Kitchen finishing

Most parts of this building process took way longer than my optimistic estimate, but the kitchen (and plumbing) took WAY longer and it's still not quite done.  It's been about a year and a half now, off and on.  There were a few plumbing and wiring changes to the original plan, but the most time-consuming part has been the cabinets.  They’re simple plywood cabinets mixed in with some metal cabinets salvaged by my friend Sven from the old hospital that we just spray-painted.

Here’s a snapshot of a 3-D drawing.  I poured concrete countertops in place using specially made countertop forms from an online source.  Here’s a link to another house-building blog showing a similar process.  I did a much cheaper version than the link shows, using regular high-strength concrete and 14 ga. wire. You can get these locally at about one-tenth of the cost of mail-ordered specialty countertop mud.  We had some locally available countertop mud, but this was also several times more expensive.  I understand the mud we used was not as workable, sandable and otherwise forgiving as the custom stuff but I would do it the same way again if the gray color was desired. It helps to have a little experience finishing concrete and to add to it by watching youtube videos like this one.

 Here is the underlayment ready to attach forms.  You can see I put 2X4 falsework under the cantilevered sections and open spans to support the concrete until it cures.

And here is the concrete as it is right now, in December 2016, nearly finished. It needs a bit more shaping and then I'm planning to seal it.  If you want to do this yourself you might want to order a kit like this or this.  Or something like this acrylic sealer with a wax on top.  The simplest finish I found was just to use beeswax, but that is not very durable.  This is a pretty nice article explaining the different choices for sealing indoor concrete.  It doesn't look like we'll have countertops for Christmas, but hey, maybe New Years!

2021 update: We really like the countertops. I made one mistake I should mention. When sanding with diamond pads, a lot of fine dust is created. Be very careful not to inhale much of it. I had the thought halfway through sanding to use water to stop the dust. It worked to keep the dust down, but the water pulled some of the fines off of the counter, leaving a gritty texture in the area where I used water. 

These past couple seasons

The past few months' progress have been mostly in the trim department.  The first rooms to get finished were our bedrooms.

Once we were moved in to our own rooms (whoop whoop) it was time to hurry up and prepare for cold weather.  Last winter caught us very unprepared for record-breaking cold temperatures.  We ran out of firewood by the end of February and I could not keep up by simply going out with a sled and cutting dead trees.  We had to get creative, burning scraps from our carpenter neighbor, pallets from anyone getting rid of them, or whatever else we could find.

This winter was way different, thank God and hard work!  First of all we built a decent 5-cord woodshed and filled it (in addition to our old shed).  Here you can see the sheds and two of our resident moles showing off their snow-ships.

The other key to coziness was a pair of propane wall heaters.  This one is in the utility room.

Installing these meant connecting to the existing gas plumbing, and connecting that to a big tank out in the yard. We were in a bit of a race to get the rest of the trench dug before the ground got hard, and then we had thigh-deep snow to clear out of the way by the time the propane company came to deliver a tank in early December.  The other difficult part of this process was chiseling a hole through the foundation for the downstairs heater's vent.  These stoves are "direct-vent" heaters, meaning you mount them on an outside wall and the fresh combustion air and exhaust are vented straight out the back.  Looking back it might have been smart to install a more-efficient central propane heating system, even though we still intend to use a masonry wood stove as our main heat.

Even though this February was the coldest on record, the spring at the bottom of the hill kept pouring its water out day and night.  The day this photo was taken the high temperature got up to -2, and that dark stuff at the bottom is moving ground water.  As handy as this abundance of wild water is, we found after having it tested that it was just hard enough to ruin our water heater and just acidic enough to eat up metal parts of the plumbing.  It had already been noted that it was difficult to wash hair and glassware with this water, and that dissolved iron left the toilet and bathtub impossible to keep white.  So after months of research I ordered a water softener and calcite tank from a company in Ohio and hooked it up.  We now have hot running soft water.  Sound the trumpets.

So as the road starts to break up we're back to putting up trim.  This week the mud room is coming together complete with coat rack, and trim for the little door to the fairy room.

 The kids built this room in the wall as we were putting up drywall.


 There's still plenty of snow up in these hills, but April promises some changes.  Here's hoping these promises don't fool us like they did last year!

 The story of the wood we’re using for trim might be worth telling, so if you find a story about wood interesting here it is:
     I grew up in a pine forest south of Marquette, and being an introvert in a house with four siblings, I spent a lot of time out in those woods and got to know where just about each tree was
between our house and the swamp. There was one great white pine, taller than all the red pines, that my big brothers climbed a few times and said they could see Lake Superior.  Once I followed them up there but a branch broke about 12 feet up and I slid down the rough trunk scraping up my doughy belly and came away so intimidated that I never dared to climb up again. 
   Many years later, in 2007, I talked to my mother on the phone who told me someone was cutting those trees down and building a house.  At that moment it appeared my parents would lose much of their privacy and have houses and roads to look at where there once was wilderness.  As it turned out the new people were very careful in selecting which trees to cut, and offered us the stack of logs from the clearing to use.  So my friend Justin of Wilson Creek Woodsmithing came by and we spent a couple days milling those logs into 1-inch thick material for trim and flooring for this house.  That big white pine we made into 3-inch planks which I now intend to use for chunky stair treads (just now I’m wondering if my subconscious still wants to climb that tree.) Here’s a link to a post from when we milled the boards
     After milling the wood we stacked it for years in the yard here, covered, off the ground and stickered (meaning stacked with small sticks of wood, stickers, in between the layers to allow air to flow through) so that they would dry out.  Years later when we finally wanted to use the wood I discovered the tarps covering the stacks had lost some of their integrity and the wood had started to rot. We were at first disappointed and then delighted after planing off the rough exterior to reveal clear wood with some subtle blue and grey colors.  I’m not sure if this is what you call spalted wood but spalted is one of those fun words that makes rotten sound good.  As my neighbor Rad says, “That’s not a flaw.  That’s a feature!”

Fall is about to stand up

We have been working like ants getting the house finished this summer.  Painting, installing flooring downstairs, and building a decent woodshed- and then filling it with wood of course.

Now it's on to trim.  This week we're hanging doors and planing the boards we milled up back in 2007, as mentioned in one of the first posts of this blog.

Everybody's eager to move into their own rooms.

A trip out west

The train trip out west was excellent. Sleeping in those seats, however roomy, was difficult but other than that it was such a great way to see the country with the family and keep moving at the same time. If somebody needs to go pee, they get up and go. If you feel like talking to somebody, walk down to the observation car. Bring a guitar and you might get the chance to trade songs as I did with some kind folks.



One highlight of the trip out was rolling into Glacier National Park at sunset. The railway at this point departs from the highway. There was a pair of moose standing in a little lake watching the train go by. If you ever take this train, the Empire Builder, you might consider planning to stop a night or two in this fantastic park.

We are enjoying life in Bend. It has a lot in common with our hometown of Marquette, just with more people and less rain, and much smaller and fewer lakes and streams and much bigger mountains, some of them active volcanos. Tomorrow I'm playing at Crow's Feet Commons, a fancy bike shop with excellent local brews. I'm feeling right at home.

Will work for vacation

August is blowing by even faster than usual this time.  Mostly because I've made myself super busy in order to raise a little money so I can travel with my family out to visit my sister and her husband (my longtime music making friend Jared Smith) to welcome their new baby!  We're all very excited and it makes it easy to work like crazy during this season which is so prime for goofing around to know that we'll soon be on a train to Oregon.  We are still finding times to get down to the lake, even if it's just for an hour or two before bed time.



My Oregon family has found me a bunch of music dates out there, including accompaniment for some yoga classes where Nora teaches.  This is a new thing for me that I've often thought about.  Both yoga and music have been great ways to get outside of the confines of my head and get a fresh perspective on things.

Mission Statement

I sometimes wonder why I chose the life of a musician, to major in music in college, to study song after song. But I do know that everywhere I look I see and hear reasons and logic that tell me that people are to be separated and compared, and put together in groups and so on, but in my heart I know that we are all one. Music is the most powerful tool I have known to cut through the labels and divisions our minds attach. My greatest goal in life is to allow this healing to be revealed in myself and everyone I encounter!

Recording dates

This house had its first job as a music studio last week, thanks to a visit from recording engineer Ryan Staples and his drumstick-wielding wife Stephanie Whiton.  Here are some photos.  I'm so grateful to have such kind and brilliant people come over:
























Jason Moody

Aya Jane singing a coming-of-age duet with me




Kerry Yost singing backing vocals 

Sven Gonstead playing mandolin 

Peter Gummerson on the keyboard 

We spent one evening in Marquette to record some additional parts.  Here's Peter Gummerson adding a piano and other keyboard sounds in the chapel at St. Paul's Episcopal church.  We recorded about 10 songs and intend to add a few more soon and get them into some kind of listenable package sometime in the snowy season.

Music for builders

Hello again friends.  It's been months since my last post I know, but the truth is there hasn't been much to write about with this house.  When we started building we had the idea that after a year or so I'd go back to work full time at the business of music.

Nearly five years later we got to the level of functioning bathtub (however crude) and now that switch is starting to happen.  For instance, I've started writing on the first page of my music website, michaelwaitemusic.com.  But I'll continue to keep this site up too, by moving posts over here after a bit.  The subject matter is bound to move away from house building and into things that this house allows us to do.

So to celebrate this blog-restructuring I write today about the best music for working on your house.   I've found that the different building processes each have their own essence, and so work best with different kinds of music. This is based on my scientific research done in da woods by da swamp:



Digging -Traditional Irish dance music.  This stuff makes it easy to enjoy a simple challenge, no matter how unhealthy.  I think within this joy is the urge to show the devil who's in charge.

Framing -The temptation is to go heavy on drums and guitar, classic rock or other masculine stuff.  But I find intelligent string band music (like Chris Thile or the Silk Road Ensemble) keeps me from working too hard without being too slow and thoughtful.

Plumbing -Blues.  As Irish music helps us enjoy great challenges, the blues helps us enjoy apparently endless frustration.  "Just Got Lucky" From Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown is a good one.

Electrical -You can get a little more brainless here, but to keep it moving some solid beats are in order:  try something funky like Dr. John's "Locked Down" recording.  Since you want to be moving from room to room quickly and can't be caught stopping near the boombox to catch the end of the stanza, it has to be something that you either know very well or something where the meaning of the words is not that important.

Pulling stumps with a minivan:  Definitely some kind of punk music, can of beer in the cup holder. 

Making firewood -this job is so mindless that it lends itself to any kind of music or podcast.  Lately I've been listening to the podcast called "A Crash Course in Miracles," which has turned the woodshed into a holy place.  Sometimes being out in the woods with the occasional breeze in the pine needles or a passing company of chickadees is the best -until you start going nuts with the roaring monotony.

Hanging drywall -This is the probably the reason that classic rock stations exist.  Anything loud will work though.  As with other grunt work, don't think about what you're doing too much.  Just keep moving.

Drywall mud -Pavarotti at Carnegie Hall.  Anything distinctly Italian would do I think for this.  There is something about the Italian vibe that can insist on excellence and beauty without getting hung up on perfection, whatever that is.

Seriously put on whatever makes you feel whole and shining in your work. 

There is still a ton of drywall finishing to do, but soon we'll be on to flooring, trim, and building a deck.  If anyone has suggestions for music for those processes I'd be so grateful.

Deck plans

Here are a couple of the sketches of the proposed deck that I drew up this summer.  I was hoping that we could put this together this year, but that old time and money thing said "hey, maybe next year."  Beyond fun outdoor living space, it adds a ramp entrance to the upstairs.

The end of drywall hanging

It's been a hot summer, hot enough to do your slow-cooking in the wheelbarrow, and enjoy a warm Lake Superior.  

 

I spent some time writing some songs and clearing out the downstairs.  This included building a funny temporary shed to get things out of the way.

 This August though, I've been able to get back to hanging drywall.  And as of Monday it's all up in place.

 This is a milestone not just because it checks a big task off of the list, but also because it means the wiring and plumbing rough-in is put away and I won't have to look at it or really think about it very much anymore.   See ya later (hopefully not).

 So the next phase is crossing a sea of white mud with a taping knife for a paddle.  I'm gonna need a lot of apples to keep me going, so get up in those trees, kids.

The internet goes everywhere again

Usually it's a lot of trouble to get wood into the woodshed. This guy just dropped out of the sky.

I spent a lot of time cleaning up the yard this spring. There were building scraps and then a list of other outside tasks like seeding grass and planting a few cherry trees like this one, which stands on the spot where we buried Anniemoosh.

This little guy was crawling around in a sand hole I was about to fill in. What a guy!





Here's a shot of the boys' room ready for paint. It is very temporarily a music room and will soon hold all the rest of the stuff downstairs to make way for the drywall work there.

Then we have been taking some weekends off, at least partly, making a little time for canoe trips, bike rides, and a dress-up barn dance. Erica took this sweet photo and also posted it on her blog, where wild blackberries grow.

I never fully imagined a satellite dish mounted on our house, but there it is. It connects us to the internet now, even way out here, by bouncing a signal off a satellite 22,000 miles away. I know this has been common technology for decades, but I'm still really impressed.
The computer's increase in demand for electricity has got me thinking about a more sustainable solution than our little generator.

This bridge had a beautiful green arch over it last summer built by my brother-in-law for the procession of his and my sister's wedding. There are rocks under it which hold back some water and I've had this idea to use this tiny reservoir to make electricity using a small hydro generator like the one on this video. I haven't found any other examples of people doing it quite this way, but I think it will work well.

The beauty of this setup is that since the moving parts are all underwater the ice shouldn't be a problem. I think it would be wise to put some 1/2 inch screen on the intake side though to prevent the little trouts from getting knocked around. I really welcome anybody's suggestions on this, or any other part of this shelter adventure for that matter.

April fools

Here are some photos showing what's new.  There were a few tasks to complete before closing in the downstairs with drywall. 

This shows a place where air is let in to the house to make up for air needed in the wood stove and propane appliances.  The cold air gets sent down the white PVC pipe into a food storage area under part of the floor for free refrigeration.  It'll be interesting to see how that works.

Another convenience is the antenna which you may be able to see on the roof to the right of the chimney.  It looks enough like a flag that it ought to be decorated.  It allows us to get a cellphone signal, but only when the generator is on.  Sometime soon we'll set up a more permanent electrical system, probably a mix of solar and hydro power.


So on to the drywall!  It is a great relief to put drywall up, not just because it makes the walls look like walls, but also because it puts to bed all the goings on within the wall.  I may get a notion to add a switched outlet or something else like that a few months from now, but that'll be just too bad for me.

Why not begin with the most difficult part, the curved wall?

 Getting drywall to bend is goofy work.  Sometimes it goes a lot easier than other times.  I'm learning to bend it very slowly.  These screw clamps worked well.  You can give them a twist every time you walk by and by the end of the day maybe you'll have gotten somewhere.

These openings will look like inset shelves from the main room, but they'll have a hinge on the back so you can peek out from the bedroom.

We've been taking occasional hikes up to the lookouts nearby to measure the progress of Springtime.  The warm March threw off some of the birds, and hornswoggled the maple syrup people.  But other than that things are pretty much on schedule.  Spring is always full of tricks anyway.

A friend asked me today if I was getting burned out from working on this house for so long.  I answered that the energy came in waves and I was just coming out of a trough.  This past fall's wave crested just before Christmas when we moved in.  And then there was Christmas with its own seasonal pinnacle, and the emergent details of moving in.  Once we were able to use the toilet I was about ready to take a break (which of course I didn't.)  But this past week I was granted a vacation by the flu bug. 

I'm only being slightly sarcastic, as this particular flu wasn't especially painful, and only forced me to lie around and fast for a couple days, during which time I missed a few phone calls (which seemed very important) because of our distance from any cellphone towers, and during which time it snowed continuously, allowing me to feel my weakness on many levels.

Even in this sorry state, my family coming around to entertain and otherwise care for me as well as having my own bed to lie in and look out at the snowy woods and an occasional song to sing made this an experience I found to be pleasant overall.

Sometimes I think the flu, and some other illnesses, are just some things we create for times when we forget to take a break.  Somebody stop me from working, even eating, so I can just breathe for a while and appreciate the ability to do that.

Anyway today I feel like myself again, and going outside I remember why I love the winter.  The snow is heavy on the trees but not stretching the boundaries of their what they're engineered to hold.  It hushes all the nearby sounds so effectively that today snowshoeing with our chatting Seamus we scared up a rabbit who was just ten feet away. 

It doesn't however hush the low drone of the mining drills.  I hear them whenever things are quiet.  I started hearing them several years ago when they started drilling core samples.  Erica couldn't hear them then and I wondered sometimes if my hearing (or my mind) was going.  But then I talked to some other neighbors who also heard it and we guessed like night dogs what it might be.  The theory that gave me rest was that it was iron ore boat engines.  It sounded to me like big diesels that were just running steady and I guess that's what those drills are.  I guess I wish they were boat engines.  Not that I rank those hard-working people out running a drill all night in 0º weather any lower than myself.  But knowing the richness of the minerals in this area makes me nervous sometimes as those minerals inevitably become more valuable. 

Here's a shot of yesterday's frosty sunrise.  

Our toilet is now fully functional, which means we've had to say goodbye to a fine woodrack.

Aya Jane deserves most of the credit for this snowfort, although she and Mossy worked as a team into the night on a couple of sticky-snow days.