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.

Always Something

My mother used to say that it wasn’t one thing after another, but the same thing over and over, and the thing she had in mind was things that didn’t work, things that broke. My father was a great fixer of machines (for a living, he fixed radios, two-way communication systems, record players, and tv’s), and I think that made him somewhat more confident about having things around that were likely to stop functioning. But, like the shoemakers’ children who have no shoes, our house had shelves full of things that were waiting to get fixed. Real fixing went only to fundamental needs.

My life in that household led me, as an adult, to put very little stock in having things that were likely to break because neither I nor anyone I lived with for most of that adulthood was likely to know how to fix them when, inevitably, they ceased functioning. For me, when things break, the things need to go somewhere far away where they may or may not recover but I will not need to know about it. Or, if I have things, I am very careful with them. E.g., I have an I-Pod, but I use it sparingly so that I will not wear it out and have to attend in some way to its failure to work.

Not so Ed. He, like my dad, is a fixer of things, but he’s more likely to get around to fixing them sooner rather than later. The fundamental things get attended to right away; the leaking skylight covered with a blue tarp…somewhat later. This week, the Water Department of Point Roberts sent us our bill and a suggestion that we might have a leak, which accounted for the size of the bill. The first task was to locate the leak and pretty quickly, Ed determined that it was between the meter and the house, but not in the house or the yard hoses. The Water Department said, don’t bother to look any further; they are old pipes, they are bound to leak, replace the pipe. Which is, of course, our pipe, not the Water Department's.

So this past week, instead of drywalling, Ed has been digging a trench through the front lawn-like area: 18” deep, minimum, and about 30+ snaking feet long (Correction: Ed says it is 80 feet. I have little ability in the spacial perception aptitude area). Our soil is pretty sandy, so it can be dug with a shovel, but it is pretty rocky. That, for me, is the good part because I have a wonderful new store of large rocks to use in the gardens. Probably less wonderful for the guy on the other end of the shovel.

There are big piles of dirt in the yard (one about 24 inches tall I managed to walk into yesterday when my thoughts and my eyes were on higher things), and also a deep canyon wherein the new flexible, plastic water pipe has made its bed and will now sleep in it. About six hours of shut-off water yesterday (the worst: being without water….all it does is make me want to turn on faucets; my needs for water turn out to be non-stop when water is not available), and we have new pipes, a new pressure regulator, and a new water meter. So, for now, it is fixed, and presumably for my lifetime, since the pipes themselves are unlikely to wear out within the next 20-30 years, whereas I surely will. But I was looking suspiciously at the electricity drop line today. Isn't it a little, well, saggy?