Lark Nest spunk

My former newspaper colleague Kim Yeager, who has undergone a career rebirth as an extraordinary designer, stylist and rescuer of cool discarded furniture, has brought a little Love 2 Loveless.

My kitchen table rehab project starred in her own fabby blog this week. What an honor!

Check it out at Lark Nest Design

Once all the messy work is done in the weeHouse (floorboards replaced, kitchen countertop sanded and sealed) I’ll move my buffed up mid-century table and chairs into the space. And, yes, it will be the first furniture to arrive.

Per the Lark Nest boss’ request, I promise to get some “in situ” photos of my updated  vintage table sometime … before the end of 2013.

Buh-bye

No doubt there will be more undiscovered treasures awaiting us at the Loveless Lake shoreline come spring. But it's a milestone worth noting that we've now removed the last of the big, easily identifiable objects and given them to Mike to recycle. Waah-hoo!



A slide.





The last vestige (we hope) of multiple heavy pieces we've already hauled out from old dock and boat lift. (Squint, and you might see a couple of tin cans.)

Hard to identify, but it's a toaster.

Of course, some of the old stuff gets to stick around, as cabin art.

She made it!

Carole Bell worked tirelessly to help me buy the distressed property at Loveless Lake in what turned out to be her swan song in a kickin' career as a realtor. But in an unusual twist of events, Carole never actually saw the place. Until last week.

Turns out Carole has family in nearby Siren (former home of the weeHouse at the side of the road). Carole’s lovely daughter, Carolynn, was able to combine a family trip with a detour to Loveless, and had the good fortune of arriving when Chris was up there doing some final fall chores.

Due to pervasive budgetary matters, the weeHouse remains disconnected from the downstairs walkout basement. And aside from some old lawn chairs, we don’t yet have furniture in the weeHouse. So it was more like a field trip than a house warming -- which only means that on Carole's next visit, we'll have plenty of progress to share.

The Deck: Almost there

I’d been hoping to report a fait accompli on our eco-friendly, thermally modified, Made-In-Minnesota decking project, but we ran out of boards. (Another project in the 90 percent club.)

I’ve been trying to figure out delivery for the final few boards since late October. A Thanksgiving snowstorm thwarted our first attempt, but it'll happen. When you’re on Loveless Time, everything takes five times longer than normal. We just roll with it.

Meantime, we’ll just step back to late-September, when the deck project first began, and recall one of the most glorious days of fall...

We covered the 75 miles up to Loveless with an extra light carbon footprint that day, arriving in a natural gas vehicle courtesy of CenterPoint Energy, where my former neighbor Doug works.

We turned quite a few heads with our moving billboard. Other than an extra-small trunk that couldn’t begin to hold our myriad of power tools, you’d never know it was anything other than a gas-gulping machine.

Chris and Doug are old hands at teaming up on projects. They put in the necessary brainwork to get the deck project started, figuring out the best way to cut and place deck boards and how to work with the Minnesota  pine, which was steam-cooked in a kiln imported from Finland. (We do love our stories at Loveless.) The wood, they said, seemed to splinter a bit more easily than cedar.

With peak fall colors and temps in the mid-70s, the boys installed about half a dozen boards in the front and back decks before we cooked burgers on the grill and called it a day.

It was toasty enough for shorts and bare shoulders.

Chris got back at it three weeks later, with all the glorious foliage down. He put in two long work days with only modest help from me. (I couldn’t seem to master the art of drilling the damn screws in straight.) Chris figures his injured hand is about 40 percent recovered, but he still worked like a maniac before running out of deck boards, which he was most careful to conserve.

What a disappointment to come so close.

Then again, look how far we’ve come!

October 18, 2010 preceeding the champagne christening.

Going Thermo

If memory serves, it was Scott, formerly of Alchemy Architects, who first told me about thermally modified wood as an option for the weeDecks at Loveless.

Thermal modification is a chemical-free process where wood gets steam-baked in a kiln at 480 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes it resistant to rot and kills the sugars that attract bugs.

Scandinavians have been using the process for decades, but apparently it’s new to the United States. My father and youngest brother, career lumbermen of the Southern Pine variety, had never heard of it.

By the wonders of Google, I stumbled on John Biegnek and his upstart business, ThermoWood of Minnesota, out of Palisade, Minn. JohnB bakes Minnesota-harvested trees – mostly pine, ash and basswood – in a kiln imported from Finland and uses a mill just north of Garrison to cut them into lumber. The boards can be used for decks, floors and exterior panels.

The erosion problem that kept me in knots all summer delayed my deck-building plans at Loveless Lake, but JohnB and I spent several months talking about my options, the costs and the trajectory of his small business.

John Biegnek (Photo: NRRI)

A grant from the Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI), and funding from the Blandin and Knight foundations, gave him a leg up on getting his business launched. The NRRI is housed at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (Chris’ alma mater), and its mission fits right in with ours:  “Fostering economic development of Minnesota’s natural resources in an environmentally sound manner to promote private sector employment.”

(Recall, if you will, the great lengths we went to so we could recycle those shingles from the former cabin to support a nascent effort in the Twin Cities.)

Turns out JohnB got a separate little loan – about $19,000 – from the Shade Fund, a South Carolina conservation outfit that helps small businesses make the right decisions by the environment. JohnB used the money to harvest Minnesota basswoods, bake them in his Finnish kiln and ship them to Asia to be manufactured into guitar fingerboards.

Is that a great backstory, or what?

So as the Minnesota forest industry faces big troubles, JohnB is trying to get a new business going selling high-quality Minnesota wood using an environmentally friendly method.

I’ll write a separate entry on our adventures in deck building. We started in September but it's still only 90 percent done because were short by about 10 deckboards.

But here’s Chris and Chipper shortly after finishing the back deck. Their pose made me think that they were Bringin’ some American Goth 2 Loveless.