Your Year, My Year

Today, a new form of wild life. Well, not new to the world or even to the Northwest; just new to my writing about wildlife.

Our log house features wasps. One of the many things about log houses is that in between the logs where they are parallel to one another and in the places where the logs meet perpendicular to one another and around the windows where there is trim across the logs, there are little insets, little hidden places, little dark areas where wasps can make small nests. Some kinds of wasps are willing to make small nests even though they are also capable of making large nests. They make a lot of them—I think the makers are yellow jacket wasps--in these little nooks and crannies of the log house.

They don’t pay much attention to people even though we are around the house all the time, around the logs all the time. They are going about their business much as the deer, the bear, the raccoons, etc., are and as long as we are not interfering with them, they do not find us of much interest. This is hard to believe, I know, because what conceivably could be of more interest than people? Hard to know, but in the world of wasps, people are not priority number one or even interest factor number one.

So, it is more of live and let live, life in cooperation. A few years ago, this folie de deux sort of fell apart when we had to have the logs refinished, which involved, in part, our washing off each individual log by hand. This genuinely required interfering with the wasps. We wore long gloves and long-sleeved shirts, we worked quickly and in the cool of the late, late day or early morning since the wasps were more around during the mid-day. I don’t know what else they were doing; maybe they had a big nest somewhere in the bush that they had to attend to. And we didn’t get bit very much and it hurt quite a lot only at first. And we got through with that project and we settled back into our old relationships.

In addition to wasps in the logs on the front deck of the log house, we have a barbeque on the front deck of the log house. It is fueled by natural gas so there isn’t smoke to disturb them. They don’t mind it and we don’t use it very often, anyway. Last week, as the summer season was setting in, Ed was looking to clean up the barbecue from its winter travails (it doesn’t have a plastic cover on it because it has a metal cover on it). And as he approached it, he noticed an odd thing. A wasp was going into a vent; and then a wasp was coming out of a vent; and then it became apparent that the wasps had built themselves a large nest inside the barbeque.

We are now thinking about this. Maybe we can do without a barbeque this year? This year, theirs; next year, we put a better cover on it and its ours. Or, what?

Big House, Little Woods

It snowed ever so quietly all night long, so this morning when we awoke, the world looked much more snowy than the last time I’d checked it. I still can’t get up the driveway even more so, and I don’t have high boots so I passed on a walk to the beach, although maybe tomorrow. The trees were absolutely full, every cedar branch, in particular, fully laden. But then, the slightest movement of air would cause the branch to suddenly release all its burden, which would then fall, as if into an invisible cylinder, slowly sifting down to the ground. It made me feel a little leery about going out because at any minute something considerable might fall on me.

We used to have a cedar shake roof on this log house, but about ten years ago it needed replacing and we were persuaded to change to a metal roof. All in all, we’ve been satisfied with it, but there were two things that we didn’t realize at the time. One was that the local bats slept in that roof, so once the shakes were gone, all the bats needed some other kind of housing. Ed built bat houses around for them out of the cedar shake remnants, but the last one he built didn’t quite get finished because it seemed to me that, as it was, it made a fine outdoor sculptural piece. The first photo above is of the incomplete bat house, which stands on a post about 25 or so feet off the ground, and lacks a front wall. If the wall had gone on it, bats would have roosted there, hanging upside down in their little individual cubbyholes. But it looks good in the snow, even without the bats.

The second thing we didn’t know was what happens to large snowfalls on metal roofs on a two-story house. It is a well-insulated roof, so it just stays pretty much the same temperature as the outside air and the snow on it. And the snow mounds up. So when there’s snow maybe 8 or so inches deep on it, it just sits there until the outer temperature starts to warm up. Then, the snow mass ever so slowly begins to slide down the steep slope of the roof. It projects out over the roof edge until the weight gets to be too much and then, suddenly, it all comes down at once, making a sound like a nearby explosion. The second picture is of that roof snow starting to slide down past the roof edge. About twenty minutes after the picture was taken, a very large amount of snow avalanched down on to the deck, which has glass panels on the front edge. Enough snow comes down, the panels are at risk.

I believe we are expecting snow tomorrow. Or at least I am. The odds would appear to be with me.

Keep Your Logs Dry

It’s all over now. The Tourists (on the Sunshine Coast) and the cottagers (at Point Roberts) have all gone home leaving us to clean up the garden, plant our spring-blooming bulbs, and engage deeply in home maintenance. Having two houses, which wasn’t exactly what we intended when we moved here (see earlier explanation, February 26, 2008, ) means having even more maintenance in which to engage. And having one of those houses be a log house means even more interesting maintenance.

When we first bought our house on the Sunshine Coast, we had neither of us ever even seen a log house from the outside, let alone from the inside, let alone from a maintenance perspective. I’d seen log cabins before, but a little 200 square foot log cabin is pretty much a different animal from a 3,000 sq. foot log house. Same genus, different species, I guess. We didn’t begin to appreciate that until we’d actually lived in the house for awhile. This experience, it turns out, was designed to determine whether we were still capable of learning.

A 2-story log house with a loft is likely to impress you (as it did us and as it continues to impress our visitors) with its inside more than its outside because you enter into a dark corridor (either from the front or the side door) and then within 15 feet, the interior opens up suddenly into some kind of sky and light-filled, giant bubble enclosed by wood. That can’t be the best way to describe it, but I can’t really find another way.

The steeply-peaked roof is filled with sky lights and the rest of the ceiling is pine. The logs that form the walls of the first story are of de-barked sugar pine and are many feet long: the longest, the ridge pole of the first floor, is well over 50 feet long. Wall logs are typically 12” to 14” in diameter, and the color of the wood itself is honey brown ranging to cinnamon. All this wood, stunningly beautiful on the inside, is, on the outside, another matter. Still very beautiful (but requiring lots of upkeep to keep it so), it is ultimately this: lunch for wood-eating and wood-boring insects, and destined to rot if it is not kept dry. All this exposed wood, in a land where it rains all the time. So outdoor maintenance is all about fending off water and the wood-eating/boring insects. The major maintenance key to a log house is having a roof overhang that comes far enough down so that it doesn’t permit rain to fall on the logs or, if there is a deck, for hard-falling rain to bounce back onto the logs.

Some years ago, we replaced the roof (cedar shakes beginning to go under from all that dampness, as well as from the maple and cedar trees which grow in the shakes) with a metal roof (a lifetime guarantee longer than our lifetime!) before we clearly learned about the importance of the overhang, which had been inadequate on one section of the the cedar shake roof and continued to be inadequate with the metal roof. As a result, those logs began to go damp, began to attract eaters. Thus, the maintenance project of last fall and on into this fall has been for Ed to design and then to build a metal-roof extension in that area just far enough out to prevent the rain bounce-back and not so far out that it collapses of its own weight or obscures the view from the windows. No small task: fortunately he was an engineer before he was an economist.

That’s the kind of maintenance you can really focus on once all the summer festivals and entertainments dry up. That’s where we are, and it’s almost a done deal, so I guess we (or at least Ed) are still capable of learning.