Country living involves a lot of DIY projects. In the last two days, Todd cleaned out drain lines with a snake (picture a gushing waterfall at our washing machine hose connection); added antifreeze to the tanks in our sweet little Casita travel trailer and bundled it up for the winter (sob, sob); and he erected a tower for a hand-me-down Wilson Repeater that we hope desperately will give us a somewhat reliable cell phone signal. We are dreamers!
The above photo was snapped three years ago when our farmer neighbor and nephew-in-law Steve Bartlett began shingling his house. (The house he built himself, naturally.) After he finished that one wall and the wrap-around porch, farming and family raising got in the way of completing the project, but this summer he got down to business, and it’s been fun to watch!
Steve spent a good part of the winter logging in our Big Woods, and he snagged some Poplar trees for shingles. (If you’re old-timey New Englandy, you say “Poppal.”) When there was snow on the ground (which was November-April last winter), he chained the logs to his skidder (make that “skiddah”) and dragged them down our driveway (also known as a death-defying uber-sledding run) across the road to his wood lot. Aren’t those logs beauties?
Once he’d milled the logs into blocks, he set them on jigs (those orange metal thingies) that tip the blocks as they go through the mill. That way the wood comes out in wedges needed for shingling. (*Official disclaimer: Though I may sound authoritative on all matters technical (hah), I may be making up terms with or without knowing it. So there.)
There’s Steve shingling the front of the house. See the umbrella? It’s also used at the sawmill for rain work and to provide shade on the Bartlett’s itty-bitty Boston Whaler. Tangent time!
The little boat is named Sparkles. It all started with the used O’Day Sailer we bought about 20 years ago with the romantic notion that we were going to sail blissfully around Squam Lake cavorting with loons. Problem was that navigating out of Sandwich Bay is tricky as the wind can be, shall we say, variable. We found ourselves increasingly using the miniature motor to put-put about and finally faced the fact: we needed an actual motor boat. That sailboat was named Sparky after the mascot of the Kent Denver Sundevils (the school in Colorado where Todd and I both worked at the time), and our subsequent pontoon boat was named Sparky 2 because we couldn’t agree on a new name. (Click here to see and read about Sparky 2.) So when it came time to name their boat, the Bartletts landed on the perfect name: Sparkles. There’s the umbrella! (Like how I expertly extricated us from the tangent?)
Back to the shingling. Above is the worksite on the porch, and that’s Steve and his brother TJ working on the back of the house. Sweet! (Rachel helped with the shingling too — she’a a farm girl as well as a teacher and knows her way around tools 🙂 )
There’s the house with its lovely new coat. (That’s eight-year-old Elsa’s bike is in the shot along with the family dog, Briar, who’s keeping watch from the porch.) Like all country projects the shingling isn’t finished-finished. There’s the second floor dormer and, well, the whole north side of the house, but that just leaves something to look forward to as well as something to be proud of now. Imagine starting with a tree and ending up with a shingled house. Now that’s DIY!
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