A Sunnie Day (Gershwin had the foggy one)

Chris reeled in the first fish at Loveless! It was a little catch-and-release sunfish. I wasn’t there to record the proud moment on digital pixels, but Chris offered proof of the sunnie (one of four, in fact) before he set it free into the spring-fed waters of Loveless Lake, which now sport a lovely shade of chartreuse.



My colleague Dennis Anderson wrote a great ode to sunnies.



Chris tells me you can catch a sunfish without even trying. Well, I’ll be dancin’ a jig the first one I snag.

Meanwhile, the fiberglass boat is gone. Yay Demolition Dave! And Chris, bless his heart, is working his arse off to try to clean up the joint as we prepare for the arrival of the weeHouse.

I’m talking to folks to hire for the work ahead – septic excavator, well driller, masonry guy, carpenter, electrician, plumber … Heaven help me.

Here’s me trying to explain things: Yes, we’re going to drive these giant trucks down my neighbor’s driveway to get to my site … No, I just need you to build a foundation ... Yes, we’re going to drop this weeeeeeeHouse right on top … No, I’m going to finish up inside of the basement when I have more money …

I hope to meet with a builder on Sunday who'll be willing to take on a small and funky job. Surely, he'll want to bring a little love to Loveless.

A 'wee' bit wet

The storm that tore through northwestern Wisconsin on July 1 spared Loveless, but it apparently whalloped the weeHouse as it sat on a frontage road in the town of Siren.

A tree branch fell on the roof and caused enough water damage, that this was the scene when Chris and I went to check it out last weekend. Shrouded in plastic and completely stripped to studs inside.

It was a bit of a shocker. Alchemy is all-pro, though. They’re fixing the roof, replacing the rotten wood and installing a whole new interior – floors, walls, ceiling, light fixtures, and kitchen cabinets, pretty much everything but the kitchen sink.

I heard on the drive home tonight that 2 million cords of wood are on the ground, a year’s worth of harvest.

An August surprise

I’m now the proud owner of a “pre-owned” cabin. But it’s not the fixer-upper sitting on the side of Hwy. 8. It’s a fabulous weeHouse!!!

It’s actually a wee, weeHouse – slightly smaller than Alchemy Architect’s studio version. It had a past life doing double duty as promotion for weeHouses and a showroom office for the Saturn Sky convertible.

The only things missing are a bathroom and stove. Otherwise, it’s top-notch: bamboo floors and walls, Ikea kitchen, Andersen windows, maintenance-free steel siding and a gigantic and awesome cedar deck.

Alchemy will help me design and build a bedroom +bathroom to add on, and then we’ll be ready to roll it the 20 miles or so down Wisconsin Hwy. 35 from her current home in Siren, Wis.

I considered buying it last summer when I first started my hunt for distressed lakefront property, but decided it was out of my price range. In fact, it was this story about a weeHouse near Duluth, which I checked out with my Realtor, got me musing about a cabin in the woods in the first place.

By dumb luck I just happened to go to Alchemy's web site (I was looking for a bunkhouse to build instead of a cabin) and saw that the price had dropped more than a wee bit. I jumped on the chance. My land is mostly cleared and I was already geared to move a building twice that size onto Loveless. All the makings of good chemistry (set).

So, yes! A far cry from the log cabin on wheels. Had those folks not left me hanging for a week – with an offer priced at the builder's suggestion – I’d be writing a different tale altogether. Just as much fun, I’m certain, but very different.

The art of a deal

Some recent fortune cookie wisdom

I’m now trying to buy the cabin on wheels, where talks suddenly have gotten funky. Can’t tell if there’s another buyer in the wings or whether I’m getting a little Cityslicker blowback or who knows what all. I'm having to work through the builder, who co-owns the moving company but doesn't own the cabin. His partner/excavator is dealing with Mr. Cabin Seller, who now doesn’t seem to want to deal at all. It's been five days since my offer.

Are negotiation and compromise dead? I can’t find it in my newsroom, where our union faced an unnecessarily aggressive management proposal and voted to extend a concessionary contract we bargained when the Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy. I can’t find it in my state, where dysfunction and bullheadedness shut down the government for a record 20 days this summer. I can’t find it in my country, where lawmakers played such brinksmanship over raising the debt ceiling that Standard & Poor lowered its credit rating. The market is not happy.

The good news: if the fixer-upper cabin deal doesn’t work out, I’ve got lots of great ideas for what I can build on Loveless. (And if the financial meltdown continues, maybe we'll just camp out for a spell...)

Cabinologist on board

Loveless has put Minneapolis architect Dale Mulfinger on the payroll.

He made a recent trip to Loveless Lake and checked out the cabin on wheels (which he calls the “mobile home”) and the land. Mulfinger gave the thumbs up, and worked up some cool drawings  to add a little of his signature “Wow Factor” to the fake log building.

Version 1: Traditional view with screened porch and funky walkway:

Version 2: Make the back of the building the front, put in a walkout basement and create a wall of windows lakeside:

Shingle Shim-Sham

Update on the shingle recycling saga. We were able to get the $18 rate for our second half-ton load – victory! But even though I’d gotten written approval and surrendered my credit card info beforehand, it took another two hours at the landfill to get it all sorted out.

Every citizen should take a trip to the landfill, just to see in living color what happens to all of our stuff.

The 120-acre Dem-Con facility opened in 1985 to take construction and demolition debris and “conserve airspace” from the metro area's municipal mixed solid waste landfills, according to the glossy brochure we picked up waiting for approval to dump our humble load.

Their landfill has a capacity of 13 million cubic yards, and, low and behold, 7 million remains. That’s about 20 years of use.

Necessity, that mother of invention, sent the company to thinking about recycling. That, and the fact that they can make some money on the commodities market for metals. But Dem-Con says that builders started asking them to recycle as well.

Chris and I sat outside the sorting warehouse and watched trucks back into the building and dump their construction scrap. Pretty cool operation.

Shingle recycling is new. They get ground up on site and used in hot asphalt road mix. Dem-Con claims it’s saving “tens of thousands of cubic yards of landfill space” and reducing dependence on virgin oil used to make the asphalt.

For consumers, the operation clearly yet doesn’t live up to the company’s mission of “delivering options for contractors and the general public to recycle and recover materials they wish to discard.”

But in the end, we prevailed in our mission to keep the Loveless shingles out of the landfill. And learned a heckuva lot in the process.

That's the grinder in the background.