I'd been to Snettisham four times.  I had a stockpile of supplies and a long list of potential projects.  July was looming, and with it a long hiatus from the homestead.  It was time to get to work!  A symphony concert kept me in town Saturday night, and on Sunday we celebrated Cailey's birthday with her sister Andariel and brothers Lou and Jeb at Sandy Beach along with her cousin (by adoption) Jenny and her friend Bailey.  I was a bit stressed afterwards, but the wind died down with the best forecast for a few days, and I wound up down at the harbor at 6:00 with annual leave planned for the next couple of days.  As I was organizing the boat, I looked up just in time to see Cailey plummet head first into the water with a panicked look on her face.  I think she must have been reaching or sniffing at something in the water (though I couldn't see anything enticing) and gotten off balance!  I grabbed her scruff and helped her scramble out, but she wound up cold and wet on an otherwise dry and pleasant ride south!  We passed whales at the south end of Grand, Grave Point, Stephen's Passage north of Seal Rocks (I think it was a pec roll), one at Seal Rocks, and one in Snettisham.  Just past Point Styleman, we saw a flock of about a 100 loons, and we passed another about halfway to Sentinel.  I arrived at the homestead to discover a meadow full of shooting stars which made a pleasant scene around the riverboat (which had turned sideways with a high tide).  As usual, Cailey stayed in the boat as I went to anchor and rode back on the front of the kayak.  I hauled the generator and other gear up to the lodge, had supper, and went to bed.

Arrival at the homestead

Ronquil at anchor on a misty evening

Cailey kayaing to shor

In the morning Cailey and I woke up at 8:00 and I allowed her to creep up onto the bed while doing her morning greeting and even curl up next to me for a few minutes (a flagrant violation of the rules).  It had rained hard all night, which sounded wonderful on the metal roof, and showed no signs of letting up.  I had so many projects I wanted to get started on, but the one that drew me in with the most pull was putting siding on the gable portion of the front wall of the lodge.  Years ago, my carpenter has suggested that I class it up by installing cedar siding there to match the rest of the porch, so he'd used plain plywood instead of T-111 for that triangular area.  Hence, it's looked unfinished all this time.  I finally had the material on hand to do it, so I gave it a shot.  I decided where I wanted the end of the first piece of siding to go, then measured the difference in height between the end of the board where it needs to be cut out to accommodate the slope of the roof and the point at which the full height of the board begins.  I did this for both sides on two different boards (since it takes two to span that distance) and cut the angles.  Unfortunately, I was unable to hold a board up by myself well enough to see if I'd gotten the cut anywhere close and was forced to table that project until I had help.

My next task was met with slightly more success.  My mother had created beautiful signs for all the cabins last winter with a router and I'd repeatedly forgotten to take them down to Snettisham (they'd been stowed carefully all winter).  I grabbed some screws, a maquita, a level, and a step stool and headed outside.  The lodge sign went up well, though I had to adjust the height once.  Hopefully it'll still be in the right place when I get the siding up.  Cottonwood's sign looked stellar, and once I figured out where the signs should go, the rest went up easily with the exception of Mink.  One of the screws for that sign ceased functioning half way in the board and I left the sign there dangling until I have more patience and tools to figure out how to get the screw out.  Overall, the signs look amazing and really make the cabins look like....well, like cabins!  I grew up calling all the cabins at the Taku Lodge by name, and I want that to be the case at Snettisham as well.  Having names on the cabins is a good step in that direction!

By then the break in the rain I'd enjoyed earlier had ended and it seemed that I was finally set up to work on the interior trim of the lodge.  It's a rainy day, solo project--painful, slow inside work that just needs to be done.  And it was awful, overall one of the least pleasant work days ever at Snettisham.  The work was hard, awkward, and unsatisfying; I am not in any way a finish carpenter!  Give me a porch to build or a building to frame and I'm happy (even in the rain); ask me to accurately cut and then gently nail in a piece of trim and I'm incompetent and furious.  The miter saw, loaned by my parents two falls ago, worked beautifully, as did the generator, so at least I didn't have any equipment problems.  I started by experimenting with some window trim and quickly decided that windows were beyond my will and expertise for the day.  A couple of cuts proved that joining two angled corners was going to be as impossible as I'd imagined, and the protruding sills I installed at the bottom of the windows means that some creative cuts will need to be made to fit around them.   So I moved to floor trim, which I figured should be the first of the wall trims to finish.  The cuts for this were pretty basic, as I tried nothing fancy on this plain jane molding, and they join with square cuts.  One corner remains an inch or so shy, as my attempts at filling in that gap resulted in a broken piece that I didn't have the gumption to replace.  I did have to move everything away from the walls, though, which was a big pain (this includes the two shelves of food, the shelf of paint, the cabinet, the wood stack, and so on.  This created a terrible mess all over the lodge, which was not only stressfully messy but required me to move ten times as far to get anywhere as I wandered between stacks and piles and mounds of stuff.  I can't wait for that shed!  I wound up unceremoniously throwing all my tools outside to endure the pouring rain--I'll take care of them later!  The hardest part of the floor trim was fitting pieces behind the range and the desk that holds all the dishes on the same wall, since I was unable to move the one and unwilling to unload the other enough to move it.  Poor Cailey suffered all day as well; it was hard to move around, and harder to nap what with the constant nailing and sawing.  She looked as unhappy as I felt.

After I had all the floor trim down I started working on the ceiling trim, which is cut to fit in the 90 degree space perfectly.  The first few pieces went up pretty well, but the pieces that met in the corners were a little more difficult and I often had to recut them.  The best I could do (read: the best I was willing to do) to make the corners fit was to make a 45 degree angle on one of them so it kind of overlaps better than a square corner on a slanted piece.  After I'd nailed a few in, I went back and finished nailing all the floor pieces in (I'd left most of the nails sticking out in case I needed to make changes).  Somehow that made me feel better.  When I got to the back wall I saw right away that the ceiling sagged too much in the spot where the panel fell down this spring to attach a straight piece of trim across the bottom of it.  I was going to have to stop and fix the ceiling before I went on.  Previous attempts at fixing the ceiling in all its droopy spots had consisted of adding screws by hand.  This did secure the panels enough to prevent them from falling down, but did not much improve the sag and most of the sagging boards didn't even meet up with the joists.  I didn't think the maquita would make much of a difference, but boy was I surprised!  The extra power sucked the ceiling panels right up and I wound up with a flat ceiling.  I had to do the same for the opposite wall, which went just as well, and I sucked up the droopy ones in the middle too.  It's amazing how much better the room looks with just those panels flush with the others! 

The very worst part of the ceiling trim was figuring out what to do with the big gap half way down one of the walls where I'd stopped installing ceiling panels (there was no easy way to get such a skinny piece of wood up there and secure, so I'd left the gap).  In the end, I went ahead and installed trim, which left a small gap; I'll figure out what to do with it later.  Finally, I installed trim in three of the corners, after which I ran out of that kind of trim (I left the easiest corner to do later).  Two corners proved to be ridiculously hard, as both had gaps; one was so large I didn't quite cover it with the trim, the other was just large enough to suck the trim in at the bottom.  For both I cut small pieces of wood to place behind the trim so it didn't get lost in the gap.  But, it was a painstaking and unrewarding task.

By then I was fed up.  It helped a little to move everything in place back against the walls, which took surprisingly little time.  I had soup for dinner at about 7:30 and began to relax, trying not to focus too much on the flawed trim around me. It was early enough that I thought I might keep working, but I wasn't up to heading outside after dinner in the rain and starting a new project.  And then I had an epiphany.  I have a single episode of Millennium on my iphone (Luminary, a.k.a. the Alaska Millennium) which I then set up to play while I cut up the asphalt shingles I'd brought down.  I'd covered about half of the main boardwalk with shingles last summer, and badly needed to finish it with all the rain we'd been having (the shingles add traction to otherwise slippery boards).  Cutting shingles is a fairly boring task, but with Millennium playing in the background, it was downright pleasant and I finished in no time.  I played a few unsuccessful rounds of solitaire after that, then retired to read in bed at about 8:00.  While I was brushing my teeth, Cailey snuck into bed and curled up, looking adorably guilty when I finally spotted her.  She was chilly, so I covered her up with some of the excess comforter when she moved to her dog bed.

Lodge mess

Guilty look

Tucked into her dog bed

It rained hard all night, and was still at it in the morning, but that didn't stop me from suiting up and heading out.  My first task was to nail down the asphalt shingles.  I'd overestimated the width of the boardwalk, so had to cut an inch off of each piece before I started.  I laid them all out (six black, then six green, etc.) all the way to the end of the board, then sat down and started nailing.  It was dumping rain, just like it always is when I work on the boardwalk!  But, eventually I had a virtually slip-free path, a vast improvement for everyone (including the dog)!  Then I started work on the other task that I was anxious to finish--putting roofing on the new shed to get it some protection from the weather.  I'd discovered earlier in the morning that I didn't have any metal roofing left over from the lodge (I remembered then that I had used it all up on the bear proof box), so I thought I'd check out the roofing material that someone had staged on the property many years ago.  The only two signs of recent activity on the homestead when I got there was a  pink tote of food and other supplies stashed in the big tree cavity and a half-buried bundle of metal roofing material.  I'd used two pieces of the crown to cap both my outhouses, but otherwise had left it on the side of the trail.  I untied the two ropes that bound the pile together and, with some effort, cleared the top piece of the three inches of dense dirt and roots that had covered it.  Below I was shocked to find a stack of about 20 13' pieces of metal roofing!  It had been used before (evidenced by the screw holes), but was in amazingly good condition.  I took a couple of shorter pieces off the top as well as a piece that had a bit of rust setting in, then half carried/half drug the next four pieces down the path to the shed.  I settled on a length of 127" (sticking out two inches in the front and three inches in the back), marked a piece, and began to cut.  And oh, what a painful process that was!  I wonder how people normally cut metal roofing?  I suppose they use electricity.  I was using tin snips, which I've done before with much more success (at least I'm sure I had more success or I would have remembered the torture).  I timed how long it took to cut across the not quite three feet of metal the last (and quickest) time around and it took less than 15 minutes.  That doesn't sound too bad, but it was incredibly slow and agonizing, sometimes snipping away at it only a millimeter at a time.  My strategy was to cut from one end through the first ridge and to second ridge, then start from the other side and finish the job.  The result was a very jagged edge with deadly spurs sticking out, but it wasn't going to be placed where anyone could get hurt.

I cut the first one before putting up the cross pieces on the roof to support them.  I figured I had two options there: a full plywood ceiling or 1x4s that crossed the roof at intervals.  The latter seemed the better choice, but the stash of 1x4s I have (waiting to get turned into firewood) were too rotten for the purpose (which bodes well for breaking them into wood stove-sized pieces).  It occurred to me that I had quite a few hemlock siding panels left over from the inside of the lodge that would work perfectly and which had no other use.  I pulled seven out, cut them eight feet wide, and spaced them out on the roof about 18 inches apart.  There was still a significant gap, so I scrounged up one more and cut it to fit (actually, the process of selecting panels required several return trips to the lumber pile, each time painstakingly removing the larger lumber holding down the paneling).  I secured each panel along one side with a single nail so it would pivot, then moved to the other side (working from the step ladder).  Once I had them all arranged, I got up on the roof and nailed them all down, double nails along the edges and single nails in the middle (yes, I was cutting corners, but it's only a shed, right?).  Somehow I'd managed to nail in the very last joist an inch farther back than the others, which made lining the final boards up impossible, but I don't think anyone will notice.

At some point in there I broke for lunch, watched a huge group of mergansers downriver, and cut the other two sheets of metal roofing.  I'd considered whether to put up three or four pieces, but the difficulty in cutting them decided the issue.  They overhang each side by only a couple of inches, but I think that should be okay.  It had stopped raining for an hour or so as I worked and I was grateful.  It picked up again when I was on the roof, though, and a big squall came in.  Low tide was around three, so I intended to leave right then or just after to avoid kayaking out to the boat (the boat had been just barely aground at low tide the day before).  After I put the roofing panels in place, I raced down to the boat and tied a line from the stern back to a rock on the beach so I could better fetch it if the tide came in.  I needed to secure the roofing panels before I left or they might fly off in the wind, so I needed a little more time.  Cailey followed me and found her birthday bone in the glove compartment (a rare, real bone from my mother).  With that treat she opted to stay on the boat in the pouring rain while I ran back to work on the roof.  Armed with a hammer, a 16 penny nail, the maquita, and a pocket full of screws, I circled the roof hammering holes in the metal and screwing in roofing screws.  It needs a few more to be really secure, but at least three sides are secure and the adjacent panels are screwed together and to the roof. 

Nailing in the shingles	Finished path	Unearthing the metal roofing
Nailing in the roof supports	Shed with a roof!	Closeup of the roof

Racing against the tide, I closed everything down and carried all my gear to the boat in one long trip, then returned to get the battery from the riverboat (which had apparently just died before I arrived, as there was no water in the boat).  As there were no high tides coming up, I felt comfortable leaving the plug out to let the boat drain naturally.  With everything loaded, I coiled in the line and pulled us into deeper water with the anchor.  The squall had passed, but Cailey was soaking wet from hanging out on the boat and I threw a blanket over her on the way home.  We saw a whale along the shore north of Seal Rocks and I don't remember where else.  A nice following sea carried us home comfortably in the rain.