Projects, progress, thoughts, stuff

2012-01-23T03:39:00.000-08:00

At one project we are working on we have a fireplace going in. The rough construction has been done for some time but the rock veneer is going on now. It's beginning to look good:

...and on the other project we have going on, the remodel of the old log "kit" home, we are getting into some finishing touches. Most of the windows have been trimmed out now:

In the cathedral ceiling in the great room, it used to be flat across this area but we put these little "doghouse" dormers between the log rafters. They are all trimmed out now and ready for finishing:

He's how those dormers look from the outside. This roof originally was just straight across this side. This picture was taken in the summer just after these were completed:

...still not a lot of snow here. We get an inch here and there but nothing significant. I expect we will get dumped on here before it is over but there is no way we will get up to what we normally to have for total accumulation. We finally had some cold temps a few days ago. I had 25 below zero two nights in a row, but now it is supposed to warm up again. I remember 20 years ago we would get a couple weeks straight of that stuff every winter. You can't help but wonder if this will slowly change the face of the tourist industry here. Over the last forty years, the average temps have gotten significantly warmer. Maybe it's just a shorter term trend... Only time will tell there...

...meantime, for the winter festival, they are asking that everyone bring in clean snow for the snow carvings in the park.
Bring snow!
That's quite an undertaking. I think they will have enough now for a few carvings, but probably not the many carvings they usually have.

...we adapt...

2012-01-17T03:37:00.000-08:00

A week didn't make a lot of progress on the current door project in the shop, I am trying to keep up with my big projects and find time here and there for the shop stuff. This picture was taken last Friday:

The door is an interesting one. The homeowner had made a stained glass window at a class she had taken and wanted me to incorporate it into a special door. This is one of the designs I came up with and the one we agreed upon:

...so that is what we are working towards.

2012-01-06T03:50:00.000-08:00

I am finally back to working on the door I have supposed to have been working on for the last two years.
I have been working on it off and on so I am pretty far along with making all the parts, but I am just starting on the carving of the panel. Here is an early shot. Fortunately, there is just on side of one panel to carve... more pine trees, but that's OK, it's what we are all about here...

My customers often have the fault of being the nicest people and they give me a lot of leeway in scheduling and I tend to push this to the limit sometimes.
This project is on my bench now and will be my next finished shop project. Yes it will...

2011-12-31T19:34:00.000-08:00

...well we made it.
Another 150,000,000 miles or so, that long trip around our sun...
This, of course, is not even a detectable blip in the 450 billion years or so that this has been going on.
...but in our short lives here, if we are lucky, it represents a little more than one percent of our total time on this planet... for me it's 2% of my time so far.
In the northern hemisphere, we observe the end/beginning of this orbit at the darkest and coldest time of year, a time seemingly especially made for contemplation and reflection.
I tend to make a lot of observations in terms of how I can improve going forward... "I did to much of that, I will try to do more of this", "I need to stop acting like that and more like this", etc.
Commitments made mostly in vain of course, change comes incrementally at best... Hopefully something sticks and we continually move forward in some small way... assuming we even know what "forward" means.
For me I think it means moving towards being the person I was put here to be but I flatter myself thinking I even have any idea who or what that person is... Most likely I am already and always have been the person I was meant to be and the striving to be more the person I think I was meant to be continually folds itself into that person... and here I am...
And so we move forward into another year. I view every day as a gift, a whole year is beyond comprehension, certainly far more than I have ever done anything to deserve or have a right to.

Here is a good version of that great Sandy Denny tune to take us out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOeDsYx_u9Q

2011-12-09T03:10:00.000-08:00

A long time since my last post here.
We now have some snow and have seen below zero temps.
Not a lot of snow yet so the ice on the lakes should be good. I have heard there is some real good skating ice in places on the lakes right now, smooth and clear...but that is not for me.

...the big news, I turned 50 last weekend. It was an uneventful day for the most part, but my wife is not one to get just a "5" and a "0" candle and call it good, she actually gets 50 candles. I won't post that picture here, it was quite a flame.

The projects are going slow but steady. We have divided up forces between two projects now, the new house we have been working on for over a year and a major remodel we started in the early spring. I don't believe I have said much about that one here so I will talk about that a little...

It is a log "kit" home, not the type we usually work on but it seemed like a challenging project and the end plan looked pretty cool so I decided to go for it. Initially I thought I would find some more help and get it knocked out more quickly but that never works out as well as I would like.

Here are some shots of the cabin as it stood before we started:

Here would be an example of the kinds of things were are doing here. This is a "before" shot of one area of the lakeside roof:

And here is an "after" shot of the dormer that was added there:

I will post more shots of the project later. It has been ongoing for some time and is coming along nicely.

2011-11-02T04:13:00.000-07:00

I have been working in the shop on two sets of arched doors for a contractor in the Twin Cities. These, like so many of my projects, should have been done a month ago and once again, I am testing the patience of my clients. Hopefully in the end they will be happy with the product...

I have the doors themselves built and finished but the glass and trim are not installed yet. I have most of the trim made but not finished yet. The glass just came yesterday so I have that. Here are some pix of the doors after I got the final coat of finish on them:

The jams are formed now. I think sometimes there is more glue in these doors than wood. In an arched situation everything has to be in thin strips and glued up over a form. Here I have the final pieces glued in place on the second jam:

The outside layers you can see are the jam now in it's rough state. Plastic separates it from the form that I had to build when I started all this which is that whiter, wider part...

After the glue is dry, I use the form as a guide for the router, and with a flush cut bit I smooth the edges of the jam. This is the end result of that:

Now I can remove it from the form and set the form aside. I think I am done with it...
The next step is to use the jam as a form for making the stops... So, more strips glued together on the inside of the jams. They will then retain that shape and become the stops for the doors. As of right now I have a little more of this to do today, but here is where I was at the end of the day yesterday:

2011-09-05T07:21:00.000-07:00

Last week I was involved in one of those moments in time that come along occasionally... The assemble of the playground equipment in Whiteside Park, in Ely MN.

I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical when we started unloading the full semi truck that pulled up on Thursday morning. There was a lot of stuff there. Heavy stuff, well wrapped. A full truck...

Once we had it all out and laying on the ground it became an unwrapping frenzy. We became obsessed. It was a warm, humid day, and a couple hours later I was dripping with sweat. There was a lot of people who came and worked on this. Lots of kids too.

I showed up that morning not sure how much I would do or how long I would stay, but once we started, I could not leave. It became a lot of fun...

At about 11:00 am, the guys from Midwest Playscapes showed up led by a young man named Bryson Pudwill. We could see right away he had done this a few times before. He did an extremely admirable job of keeping everyone moving and busy with various tasks while focusing himself and his two men on the details. I was impressed by his energy and focus.

By early afternoon we had everything unpacked and laid out and were putting in the first of the posts and had many parts assembled on the ground.

In that last picture the guy in the yellow shirt walking by is J.J. Day of All Day Landscapes in Ely. It is probably safe to say this project would not have happened nearly so efficiently without J.J. and his skid-steer mounted auger. He worked tirelessly the entire two days and deserves a huge thanks for his efforts...

The next day we really hit it. It was amazing how quickly things started taking shape:

By the end of the day we had everything assembled and our orange caution fencing up. We wanted to make sure the concrete around these posts had plenty of time to set up...

It should be noted here that, even though we have all the equipment set up, the project is far from done. About $60,000.00 was raised, mostly from contributions from generous donors. This was enough to purchase the equipment and get it set up, but still needed is about $40,000.00 to finish with ground cover, (to make it all safe), and landscaping and a few other details. To get more information on donating funds or purchasing pavers, (the picnic table area will have brick pavers), you could contact the city of Ely:

209 E Chapman St

Ely, MN 55731

218-226-5449

...after the fencing was up and things were quiet on Friday evening, everyone had left the park... nothing more could be done but waiting... the concrete needed to set up before anyone could climb around on the stuff...
But there was one person who did not leave. Council Member Heidi Omerza. Heidi had been here the entire time helping with every aspect of this project. This has been a dream of hers as long as I have known her and she looked at it through the eyes of a child on Christmas morning. Always one to go way over and above on everything, she took it upon herself to stay the entire night watching over our huge investment of labor and money to make sure nothing would disturb anything during the crucial concrete set-up time.
...if you know Heidi, you know that's just the way she is...

2011-08-14T07:18:00.000-07:00

.and so ends out baseball season:
http://www.elyecho.com/main.asp?SectionID=12&SubSectionID=12&ArticleID=11443&TM=36463.53

One of the things the article failed to mention is the pouring rain in the last 4 innings of the second game under the lights. The kids were soaking wet but all smiles at the end of the night. This is the best picture I have showing the rain: Spencer on the mound, probably about the 5th inning.

2011-08-04T17:14:00.000-07:00

A recent shop project I finished. Make sure your volume is working:

2011-07-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

There is a secret treasure in Ely. I was unaware of it myself until a few years ago, even though I have lived here for over 25 years.
Back behind Whiteside Park, behind the little league field and softball field is the Veterans Memorial Baseball field.
This is an un believable facility that has been honed over the years to a level of beauty that, especially under the lights at night, brings a tear to the eye, by a dedicated group of staff and coaches and players that give it a tremendous amount of their effort and free time.

Over the past few weeks they have taken that dedication to a much higher level yet, (I wouldn't have believed it possible), the field is an absolute vision of beauty for the State Legion Tournament which started today at 11:00 am.

I just stopped by there and there is an energy there that makes it hard to leave, (and I am not even that big of a baseball fan). I just wanted to hang there and have some of those burgers they were grilling and sit on the bleachers in the shade and watch some high level baseball played by some of the best young players in the state. Guys that came here to play.

If you are in town town today, tomorrow or Saturday, sure, go to the Blueberry festival and get that out of your system if you need to, but then, if you enjoy baseball, take a walk back over there and witness something special.

If you are not in town and are interested, you can read all about it here:
http://elylegionbaseball.blogspot.com

2011-06-09T03:51:00.000-07:00

An old acquaintance I hadn't heard from in years called yesterday and we had a fun conversation. I had the privilege of working with this man on his log home "monument" many years ago, (I think everything Virgil does is of "monument" scale), and I enjoyed watching this video and seeing what he is up to now:
http://www.mnoriginal.org/art/?p=1673

2011-05-11T15:06:00.000-07:00

Some progress on a door I am building.
The doors are hard to see progress on because the parts are all built and all the carving is done before everything is put together. So, even though the door looks like it is nothing yet, there is a great deal of work that has been done and once the carvings are finished, the panels will be varnished and then the assembly takes place. At that point, the door is almost done.

This is basically a frame and panel door, meaning the stiles and rails form the frame of the door and the panel will be set into slots on the inside edges of the frame and left loose so that they can move around, expand and contract, with humidity and temperature changes etc.

The rails are joined to the stiles by a basic "mortise and tenon" joint. Here is a shot of what that looks like:

This is the door frame assembled and laying on top of the flat panels. The slots for the panels in the frame have not been cut yet:

I have begun the carving on the panels. They are roughed in and I am ready to go over them and finish the detail carving. There is carving on only one side of the door, so there is one carved panel and one flat:

This door will have a side panel. Again, only carved on one side, so there is one flat panel and one with the carving:

I have the jams all made and finished and assembled. Here is a shot showing the threshold of the assembled door jam:

Here is a drawing of what the door will look like on the exterior when it is completed:

2011-01-10T03:34:00.000-08:00

The winter weather and the snow and the Holidays have slowed things down a bit.

There's a few less working hours in a day when you either have to do an hour of shoveling in the morning or just hold off for a couple hours when it is 20 below zero... better to wait till the sun gets a little higher in the sky and the temp gets to zero or so...

Last year and this year winter has been more like what I remember it being many years ago. Lots of snow and cold. We haven't seen 35 below yet, but it's still early...

...we have the walls completely sheeted with plywood and a layer of foam insulation ready for windows to be installed.

Back to the roof now that the fascia has come in. The fascia is a dark brown pre-finished OSB product called LP Smartside. Here are some pictures showing the fascia going on and parts of the roof sheeted and the soffets and venting being finished.

2010-11-21T04:22:00.000-08:00

Some pictures of the project this week.

2010-10-16T05:04:00.000-07:00

...and the nice weather continues...

This new project we are working on is turning out pretty cool. We built this huge timber truss, (well, Chris and Scott built it, I just drew the pictures for them). These are 10x10 Douglas Fir Timbers. the joints are mortise and tenon held together with oak dowels. Above is a picture as it was built and ready to stand in place.

Once we were ready we had Sam come with the crane. Always a fun time:

And here it is with the ridge beams in place:

Now we need to figure out the dormers and gables and get the perlins in place. Then we will be ready for the roof decking...probably just as the snow starts....

2010-10-10T05:00:00.000-07:00

The weather has been unseasonable warm lately. Highs in the mid 70s and sunny. It's been like this all week...
I had a beautiful ride out to our lake access project on Burntside the other day. This is an interesting project in that there was no plan to begin with. Actually there was a plan but we discarded it almost immediately.

We originally started thinking we would be putting up a quick shell, log walls and a roof, but soon realized the owner actually wanted us to finish the whole thing. Wow. Didn't see that commin...

This has resulted in the most haphazard progression of I project I have ever been involved in. We have been literally flying by the seat of our pants on this one... but it seems to be turning out OK. We haven't shot ourselves in the foot too many times...

The wood floor is going in now, (before the frame walls, of course, nothing happens in order here). This is the widest solid wood plank flooring I have ever seen. I discourage flooring any wider than 6", but this manufacturer says this will be fine. Whatever. I have seen the strength of wood. When it wants to bend or cup, there is no stopping it.

I recommended to our flooring installer that he use the glue that the manufacturer recommends so that we will not be responsible when it warps and breaks the bond. Just the shrinking and swelling movement with the varying humidity over the course of a year will cause these boards to change size by a quarter of an inch, pushing them apart and opening the tongue and groove joints. It really doesn't go together very well either, it is so wide you can't force out the bends in each piece and it isn't real straight. It's wood. You have to work with wood, you can't expect it to be something it is not.

Very impressive boards though. Quarter sawn white oak, some as wide as 18".

I managed to get a huge slab poured for a basketball court this week at the Ely Rec Center. The weather has been kind to us this year allowing us to get this done this year. The whole basketball court part of the project was made possible through a generous donation from clients of mine who I have been working with for about 10 years now. Wes and Linda Gibson have been a part of the Ely summer community and wanted to give something when they hard about the project. Here is the start of that. I will put up the hoops in a week or so, once the concrete cures enough.

These are the anchors for the basketball hoop posts. They will be set into the wet concrete:

The ground prep is done and the forms are placed. Steel mesh and re-bar has been placed and tied together:

...and here we go... The contractor I have doing the job is John Sjoberg of Sjoberg Masonry:

...and finishing:

Pretty cool stuff.

2010-09-19T04:27:00.000-07:00

Back to the water access site on Burntside... As we approach, we can see the gable glass is now installed:

...and from the inside:

We have cut a few of the other window and door holes and they are ready for installation.The roof shingles have been finished since the last time I was able to take pictures:

2010-09-12T05:11:00.000-07:00

I guess I've gotten a bit lazy over the summer and not posted much here.

We have been working on a project that is water access on Burntside Lake...a small log cabin. These pictures were taken the last time I was out there a couple weeks ago. This is the approach from the lake as we pull up with the boat:

And then as we walk up the hill:

I discourage cedar shakes whenever possible...we haven't done a shake roof in many years, but this homeowner insisted on them... It is a nice look when they are new...

More recently, the glass for the gables being taken out to the building site as they are leaving the dock on the barge. This is how everything has gone across. We just drive the truck onto the barge and take it over...

This past week we have started framing a new project on White Iron Lake. In this first picture you can see the Douglass Fir timbers in their wrappings in the foreground:

The view of the lake from the loft floor:

In the mean time autumn is coming:

2010-07-25T08:17:00.000-07:00

This project was, for the most part, finished a couple months ago, but I was there this past week installing a microwave oven and finishing some other loose ends and thought I would take some finished shots. Not the most impressive of projects, but it turned out nice, and these people will make good use of the extra space when they come up for vacations.

2010-06-12T04:58:00.000-07:00

Interesting little side project I am helping out with. A small log cabin on a lake access site...
I made my first visit to the site last week. It was a nice sunny day for a boat ride. The owner had been contracting with a local barge and excavating company to work on the site prep and putting footings in.
As we approached the site, the view of the barge and the road they had built up to the cabin site. There are blasting mats on the barge and I can hear drilling, so I know they are having to move some rock, for a septic tank, it turns out...

We tied off on the side of the barge and started walking up the hill. I took a look back at the barge. You can see the ramps and the blasting mats better:

The footings had been put in. They are just concrete piers on top of the ledge rock. I had made a drawing of the positions of these posts for the contractor, but this is my first look at them. They are a little rough, but the positioning appears to be pretty good and that is what counts. And a nice view from the building site:

It's amazing the equipment they can bring over the water on that barge. Several big machines including a huge excavator...I saw it going across with two dump trucks fully loaded with dirt on another trip I took out there.

Interesting little project...

2010-05-23T04:43:00.000-07:00

I managed to throw together a quick screen door this week and get some other things in order before I went on a trip with the 6th grade class as a chaperon, to the Environmental Learning Center in Finland, (Minnesota).
Here's the screen door. I have to build a lot of these since decent wood screen doors are just so hard to come by:

The 6th grade trip to the ELC has been something they have been doing in our school for many years. I last went with one of my other son's class about nine years ago. This will most likely be my last time going, since I don't anticipate having any more children. The ELC trip is pretty fun once you get past all the "sharing" and "touchy/feely" stuff the instructors are forced to throw in there just to kill time I think. My son's reaction this time to all of it was the same as my other son last time I went. He just thought, for all the talk about how fun it is, for the most part, it was pretty boring and he could have been using his time more productively doing something else, (in this case, playing baseball...).
But here are always the highlights. The rock climbing is the big one. They have a couple great inside rock climbing walls and the kids really like this. I enjoyed it too, but only climbed one section:

The other big highlight is the ropes course:

My job was to man the station at the end where we clipped into the "zip line". I made sure the kids were clipped in and then sent them off. Of course, at the end, I had to clip myself in and go down too:

But mostly I just liked the hiking. There were some beautiful over-looks with views of Lake Superior in the distance, and because we were so close to the North Shore, the bugs were minimal. The weather was perfect. It was a good trip. We had some great instructors.

2010-05-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

A week ago we drove a car out to Phoenix for my son who is living there. We took a ton of pictures, but here are just a few:
We started off in the afternoon about 4:30 PM from Ely. We took two cars from to the cities and left one there by the airport so we would have it when we flew back. We continued on through the night taking turns driving. Iowa was passed in the night, but there was almost a full moon so we could see the landscape.
Iowa seemed to have the best rest stops:

We stopped for an hour or so and tried to get a bit of sleep in the car, but ended up just pushing on.
Kansas had cows:

We made it though Albuquerque, and the sun was setting over the mountains to the west. We realized we were not young anymore and so stopped in Gallup NM for the night. This proved to be a good thing, because coming down into Arizona was very picturesque and actually would have been probably dangerous in our sleep deprived state.

We stayed there a few days with our son in Scottsdale. Took lots of pictures, but they are probably boring to anyone else. The last day we were there, we climbed Camelback Mountain. We didn't know what we were in for, but we couldn't turn back half way...had to keep going to the top:

From the top you could see the whole city spread out:

We decided we would go down the other side instead of the way we come up. This was apparently the more popular side, there were lots more people here:

Quite a trip...very relaxing. First time we had done anything together without any kids in about 23 years.

2010-04-24T16:27:00.000-07:00

In the last couple weeks, we god some window in this little project and started on the siding.

We pre-stained the siding a dark brown. Here the first courses are going on:

It seems like the project is going slow, but we have run into some decision making snags and things that took some time. We are off and running now, though there is only one man working on this at this point.

The other guys are still tied up on this project, where we have just finished the exterior stain. Strange to be doing that this time of year, but the weather has been so nice, we left off some of the inside finishing to get this done now. You never know when we will get three weeks of rain...

Mean time I decided to start picking up pencil again...

2010-04-10T16:07:00.000-07:00

Interesting little project this last week, installing an elevator.
We constructed the elevator shaft when we built the house, not knowing exactly when the actual elevator would go in, but the scheduled it for last week and there you go.

Not mush else going on. The ice went out on all the lakes last Monday or Tuesday. Even Burntside. I haven't talked to anyone who can remember ice out this early. Maybe it will actually get warm enough to swim this year, or...Heaven forbid, watch a little league game in just a T-shirt.

2010-04-03T04:38:00.000-07:00

Still way above normal temp for this time of year...all the snow is gone. A year ago today we had about 8" of new wet snow.
...but what is one to do about the weather. It is what it is. Maybe we wont even get the end of season snow storm, but I am not putting the winter boots away just yet...

Here are a few pictures of Burntside lake, with the ice receding from the shoreline. A lot of the smaller lakes have the ice already out.

2010-03-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

The Moose lake project is getting close to being finished inside.
We are finishing some doors getting ready to hang them and bathroom tile is going in:

On the sauna remodel project, we have finished the roofing shingles and the eves and soffets with the vent strip:

We got a bit of a cold snap this past week Lows near zero, but not the snowstorm that we all know is coming...not yet. Looks like it is supposed to warm up again this coming week, maybe the 60s.

Nothing else much happening right now. I have been working on quite a few estimates and things, so it looks like we have plenty to keep us busy for a while, which is good. I know there are lots of folks who are not busy right now, so I can only be thankful...

2010-03-13T06:24:00.000-08:00

A year ago yesterday, we had 25 below zero in the morning after a snowstorm dropped at least 6 inches. This year, we have had above freezing temps in the mornings and highs mid to high 40s.

The last few days it has been drizzly with even some period of hard rain. It's kind of nice to see all the snow going, but we know we are just being set up to be slammed with one last storm...

A look at Burntside Lake, the ice is already starting to look dark:

We are working on a new little project. It is an old sauna/bunkhouse that we are refurbishing. We took all the old siding and roof off and are waiting for new windows and shingles:

On the Moose lake Project, things are moving along. Walls are painted and trim is going on the windows:

2010-03-01T04:07:00.000-08:00

I finally finished the door I have been working on. It is simular to another door I had made a few years ago, but this one is mad of Butternut Wood.

2010-02-13T04:14:00.000-08:00

Finally getting these carved panels done for this door. A small piece of blue glass needs to be set in the back side of the panel:

Then I put the first coat of varnish on:

A neighbor with a trail cam caught these images of some wolves out on the lake a few nights ago.
The are some nice looking animals:

Pacing the Cage...

2010-01-25T06:32:00.000-08:00

Well, for those of us that were looking for snow, we got it yesterday. It was supposed to come Saturday, everything was canceled in anticipation of the big storm, (which just meant a hockey game in Hoyt Lakes for us), but the storm never came...just light rain all day and 34 degrees.
Sunday morning the rain changed to snow and by noon we had several inches already. Wet, heavy stuff. My snow blower couldn't handle it so I fired up my tractor to push it aside enough that we could get up and down our hill. It kept coming lightly through the day and Sunday night. A few flickers in the electrical service early Monday morning, due, I suppose, to snow laden tree limbs falling on power lines.

Though loss for the Vikings last night. I try not to care too much about such things, but it was hard to watch.If they could have back almost any one of their dropped balls or interceptions, they would have won in regular time, but this is the playoffs...when two great teams square off, most likely it will come down to mistakes. The team that makes t

Pictures from the shop last week:

2010-01-17T05:17:00.000-08:00

Well, one may wonder if I have been to busy to keep this up lately, but the reality is, I am really just lazy. I always use the holidays as an excuse to just not do much of anything. But, I suppose that's all behind us now. We took the tree down last weekend and life has gotten back to normal.

A few weeks ago...back in 2009...we had a bit of an event here in Ely that I guess I was involved with to some degree. This is how is came out in the Ely Echo: Rec center opening

The "Grand Opening", as they called it, was really sort of a non-event. I mean there were a lot of people there, (though noticeably only a couple city council members), but "Grand Opening" usually implies that the place will now be open to be used for what it is intended to be used for...and this is not. We have the ice rink flooded and the warming room area open and the city has hired rink attendants, but the youth facility aspect of it will probably not be functioning for a while. I still joke with Chris Ismil, (IRYA Director), that in five years the windows will be boarded up and the city will park street cleaning equipment in there and it will be an almost forgotten standing joke...then I thank him for throwing my name around at this "Grand Opening", so that I will forever be connected with this project. A connection that I had been seeking to keep as far removed from the public eye as possible. Sometimes I feel like it was the final manipulative move to force me to be tied in to the project forever. I'm not sure if Chris contemplates things to that degree, but the effect, intentional or not, is the same.

It is a good project, though, and I am glad to be a part of it, although it is interesting to see the lack of support from the city on something like this. I understand their concern. At a time of an extreme city budget crisis, the last thing they want is another building to heat and maintain, even if it didn't cost them anything to build, (all the money for the building was raised from outside the cities funds, except for some "in-kind" serviced that they had to supply to satisfy some grant requirements). But there seems to be a lack of foresight on the part of the city council members, (all of them except one).

It seems to me that to make a community grow, to entice young families to move here, we need facilities for young people. There isn't even a public place in town to go shoot some baskets right now, and this was the intent, to make something nice for young folks where they can hang out, ice skate, play basketball, skateboard and even play pool or ping pong. To me, the construction of a facility like this just seems to make good sense. It is too bad the place they chose to set aside for this project is such a poor location, (and now they are all complaining about it), but it is what it is and we all have to just make a go of it at this point.

The other day I was there and one of our local police officers came by and asked how things were going. Of course, like most police officers, he never got out of his heated vehicle, just rolled the window down to chat. It was a short chat and as he started driving away, he shook his head and said, "what a waste of money". It seems to me that that pretty much sums up the feelings of the entire police force and city council, (again, except one). Though they all give it lip service, I feel, for the most part, their hearts are not with it.
The mayor, Roger Scraba, is on board, but he is a true politician who will say whatever he has to to make himself look good. He is a nice guy, I like Roger, but, if it threatened to hurt him politically, he would probably dump our project pretty quickly.

The one council person who s the exception to the rule here is Councilwoman Omerza. She has young kids herself so actually has some interest in the future generations of Ely. She has put a great deal of time and effort into this project, (on top of all the other projects she has going), and has been pretty much our only real ally on the city council. I am glad she is strong and smart enough to go up against the "good-ol'-boy" stone wall because I certainly am not and probably would have walked away from this a while ago with a hopeless shrug.

It seems like we have come a long way with this project, and as burned out as we are feeling, I am realizing just how far it has to go. In order for it to become what it is intended to be, it needs to take some legs of it's own, an I don't think there is much I can do to facilitate that, so I will just have to keep doing what I have been doing and hope for the best.

I have learned a few good things from my experiences here. An important one is that working on something is a whole lot more enjoyable when you take money out of the equation. I wish all of my work could be for little or no pay. I try not to pretend to have altruistic motives here, I believe I am a selfish person, I just enjoy the work more that way.

And, as much as I like to work alone and do things myself, to my surprise, I find I come away from something like this with the acquaintance of a handful of good people, some quite young and some much older, and one or two really good friends.

Good friends are hard to come by in this life, and no matter how this project plays out over the next five or ten or twenty years, those are the important things I want to take with me over the long run. As sappy as that sounds, sometimes it just is what it is...

...and in the end...

2009-12-21T04:42:00.000-08:00

...just working on the interior drywall now on the Moose Lake project...

They had the grand opening of the new park building/youth center in Ely this weekend. I have been helping some with that project and it is nice to feel like it is almost completed, thought there seems like a lot left to do. At least the skating rink part will be up and running so the kids can use it. I will be down there a lot myself since my son decided to play hockey this year. I was not at the main events of the grand opening, since we had a game in Virginia, but I heard it went well.

I did not take any pictures of the facility this past week. I just didn't have my camera with me at the right times, (or maybe I was just lazy).

Someone wrote a real nice article about skating history in Ely. I don't often enjoy reading the local newspapers, but this one I found fun:

Ely Echo Article

Also, WDIO TV from Duluth came up and did a piece on it last Thursday, it was on the 10:00 news that evening. You can see the video here:

WDIO News spot.

2009-12-11T04:10:00.000-08:00

The lakes are all frozen over now, it has been a very cold week, 16 below zero right now as I write this.
I took a picture of Burntside lake on Tuesday. This is the last lake to freeze and you can see there is still a bit of open water out there with the steam rising off of it. I'm sure it is all frozen over now:

We are getting the insulating done at our Moose lake project. The heating system is up and running now, so things are a little more comfortable in the house for working. The electrical is all done and we unloaded a ton of sheet rock on the site yesterday:

...and my shop project pokes along at the usual snails pace:

2009-12-06T04:52:00.000-08:00

Winter came this past week.

I was doing my weekly visits to one of the houses I recently completed that I agreed to continue checking on through the winter months, and I snapped this picture on my approach:

That was Monday, when it started. It was about 30 degrees and the snow was a sit slimy. We didn't really expect it, they weren't really predicting that sort of thing on that day, but we all knew it was coming, at some point, so accepted it pretty well, I think. That first day is always a shock but by the end of the week, we had made the adjustment. It's amazing how quickly we adapt. This was now going to be our world for the next few months and by the end of the week, that just seemed OK.

I went to the flower and seed store and got some bird seed. Up till now, I think they have been OK in the woods foraging for themselves, but with the snow and then the colder temperatures, I feel like I should try to take care of these little guys. It probably doesn't make a difference to them, but it makes me feel better.

As far as work goes, the Moose Lake project is still coming along. We have begun to put windows in and the "log" siding is almost done:

Fortunately, I have a few shop projects to work on as well:

Saturday morning we had seven degrees below zero and clear sky.

I'm guessing a total of 7 or 8 inches of snow in the last 6 days.

Yup, this week, winter came:

2009-11-29T05:32:00.000-08:00

It was a short work week. We are finally getting some cooler temps, but no snow yet.
After our quiet Thanksgiving day at home, we spent some time watching some Pee-wee level hockey games that my son was participating in, in Coleraine.

Some good games. It's been a couple years since we have had the opportunity to be "hockey parents" and sit with all the other "hockey parents", and I wouldn't go so far as to say it was good to be back as "one of them", but it is a fast paced, exciting sport to watch, and despite having to dress warmer as a spectator, spend ten times as much on gear, and drive all over the Iron Range in the worst types of weather, I guess I prefer it to basketball, though it seems to bring out a little more of the "dark side" in the parents.

After one of the games, we asked our son if he could hear all the yelling, if individual players could hear their own fathers and mothers explicit instructions, "SHOOT!", or "GET THE PUCK!", helpful advice like that, and he said no. They can hear the collective groans or cheers, but not much else. We were glad to hear this. Hopefully the parents calm down a bit before the long ride home...

2009-11-22T04:42:00.000-08:00

We are still having great weather for building. It's been sunny all week and highs in the 40s. The nights have been cold though, and there is a bit of thin ice on the quieter waters in the mornings and it's taking longer and longer to melt during the days.
Driving to a job site one morning I found this guy. The water is mostly skimmed with ice, but he was just sitting there on a rock in a little area where it was still open, enjoying the morning sun.

We are getting the log siding up on this project and putting some window in. Electricians and plumbers have moved in, so we can do the outside work now and stay out of their way.

On my other project, the well drillers came this week and drilled a well. Hard to see, but it is that pipe sticking up from the ground:

That slab is cured now to the point where we took the curing blankets off. It looks pretty nice, I think they did a good job:

...and I managed to get a little work done in the shop:

2009-11-15T05:32:00.000-08:00

Seems like not a lot happened this week, but the big thing was the concrete work for our next project was finished. The nice weather held into this week, we had highs in the 50s and for a couple days after this slab was poured, we actually had lows in the 40s. Very unusual for this time of year, but I'm not complaining. Here the slap is being finished:

On the other project, we are working on getting the skirting around the base of the building done. This will close in the building so that it can be used in the winter in the future. It was set up as a seasonal cabin, but with our improvements, the heaveir insulation in the roof and the insulated wall around the base, it should be able to be used year round.

The half log siding will go up from the top of the skirting there.

We also poured a small slab inside under the building for the heating and mechanical stuff to sit on:

We woke up to an inch or so of snow this morning. It started off as rain yesterday, but the temp dropped all day and it ended up being snow. I was very grateful for the mild weather up into this past week, but now I am OK with the idea of winter coming.

In mid November, 50 degrees is just weird. Although I can remember the first year I moved here, about 24 years ago, deer hunting in a T-shirt.

2009-11-07T05:03:00.000-08:00

On the modified "A" frame project, we are making progress. The roof is all buttoned up, so, for the most part, we are out of the weather, which is always a good thing this time of year. I have the windows, but there is no need to bring them to the jobsite just yet. We will get all the interior walls framed and then electricians and plumbers can get in and do their thing while we stay out of their way putting in windows and applying the siding.

The "A" frame beams inside will remain. They are Doug Fir that was stained a very dark brown, but we took the time to sand them so they are now the natural Doug Fir color:

On the other project we are getting the ground work in. The masons have finished the foundation walls, and the dirt guys have backfilled inside. We have put the foam insulation down to insulate under the heat tubing, and the plumber and electrician have put their tubes and pipes in place. We are ready for the slab to be poured. Unfortunately, this is opening deer hunting weekend, and the entire world in Ely comes to a complete stop. I don't understand this, even after living here for about 25 years, but from three days before opening day till about the wednesday followong opening weekend, nothing gets done in Ely. Apparently, it is not about hunting, it is more of a ritual. We see men in the grocery store loading up shopping carts with enough food to last months and then at the liquor store loading up on beverages. Meantime, I we just had the most beautifull fall day you could imagine and my slab is not getting poured. Next Wednesday they are saying...it looks like the weather will hold, but I am getting nervous. It's all my own fault, of course. I dragged my feet this summer on getting this project going and now this is where I am.

I did manage to get up on the roof of the youth center building we are constructing in town and finished the upper dormers. These stayed open last winter, although is wasn't a big deal then, we really didn't have the ceiling finished inside or anything, but this year I wanted to make sure no snow blew in there and wrecked anything. This is totally a volunteer project, so I have to find time here and there to fit it in. A bunch of kids from IRYA came and finished, (or mostly finished) the soffets, so we are moving along. We will have the warming room ready for the ice season, so, hopefully that end of it will get some use this winter once the city starts making ice in the rinks.

Inside, the floors and ceilings are done. Hopefully it will be ready to use as a "youth center" or whatever this winter, but there is still a lot of work to do...

For more info on the Ely Youth Facility click HERE.

Or copy and paste:

http://www.irya.org/projects/view/ely/

On one of my errands this week I was confronted by this guy. He appeared pretty full of himself, so I let him cross and go on his way:

2009-10-27T03:52:00.000-07:00

It looks like we might just make it with the concrete work for this new house before winter sets in. We have the footings poured and ready. Before we back-fill we will put one row of ICFs around to take it up to the floor height. Here are the footings with the forms stripped:

We have a few ICF forms on the site:

2009-10-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

I finally completed the finishing touches on the little sauna building we have been working on this summer. It has been largely complete and usable for a few weeks now, but I had to finish building the cedar slat floor in the sauna room and the doors. Everything looks good now. I added pictures to my gallery, they can be seen here.

2009-10-13T04:02:00.000-07:00

I was meeting the electrician at a new job site yesterday, but I got their a little early. The lake was like glass and the colors were nice, though this isn't going to be a great year for leaves. It was chilly, probably about 32 degrees and very quiet. I put my little camera in my pocket and took a little walk around.

I walked up on the rock in front of the cabin and was standing there when I caught something something out of the corner of my eye. It was a fox curled up looking at me over his bushy tail like I had disturbed him. He had the expression on his face that he was not quite ready to get up and face the chill of the morning yet.

I thought he would disappear quickly, like every fox I had ever seen in my life, but he just laid there looking at me, so I slowly reached for my camera. Then he got up and slowly walked over to me. Very strange. He stopped about ten feet away and sat down looking at me. He didn't seem concerned, possibly more bored than anything. He didn't look sick or anything, (like I would know if a fox is sick), just mildly interested in me. I tried to coax him a little closer, but he had no interest in that. I wonder if I had had some food, maybe he would come, but I had nothing.

We spent about 15 minutes there together, I would guess. He walked around me looking at me, sitting there looking bored, yawning, scratching. I felt a little silly taking pictures of him, he had that cat like attitude that makes you feel like you are really an inferior being, but I didn't really know what else to do. I said a few words to him, but he didn't seem to hear or didn't care if he did hear. I wondered if some of the cabin owners in the area fed him and he was waiting for something from me.

Eventually, he seemed to get tired of the whole thing and just wandered off slowly into the woods.
The electrician drove up and I told him about the experience. We talked briefly about the grouse we had seen on the road on the way in and the chilly morning and then the day moved along like any other.

2009-10-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

Hopefully we will be getting started on a new project here sometime over the winter. The most important thing is getting the foundation in, all the concrete and dirt work done before everything freezes. I always like to wait for the last possible minute to do this, just because it makes my life a little more interesting.
I was at the new home site on Wednesday of this past week and took this picture. This is the site, pretty much untouched except for a few ribbons and marking to show where the footprint of the house will be. They all start like this:

Today we woke up to a little bit of winter. About two inches of new snow, 26 degrees and very windy. It's only mid october so I am not worried, but it certainly is an unwelcome blast of reality. Here is a shot I took from the deck of the house, some of the snow had alread melted, but most of it stayed all day:

2009-10-08T14:16:00.000-07:00

We got the siding deliver this week. it is half log siding from Homestead Timbers. I don't know anything about this company, have never worked with them before, but it looks like nice stuff, as far as half log siding goes. It is all Northern White Cedar, which is interesting because we don't see White Cedar around here consistently large enough to get that many of that size of board out of. Here's one pile of it:

A plank way up on the side of the building to get the last few soffet boards in:

2009-10-03T04:22:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting project we started last week. It is an "A" frame with "wings" built lower down and we are going to raise the "wings" and give it room for a few extra bedrooms and baths. This is the profile before we start:

This is what the profile will look like after:

Here is a shot I took before we started:

It is hard to get a good shot of it with the dumpster in front, but you can see the new roof line through the trees:

Here, you can see it better from the lakeside:

I stumbled upon this the other day, I have no idea who this is, but I sure do like how it's done. Let's see...I'll put it right Here.

2009-09-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

I was back at the house we finished up at earlier in the summer. It is not completed, but the owner wanted us to pull out for a while and they were going to do some of the work themselves. We are going to build a little roof over the basement entry area and I was just there to fill the Sono tube form with concrete. The landscaper dug it in while he was there:

I was really impressed by the work the landscaper had done here. His name is J.J. Day. This is the second job that they came after me and worked on, and I am really happy with how it turned out. Here are some pictures:

The owner of the house has been working on the scratch coating of the foundation, getting it ready for stone veneer.

Another beautiful day. Seems like winter is still a long way off.

Here's a nice totally unrelated music video just for fun.

2009-09-18T04:31:00.000-07:00

Well, our work here is done, we pulled out of here to the next project earlier this week.
A strange project for us, but it turned out looking pretty good:

...funny story here, but that will have to be another day...

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh.

2009-09-12T04:22:00.000-07:00

A home that I built a few years ago is being sold by the owner. They have made a nice little virtual tour, accessable here.

They don't show some of the coolest parts of the house, like the screen porch:

Or the loft office area:

and a garage view:

...so I put a few pictures here. Still, it's pretty cool to see a little video of one of my homes.

2009-09-11T04:14:00.000-07:00

Guess it's been a while since I've posted here. It's been a busy last couple weeks.

The progress on the storage building we are working on can be seen here. Seems slow but it is such a big building. The roof metal was on last week and the soffets and walls are being done this week. here are some progress pictures:

2009-08-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

This past week we managed to get the trusses up on this building. We had a couple down days because the crane wasn't available on the day we needed it, then when it was available, we got rained out halfway through the day after getting just one set and a gable wall up. It was a somewhat frustrating week as we are considerably behind on this project, (as well as the next one), but, at least the trusses are up now and we are not having to rely on crane scheduling to move forward. Hopefully things will look a lot different by the end of this week.

2009-08-19T04:11:00.000-07:00

The truss sections are built on the ground to be lifted up later with a crane. We started this during the first real warm week of the summer. We had some days in the 90s with very high humidity.
Before that, it had been an unusually nice summer, rarely getting above 80 degrees with plenty of rain, though, in my picking range, the blueberries never did really take off.

2009-08-14T15:15:00.000-07:00

The sauna door is taking shape. I have the last few veneer boards glued on. It will look like a cedar plank door, but it is really just thin veneers glued to a plywood box core. This is the way I will try to keep this door from warping.

2009-08-09T15:41:00.000-07:00

Extreme Makeover in South Range Wisconsin:

On the weekend of August 8th, 2009, I went to a little place just south of Superior Wisconsin, a little town called South Range. Somewhere out in the country near there, a field with an old dilapidated farmhouse, (among a hundred other similar fields with old dilapidated farmhouses), had been transformed into a Hollywood set for a show called “Extreme Makeover, Home Edition”, or something like that. I have never seen the show and knew nothing about it, except what I saw on the end of a movie called “Wild Hogs” a couple years ago.

About a week ago, a friend, Chris Ismil, who runs a program called “Iron Range Youth in Action”, (IRYA), called and said he had been contacted as someone who could round up a group of carpenters to come and help on some of the finish trim work on the house. He told them he could bring five good guys who could do this work. He figured he could also bring a few kids from his program and make an experience out of it, which is a good thing, and since I had never been on any of Chris’s “adventures” with he and his group, (from sandbagging the river in North Dakota, to rebuilding homes after Katrina in Mississippi), I decided to go.

We were going to fill a shift that started at 4:00 am and went to 6:00 pm. We were going to trim windows, doors, stuff like that. We actually thought we would be needed and would be working hard for 16 hours.

We got there at 4:00 am. I wasn’t sure what to expect. There were lights everywhere around the house. Huge lights that each operated on their own generator. The whole place was lit up. There were people everywhere. I don’t know what the process is for choosing a home for this show, but I have to think that having a field large enough for a thousand cars and numerous RVs and several huge “movie star” buses, has to have something to do with it. The place looked like a fairground. There were security posts on the driveway coming in and volunteers directing parking traffic. There had been quite a downpour overnight and the field was now more mud than grass, but there, in the middle of it all, was a house that stood where the old farmhouse had been with hundreds of people in blue shirts and white hardhats moving in and out and around.

We were told the drywall crews were still in there and the mud was not dry, so there was no room for finish carpentry yet and we would have to wait. This was after we signed in and got our blue T-shirts. Not knowing how things really went around there, we waited…and waited...and waited. We found out later that there was really no rhyme or reason to the whole thing, we should have just walked in and tried to find things to do.
Eventually this is what we did. That’s not to say that there was no organization, there obviously had to be some grand plan or there would be no way something like this could be pulled off. There were a few guys walking around with microphones clipped to their shirts who would communicate with each other and have some idea where there was a shortage of help and send people in that general direction. By the time you got where they sent you there was usually a few others who had been standing around looking for something to do, that where already on it.

Before I went, I joked about probably having a job site where you would have five guys cutting one piece of trim, then five more taking it and holding it up to the window where five others would nail it in place. Though this is not exactly how it went, it turned out to be a surprisingly accurate analogy of how it felt.
When you did find something to do, it was usually at the expense of a few other people who would like to be doing that, but you happened to get there first and they would watch or find something else to do or try to help. Most people were just walking around doing nothing, which is what I spent a good deal of time doing.

We did end up trimming some windows, but the extension jams and trim were all pre-made, so, trimming a window took two guys all of about 10 minutes. The biggest job was locating the trim in the trim trailer, which probably took about 5 guys about 15 minutes.

Other than that, I helped shovel some concrete mud and helped erect a temporary shelter over a garage skirt pour, in case the rain should start in the middle of the pour.

After being there for about ten hours, I decided that there were plenty of people there who actually enjoyed this sort of thing and I wasn’t really one of them. I found it interesting to see happening, but, though I had signed on for another shift the next day, I decided they could carry on with out me.
It’s amazing how many people will turn out to try to be even the smallest part of a hit TV series, or, what I mean is, to help a family in need, (supposedly “in need“, we never really learned much about the family), get a brand new house that everyone there assumed they deserved, because they had been picked by, we would assume, Ty, himself, (who, incidentally, never appeared on the site while I was there).

I was, however, impressed with how civil everyone was. I didn’t hear a harsh word from everyone in ten hours I spent as one in hundreds of generic bodies in blue shirts trying to appear busy, (and occasionally succeeding), around a construction site/Hollywood TV set.

I was impressed by the underlying organization that I new had to be there, in order that the apparent chaos that I was witnessing could result in this project taking form and being complete in 7 days.

I was impress with a Perkins Restaurant that was packed at 3:00 am, which illustrated to me the only real benefit to this community, the thousands of dollars these Hollywood people must be bringing to this place plus the tourists coming to watch.

I was impressed by Paige Hemmis’s shiny pink hard hat and clean pink work gloves and boots when she came on to the site for a few minutes of filming.

I was impressed with the food.

But I never really could get the enthusiasm. People throw around phrases like “Giving back”, when asked about why they are there. Giving back to what? There must be a dozen incidents every week that offer us each the opportunity to do something important that might make a difference to somebody, but I didn’t see this as one of those opportunities.

I guess I’m glad I went, just to see how these things really work, but, in the end, I felt like I had seen a slice of Hollywood mixed with ordinary humans, that just left me feeling a little bit queasy. It seems we have the capacity to be so well intentioned and good, and so ridiculous, and in this case, all at the same time, (me included, I was there too).

At the end of the day, I took my nice blue T-shirt, (now a little soiled), and went home.

Here are some pictures:

This is a view from the project house looking out into the field where the tents, buses and cars were arraigned.

This is one of the "stars" standing next to a wind generator tower that they were erecting. They had camera guys up in the lift and on the ground. They put this tower up and down several times while he talked and they filmed. I don't know this guys name, but he was the main guy posing in different situations as if he had something to do with the work going on.

...Paige...there she is. For many of us, this was all we needed to see. I could now go home fulfilled.
(you might wonder, if I had never seen the show, how I knew who this was. After I new I was going, and before I went I did stumble upon the show as I was flipping channels one night. For some reason, she was the only one who's name I remembered in the 10 minutes I spent watching).

I found out later that this was a tree house for the kids that they were building.
I was up on some scaffolding when I took this picture. We were trimming some high windows. At any given moment, this was what the house looked like inside. Everyone was either trying to do something or look like they were doing something, or trying to stay out of the way of people that were doing something. The lady in black, (without hardhat), must have been a designer or something. She seemed to be involved with a huge concrete piece of "art" going on in the great room. You can see the top of it in the foreground where the guy with the blue shirt and white hardhat is working.
This is the front of the house. (I'm not so sure I would have went with the green.) This was a rare moment where there weren't too many people in the view. The guy on the right is Chris Ismil, a guy that really does make a difference in many lives. A real hero to many kids on the iron range. You can find out more about the program he runs here:

http://www.irya.org/index.php

The other two guys just happened to be there, I have no idea who they are.

2009-08-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

...and now for something completely different...
As soon as we get the sauna building done and a couple other loose ends tied up, we are going to build a huge pole building for Hamiltons Boat Storage. This isn't something we normally do much of but it is for someone I built a lake home for in the past and the location of this building is very close to home here, so when he asked me if I wanted to do it so I figured, why not?

Here the slab has been poured with steel brackets for the posts and the materials have been delivered. Hopefully we can get it started next week.

2009-08-06T12:43:00.000-07:00

With the building standing like this we started to re-think the siding. We had intended to go with regular 6" beveled siding on the lower parts with cedar shingles into the gable areas, but we started thinking this might be small enough that we could just do the whole thing in cedar shingles.
...Except for the lower 28" which will be rock...

Anyway, I decided to make this sketch and run it past the owners:
They said they like the look. I could find anyone who thought it might not be a good idea, so, cedar shingles it is...

2009-08-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

In the mean time, in the shop, I have begun to make some doors for the sauna.
I still glue up the stave cores myself, and I took a couple pictures of that process and the result.
These will be simple plank style doors, but I still need a good solid core.

2009-08-01T04:12:00.000-07:00

The framing oges up next. Here we have the walls framed and the roof framing has just begun.
It's fun to work on small projects, occasionally, that go together fast.
We've been having plenty of rain, but not a lot of hot weather. It is another disappointing year for blueberries, I don't know if that is because it was such a cool spring or what. I don't think there has been a day yet this year that has had me feeling like jumping in a lake. Maybe August will bring some warmer weather...Not that I desire warmer weather, it's just that this time of year, you start to feel how short the summers really are and, as much as I like fall weather, I don't want to start feeling like snow could be any day now just yet.

2009-07-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

Once the old building has been removed, we pour a concrete slab. The new building will measure 16'x8'. The slab is 6" bigger all around to support a rock veneer that will go about 26" high all around the building.

2009-07-26T04:32:00.000-07:00

A new little project getting started here. This old sauna building is coming down to make way for a new one. It is a small building, 16'x8'. The piece of property is on a lake in St' Louis County. The ordinance allows us to build a sauna of this size as close as 75' from the lake shore, so we didn't have to worry about just tearing this whole thing down and replacing it, (we are about 80 feet from the shore).
So, down it comes...

2009-07-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

A finishing touch on a basement bar, a brushed stainless steel foot rail.

On a side note, I felt it was an interesting coincidence that my 11 year old son, in his interest to find Hugh Laurie in "pre-House" life, came upon this video just a couple days ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJW_yTbYGoI

I know it might seem a bit insensitive at such a time in the world, but I don't take the meaning of these coincidental events lightly, so I thought it might be worth posting here.

I don't know why the link above is not "clickable", but if anyone wants to see it they can cut and past it to their browser...

2009-06-27T08:05:00.000-07:00

We are getting the staining of the outside of the building done now. The above photo shows the screen porch framed and ready for the screen, but we decided to do the staining at this point rather than try to cover the screens.

Someone sent me this the other day and asked what i think about it:

http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/23314264/jobs-vs-environment.htm#q=ely+minnesota

My response may not be the best thought out and organised, but I hurridly jotted down the following:

Well, first off, I'm not really all that "liberal", I don't think, though I took some sort of internet test recently to determine this accurately and I came out a little left of center. Anyway, the Fox news thing wasn't that bad, till the end when she said you might just have to find a different lake to go to, there are, after all, over 10,000 of them. that's funny.

This mining stuff has been in the works for some time. The testing is down around Birch lake near Babbitt, but that all does flow into the BWCA. The environmentalists are getting a little uptight about it, (I don't really consider myself an environmentalist, most of them are more than a bit nutty), but really there is not a lot being said. I like the idea of some sort of industry that might create some jobs other than in the tourist industry, but I don't know a lot about this mining procedure they are talking about. Seems to me though, that there are enough laws in place now, that they would have to come up with something pretty clean to make it happen. Maybe I am naive, in thinking large industry will have to conform to the laws set up by the EPA and folks like that, but I like to think, with the increased attention, they will have to do what needs to be done.

I guess I have taken a somewhat apathetic attitude towards all these things. It seems like thing will happen and there's not a lot we can do except try to make difference in the small circles within our reach. I am more concerned about North Korea, but that is even farther beyond anything I can have an effect on.

On the mining thing, my opinion is, it will be a relatively small operation in the end. they are never going to tear up the land like the iron ore mines did. They will ultimately create a few badly needed jobs and, in the end, everything will be pretty much unchanged, except that the environmentalists and the Rusch Limbaugh types will have something else to argue about. I have other things to expend my energy on. those nuts will never find any common ground. They fight for the sake of fighting, just like the Republicans and Democrats. There is no end.

I wouldn't worry about your real estate value dropping or anything like that.

This is one viable option for creating new jobs, and I can't really think of any others...logging would be good, but the same thing, environmentalists and local people would have to come to some sort of an agreement, and that is just never going to happen.

Like many other similar towns, Ely seems to be dying. Locals who grew up on Burntside can no longer pay taxes and have to sell out to rich people from the cities. There are so many empty houses in town for sale. The only industry will be catering to the tourists, which is a 4 month out of the year deal. Not many can make it on that. All Mom and pop businesses, nothing bigger. Just scraping by.

I will stop there...

2009-06-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

...working on the elevator shaft in our current project. This is a quick shot looking up from the main level. The elevator offers an easy way to get from the basement level all the way to the loft.
Otherwise, elsewhere in the house, we are ready to give it a good cleanup and start on the varnishing in the inside of the building, as well as the exterior stain.

It's been a cool spring so far with just about the right amount of rain. The weather has been very nice if you are not one who is wanting to take a relaxing swim in one of the lakes around here. I haven't tried it yet, but I would think a swim would still be anything but relaxing at this point.

2009-06-07T05:12:00.001-07:00

A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to set up a pool table for one of my clients. This was the second one I had done in my life and I find the task to be an enjoyable and rewarding one. Here is a picture of it in the basement of the home we finished building last year:

Way off topic, we had another one of our kids finish high school a week ago.

I've been thinking a lot about the speech one of the teachers gave at the graduation ceremony last Saturday. Just one of those things that has been bouncing around in my mind for a while now.

Apparently the students voted for the teacher they wished to give the speech. I don't know if they only had one or two to pick from, maybe out of the few that throw their hats in having interest in the job, or if they can pick from all the teachers, or how that process goes, but the same guy gave the speech two years ago when our second one graduated, (last Saturday was our third).

He had some good points, the usual thoughts to be pushed at such an event, but at one point he stressed the importance of "finding a mate", (maybe not his exact words, but that is how I remember it). "People are sociable animals and need someone to live with".

Now, I have nothing against marriage, but these are high school seniors. The last thing I would want to do is promote the idea that the most important thing they need to do now is going off in the world is to find a person to be their spouse. I would also argue that there are many perfectly happy single people in the world.

I know he was using this as a jumping off point to throw some comments about God, (convinced, I'm sure, that this was a gutsy, heroic move in a public school setting), into his speech, (marriage without God will fall apart), but there are many other ways he could have done this. This isn't a marriage counseling class, these are 17 and 18 years old young adults, most of whom are going to enter some of the most stressful, confusing years of their lives right now. The last thing they need is the additional burden of "Now I have to find a spouse".

Fortunately, I doubt if any of the seniors could tell you anything he said after the ceremony.
My wife pointed afterward that, with this particular teacher, the emphasis was on the theatrics of the delivery, not the content.

A few weeks ago I watched as a well meaning adult asked my soon to be graduate the question that came probably more than any other over the past year, "So...what are you going to do after graduation?". I don't remember anything about my own graduation, but I do remember the last year of high school having that question thrown at me by many similar well meaning adults.

In this most recent incident, the response from the future graduate was, "Live life as it comes at you". A cliche for sure, but that is probably the advice I would give if I had to talk to these young adults.

Life will come at you. Guaranteed.

Hopefully, in a few years, when I have to sit through another one of these ceremonies, something a little more inspiring will be said, and in a slightly less theatrical manner. If only for us older folks who are listening.

2009-06-06T04:47:00.000-07:00

Another cold morning. 32 degrees when I got up at 5:00. There was frost on the roofs. It is very sunny now and looks like it will be a beautiful day.

2009-06-04T04:31:00.000-07:00

...continuing work on the interior railing. Here is a close-up shot of the railing going up the stairs with the spindles installed:

It was a beautiful day here in Ely today. It started off a little cool, but later became clear and temps touched about 70 degrees. It ended up being a great night for baseball, we had a little league game where all the kids played well, none of the coaches, (or parents that I was aware of), became aggravated, and, though we were loosing going into the 6th inning, we actually pulled out a win in the end. My son said to me on the way home, "this is just one of those perfect days that you wish wouldn't have to end".

2009-06-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

Inside we are working on the hand railing that goes around the loft area and stairways. The first step is putting up the posts, in this case, spruce logs measuring 6 to 8 inches diameter. Then the rails are shaped to tenons on the ends and the mortise cut in the post to accept them. The spindles will be put in later.
We like to make the rails and spindles out of Aspen, (or Popple as it is most commonly referred to around here), it is a relatively hard wood, (compared to the coniferous species most popular for this type of purpose), has plenty of character, and it finishes beautifully.

2009-05-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

Working on getting the entry roof of this building completed. This is the project we have been working on most of the winter.
Today was a nice sunny spring day, high in the upper 60s.

2009-05-21T05:53:00.000-07:00

I finally got this door installed in its permanent place. It is the finishing touch for this magnificent house we built last year.

2009-02-12T09:18:00.000-08:00

Finally finished...

2009-01-10T07:22:00.000-08:00

I finished carving both side lite panels now and one of the main doors panels. They do not have a coat of finish on them yet so they don't look real great, but these are some quick shots that I took yesterday. I was kind of excited that I had finished one of the door panels, there are quite a few man hours into these.

2008-08-20T07:16:00.000-07:00

The side lights panels are pretty much done and finished:

The door is done too:

The carving, itself, is proving to be very time consuming.
I think in this case, I will try to get the door installed with the glass and temporary stops and then i can put the carvings in later when they are done.

2008-07-27T04:28:00.000-07:00

Here is a sketch of the newest project. We have made a small change in the height of the center rail, we have moved it up a bit, but the overall look is pretty much the same. The door will be made of Black Walnut;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juglans_nigra#Wood
It is a dark wood with a good temperament. I am excited about using it for this door.

2008-06-28T04:35:00.000-07:00

Finally the door is completed, installed and trimmed out.

The carvings appear on the outside only. Here is a shot of the door from the inside:

2008-03-22T14:31:00.001-07:00

I finished the carved panels for the door. I used a pickling stain on the trunks and branches of the trees to keep them lighter, (like birch bark), and then finished everything, including the backs of the panels, with a satin finish marine varnish. Now I can get back to work on the door itself.

2008-03-13T10:40:00.001-07:00

Here, the carving is basically done. It is hard to see well in this light, even though the relief is fairly deep. I'm going to enhance things a bit, though I'm not sure how. Probably give a slight white wash to the birch bark and then do some enhancing with a wood burner.

2008-03-11T04:09:00.001-07:00

These pictures were taken a few weeks ago as I was just getting started on this carving. These are relief carvings on panels for a door I am building.