Christmas at Loveless

The weeHouse flew through the air about a year ago, arriving on its Loveless perch on Dec. 22. My how time flies.

The place is still pretty far from being ready to entertain overnight guests, but here’s hoping that a year from now we’ll be welcoming fellow adventurers to Loveless Lake – with steaming mugs of coffee sipped from this most handsome Christmas gift from my brother and his wife.

Merry merry.

Save the date

Just in time for the end of the world and the Mayan calendar, winter has arrived in the Midwest. The blog, in turn, has taken on a new wintry design as well.

Twelve inches of snow dumped on Minneapolis a couple of weekends ago and, if weather.com is to be believed, Loveless got about 14 inches.

Soon, the lake will be frozen enough for us to ski and snowshoe and fish. Chris is starting to talk about hosting a fishing and frolicking party in frosty February, so here's hoping we all survive the doomsday.

Mark your calendars!

How ‘bout them Cheese Heads?

From F&A Dairy's web site.

Here’s a great story about my Loveless Lake tax dollars at work. (Since I can’t vote, the least I can do is support progressive thinking wherever I can find it.)

According to a recent story on WCCO-TV, Polk County officials have found a new use for the briny waste water from the F & A Dairy plant in nearby Dresser, Wis. As it happens, the salty byproduct works wonders in melting winter ice off of the roads.

For the past four years, the county has been experimenting with the cheese whey – remember Little Miss Muffet? – and discovered that it’s cheaper and more effective than the magnesium chloride that normally gets mixed with the salt before getting spread on roads.

F & A Dairy, which we drive by on the way to the weeHouse, churns out 5,000 gallons of the brine waste a month, according to the report. It charges Polk County 9 cents a gallon to haul it away.

The county said it has cut its use of salt by about a third, and saved taxpayers $40,000 by substituting the brine water.

“It’s a win-win for both us and the dairy,” Polk County’s Mike Norby told the TV station. “They get rid of their waste product and we get it for free, for just the trucking costs.”

Rock on, Cheese Heads!

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.

Two years in review

Confession. I still have some “what the hell are you doing?” thoughts, two years later. They seem to strike when I’m in the city, where checkbook matters inevitably take center stage.

When I actually arrive at the woods and weeHouse and Loveless Lake (these days, sauntering down the awesome Saturn Deck), it’s so mind-blowingly fun and beautiful and full of surprises, that all of that left-brain, Monday-thru-Friday handwringing stuff just falls away.

Who knew two years ago that I would have the stomach to take on all that trash and see the beauty in this piece of land on the verge of foreclosure? (OK, confession No. 2. I didn’t have the stomach. Chris did.)

And then … who in the world goes around hiring crane and crew and watching a weeHouse that was bought -- sight unseen -- fly through the air onto that piece of land? (Great coaching from Alchemy.)

My latest thing, as yet unchronicled in this blog (soon, very soon), is to buy some deck boards from a guy in Palisade, Minn., who is harvesting Minnesota wood and baking them, without chemicals, in a kiln imported from Finland.

What an adventure.  And, I do believe, we’re bringing a whole lotta love to Loveless.

The current scene, with the aging Chipper.





Rubble, October 2011: Chris, left, and The Builder

 

October 2010: Day One.

Happiness is …

Friends who visit with treats!

Ramona and Margaret made Loveless part of a fall exploration adventure that included lunch at Café Wren, in nearby Luck, Wis., where they picked up some yummy peanut rolls to pair with homemade zucchini bread baked fresh in  Margie’s St. Paul kitchen.

We enjoyed said treats during their visit, and Chris and I got to snarf up leftovers with our coffee the next morning.

(I was too busy showing them around to remember to take photos of my actual friends, hence their essence, in food.)

Just because

I’m posting this picture just so it’ll remind me how beautiful it was last Sunday when we started building the deck. I don’t know how experts measure “peak” fall color, but the sky was blue (the lake was green) and the maples, oaks, basswoods, birch and whatever else I’ve got growing there that I haven’t yet learned the names of were absolutely brilliant in the afternoon light. Man, will this be a treat to look back on sometime around Jan. 15.

Those stripes on the side are my attempt to figure out what to do with the basement concrete. I’m experimenting with dark browns, but I’m not sure I’ve found the right thing just yet. I ordered enough Minnesota pine to put a “skirt” around the perimeter under the weeHouse, but I’m not sure that’s the right direction, either.

Architect’s plans called for The Builder to spray a transparent water sealant on the foundation so we could go with the natural concrete forms. Instead, there’s baby-blue spray on it. We’ll get ‘er figured out.

Ideas? I’m all ears.

Presenting … The Saturn Walkway

Visualizing things is not what you’d call my strong suit. But I’d always imagined I’d turn the huge pallet of very fine cedar decking that came with the weeHouse into a walkway that would lead down to the house from the driveway (once we cleared out the pontoon, motorboat, astroturf carpet and assorted trash and weeds). I just wasn’t sure how it would all come together.

Mike, our scrapper-scavenger-builder-entrepreneur friend, suggested we use some I-beams he’d salvaged after a mobile home burned down near his home in south-central Minnesota. Swell idea!

Over a recent long weekend, Mike, along with the still-healing Chris and my up-for-any-adventure friend, Aaron, worked like mad and got the Saturn Walkway built.

Here's the story:

In the beginning, there was an enormous pallet of quality deck pieces.

 

Mike drove this trailer of I-beams verrry slowly through the Twin Cities and up to Loveless.



We staked out the expected pathway, and picked our starting point at the weeHouse.

Mike scrawled some numbers and pictures into my reporter's notebook and got out the torch.



Chris and Aaron started digging post holes.



 

Oops! Call before you dig. What is this? Copper wrapped in electrical tape?



Mike figured out how to lock the I-beams to create stairs and gentle sloping walkway.

Aaron and Chris mixed a slurry of concrete for the posts.

At setting sun, the final I-beams reach the driveway!



Aaron prepares his camping hammock. (Before dawn the next morning, an owl swooped so low Aaron felt the power of its wings.)



A new day: Bring on the deck -- which Chris disassembled b/c it was too heavy to move otherwise.

Aaron digs in.

Lookin' good!

Welcome to the weeHouse. (Visualize with giant ferns and railing.)



Saturn Sky, deck and "my" weeHouse in their former lives.

   



On a roll

Wouldn’t you know that after a spring and summer of monsoons, just two little rain showers have befallen my humble plot in the three weeks since landscapers graded out the land and rolled out some fabric and grass seed?

Fortunately, I ponied up an extra $78 dollars so the crew would set up an elaborate timing system, courtesy of Menards, that sets off four sprinklers, twice a day, for 20 minutes each. Gravy train!

About three weeks ago.





Critters...



...hoping to take up residence for winter?

P.S. For northwestern Wisconsin readers, I’d recommend Jon Hol to anyone looking for a guy who’s trustworthy, dependable and who knows his native landscaping stuff.

Catch-and-release

Mike and I were working by the weeHouse, when Chris (on break) ran up Stairmaster Hill to prove there were fish in the lake. This was the first of three – count ‘em, three – large-mouth bass he reeled in (and set free) during our weekend of building the Saturn walkway. 

What a beautiful fish. I think I’m going to really dig this “up-at-the-lake” thing. Chris has started planning the Loveless Bass Open.

Cocktails?

Seems we’ve turned up nothing but corroded Miller beer cans and the occasional condom package (two, so far) as the earth continues to spit up lost treasures from a Loveless life previously lived.

But Chris’ recent discovery of this low-ball glass (plus a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade) conjures up thoughts – yes, fleeting – of a little more high-brow toasting beneath the towering maple trees.

Hmmm. Jack Daniels, Mountain Dew and a twist of lemon, perhaps?

Old dog, new tricks

One cool thing about being a newbie to the cabin lifestyle is that there are so many firsts.

Like getting Chipper into a canoe.

As a puppy, he easily took to hopping onto a hammock, especially when long naps ensued. Seemed logical to think as a 10-year-old he’d enjoy riding in a wobbly water vessel, too.

The two of us went on our first sojourn a few weeks back. Although he was a little tense, it worked out OK. Adding Chris – and especially a fishing rod – into the mix proved more challenging.

It clearly is in his Labrador DNA to try to retrieve that splashy thing that Chris tosses out on his fishing pole. Though Chipper listens to “leave it,” I haven’t figured out the right training method (other than distraction) to get him to chillax and actually ignore it when Chris throws out a cast.

On our most recent trip around the lake this weekend, Chipper’s first containment challenge came within minutes, when I forced him to stuff his deepest doggie desire to leap into Loveless to check out a neighbor’s Rottweiler on the shore.

Next, as we passed a no-wake buoy, he barked and PUT A PAW OUT of the canoe before succumbing to my shouts from the stern. (In his defense, it did look mildly like those fetchers used to train bird dogs. Maybe he's been watching too much Ron Schara on TV.)

By the time we got 20 feet from shore, he was done listening. He lobbed himself overboard, somersaulted underwater and used that giant tail to rudder himself to shore.

Next time, treats?

The allergens of Loveless

Chris has itchy eyes and is sneezing up a storm (which sends Chipper into a brief state of apoplexy). I woke up this morning with a puffy eye and cheek after a day of cleanup.

I’m not complaining. It’s more glorious exploration, as far as I’m concerned, to see what has erupted on the groundcover-free Loveless hillside since spring.

One prize: what seems to be the world’s tallest dandelion. It’s probably a close cousin, whose nice yellow flowers were broken during a Saturday rain.



Spiking at 5-feet. Any ideas?

We’ve also got plenty of butterweed and ragweed, the scourge of sensitive noses everywhere. I was heartened to read that goldenrod is wrongly accused of causing allergies. I have lots of it on the north side, and I quite like the look of it. As I was researching it, I chuckled at the descriptions of where it likes to grow … “disturbed areas” or “roads, ditches and waste areas of North America.”

Pretty much describes Loveless --before we started bringin’ the love, of course.

At any rate, these weeds may not long for the earth (at least until next year). Now that the retaining wall is built, I’ve hired a landscaper to grade the hill, bring in some top soil and throw down some grass seed.

In the landscaper’s words, we need to “stabilize” the site before we can do much else.

The Wall

This hardworking bunch finally pulled off the first major post-construction project at Loveless Lake. I’ve now got a lovely tiered retaining wall to keep the earth and water away from the walkout window in the basement. (To celebrate, I've given the blog an uplifting new design as well.)

Jeff, Chris, Kobe, Mike toast a job well-done.

 

Recall the scene in late May…

 

At least the ferns were happy.



Mike figured out that The Builder never caulked under the sill.

The retaining wall project got postponed six times for rain or heat. We were 0-for 3 on consecutive weekends and facing 0-for-4 on Friday night when another storm rolled in after midnight.

(And it was a doozy. My neighbor’s house in Minneapolis caught fire after getting struck by lightning from the storm, and Mike and young Kobe spent a terrifying night in Mike’s sailboat on Loveless Lake.)

Chris and I headed up Sunday not knowing what we'd find. We figured the worst that would happen is we’d get there and have to, I don’t know, maybe play in the water or go canoeing or fishing or something.

Sunday turned out to be a fine day to work. Low humidity, temps in the low 80s. The delays ended up giving Chris’ hand more time to heal, and Jeff was willing to motorcycle over to add some muscle.

With three professional handymen -- and support from the peanut gallery of Kobe, Chipper and me – the boys pulled it off in a really long work day that went something like this:

  

Thank you, gentlemen.