ski hills come winter, snowmobile, and elect pro wrestlers for governor. We eat hot dish. We are hardened at a young age by waiting in 30-degrees-below-zero wind chills for snowbound school buses that never come. It’s work for Minnesotans to have fun. So the “It’s gotta be fun” attitude was not a natural act.
“Fun” should be loosely defined. When I was a rookie teacher in Denver, my mentor, a forty-five-year-old teacher and mother of seven, would respond to questions of policy or curriculum with, “If it’s not fun, why do it?” Not necessarily a double over, split your seams kind of fun. Not a Chuckles the Clown “a little smile, a little prance, a little seltzer down your pants” kind of fun. No, her definition of fun meant approaching things with excitement, in the present, with a positive attitude and a sense of adventure. It was an expectation you would come out of the day a better person. Our expectation was to enjoy ourselves.
This all runs counter to our Monday through Friday city lives. Kat and I are co-CEOs of a large corporation — our family. When we merged in 1994, Kat brought Sarah and Kellie onto the board of trustees, and I brought Maggie, Zach, and Tessa. At points the Carlsen-Erickson Corporation has had four kids in college and a fleet of five vehicles with varying degrees of rust, mechanical fortitude, and insurance coverage. The corporate headquarters contained six bedrooms, nine telephones, six laptops, a fourteen-year-old Pekingese, and a psychotic cat. We managed the health, financial, and emotional needs of everyone as best we could. We couldn’t fire anyone, though there were times we reached for the pink slips. There was — and continues to be — nothing more fulfilling, and nothing more exhausting, than raising a large family. So Rule #1 gets more than just lip service.
The clan perched in “the best seat in the world.” Back row (l to r): Kat, Maggie, Kellie, Tessa. Front row (l to r): Spike, Sarah, Zach.
“Taking our time” has two benefits: First, it takes away the pressure cooker that turns peace of mind into a pulp. Second, it provides the luxury of being able to do the job right. Kat and I both have jobs in which the above two constantly interplay: we work in fast-paced environments and have jobs that require precision.
Kat and her business partner, Troy, left a technical recruiting company several years ago to start their own business — PrimeStaff. When they left, the only things they carried out the door were grocery sacks of family pictures, a six-month no-compete clause, the ire of the owner, their reputations, and enough angst to kill a moose. They honored their no-compete clauses, rented a dinky office space, hung a shingle out, then spent two months of sleepless nights, staring at the ceiling, terrified that what they’d done was dumb, dumb, dumb, and irresponsible. Troy was looking at three kids under eight, and we were looking at five kids either in or headed toward college.
PrimeStaff is a technical recruiting firm that finds candidates for companies; sets up interviews; negotiates salary; arranges contracts; handles tax, medical, and worker comp deductions; and wrestles with personnel issues. At any given time they can have a hundred architects, engineers, surveyors, and interior designers on their payroll. The essence of a company like this is nonstop pressure.
When we started the cabin, I was the executive editor of Family Handyman magazine, a publication for do-it-yourselfers with a million subscribers and ten issues to crank out per year. The pressure came from the top (producing it) and bottom (making sure our readers loved it). We were always working on four or five issues in various stages of production. It was like juggling a feather, a cigarette lighter, and a bowling ball. There was rarely time to take time.
Yet on the flip side every article had to be absolutely, positively technically correct. Show the wrong wire under the wrong wire nut, and your readers get a circuit breaker that sparks rather than a light fixture that shines. Mislabel a “pipe wrench” as a “monkey wrench,” and wait for the torrent of emails and letters from retired shop teachers. Get one letter wrong in a website address, and your readers are visiting Kinky’s Massage rather than the ACME Window Supply.
Even in my previous lifetime as a builder and carpenter, I rarely had the luxury of time. Few clients savored cooking on hot plates and washing dishes in the bathtub while their kitchen was being remodeled. If you stripped half a roof of shingles, you had to keep laying new ones, even if it meant working until midnight with a headlamp strapped to your forehead. Some people have the romantic image of a carpenter, block plane in hand, coffee on the sawhorses, carefully cutting and fitting stairway parts to perfection. In fifteen years of carpentry, I only had two or three days that fit that romantic notion.
Take two high-stress jobs, then mix in five kids within seven years of one another, in various stages of academic success, heartbreak, college quandary, and driving skill, and some days we find ourselves tied to the railroad tracks, with the 10:15 coming and Dudley Do-Right nowhere in sight.
Rule #2 is the finger that reaches out and hits the PAUSE button. The cabin has no schedule. It doesn’t need to be anywhere at a certain time. Here is something with a pace we can control.
Getting a nettle in my toe made me realize Kat and I are only as strong as our weakest link — and we’ll never know which link has the bad weld. It happened like this: Kat and I were walking on the perfect sand of a perfect Mexican beach on a perfect day. We had on sunscreen so we wouldn’t burn, toted water so we wouldn’t parch, and had cleared our heads so we wouldn’t fret. We were walking to paradise. Then I stepped on a nettle, a thing so miniscule I could barely see it. It turned the day on its head. It made the journey back painful, turned the conversation we were having about the future into an obsession about an irritant in my middle toe. Rather than sail that afternoon I took Advil and lay in bed. And it was a metaphorical thing. It takes just one unpredictable thing happening — to Kat or me — to upset not just a walk, but a day, a year, or a lifetime. A single thing can — in a heartbeat, or lack of a heartbeat — dump all the perfection into the backseat. It happens all the time: Someone slips on the ice. A spot appears on an X-ray. A tornado flattens your life. And you can no longer do the things you love to do, and planned to do, as a couple. We gotta get while the gettin’s good. It was an enlightening nettle.
So the cabin is an opportunity to not only build together but to plan together, drive together, browse through books for ideas together, shop together. Sometimes we make decisions solo, but the other person always holds veto power.
The last rule keeps us honest. It’s easy to set up a game plan, then let it slip away. We keep our fun radar tuned in, and when the early warning signs appear — using four-letter words to describe paint cans, tripping over brooms, forgetting a measurement in the time it takes to walk 3 feet — we say, “Screw it.” We walk the shoreline, play gin, fool around, visit Dick and Jean, take a nap. Because those are the rules.