My husband loves to build things. He said that if he had
known that an engineer can do more than just drive a train, he would have
studied structural engineering in college.
As a kid, he and his brothers built the usual things: a
go-cart, a tree fort, and even a Sea Flea for zooming up the river at the
cottage. He built his first house after university and a work stint in
Manitoba. He and a buddy bought the land together and they each invested in the
build. My husband (who was neither a husband nor a Farmer at the time) chose
the house plans: a sprawling bungalow with a 12-pitch roof.
“We built the biggest house in Chatham,” he remembers. It
was quite an undertaking for a first build, and not without its challenges. But
it seems the man thrives on challenges.
The next build was actually a reno, on a stone century house
near Oxford Station, in 1990. Then he built another bungalow (with a more
reasonable roof this time) on Smith Road. Finally he set his sights on a farm.
He started scouting for properties, dreaming of one day owning and fixing up a
red brick Canadiana farmhouse. He ended up buying 200 acres on O’Neill Road,
and building a house from two sets of designs put together. During the ice
storm. Like I said – a challenge does not deter this man.
While raising little girls, he built life-size dollhouses
that they could walk into. The play house in our yard is a perfect tiny replica
of a farmhouse with shingles and window boxes and a little front porch. It is
wired for electricity and has a little kitchen complete with child-sized
cabinets inside. Stairs lead up to a tiny loft for sleeping. It has now been
taken over by a family of groundhogs and is slowly disintegrating into the
earth, our very own art installation.
Since we have been married he has built a split-level home
on Jig Street near Bishop’s Mills and he fixed up an old farmhouse (but not red
brick) around the corner. Then he heard someone was getting rid of a pile of
cedar logs after cleaning up their forest. He started researching log cabins.
He got the logs for a great price – but the catch was he had
to pull them out of the bush himself. That winter he would spend the better
part of a day collecting just two or three logs at a time. The tractor got
stuck in the snow and the logs were extremely heavy to move, snapping the
chains, but he did it with patience and persistence, all by himself.
Once he got the logs to the build site, I had to come and
see for myself how he was managing to do this solo. I made a video of him
putting a chain around the log and over a tree branch, tied to the back of his
truck. With this pulley system he raised, swung and lowered the logs onto the
scaffolding and then reached up to tip them into place on the wall.
That cabin was a real work of art with a hand-hewn fireplace
mantle, huge ceiling beams and contrasting shades of wood on the door sills. He
sold it for a tidy profit, and started looking for another lot.
This time the Farmer is building on Bass Lake near Lombardy.
The plans came out of some sort of small-house book, but considering the
three-story structure is built into the hillside with a walk-out basement, it’s
quite a tall building. I guess the man temporarily forgot that he is afraid of
heights. Once again he has a 12-pitch roof to climb whenever he needs to pulley
a piece of wood into place. He had the wood for this cottage dropped off on the
front field of the farm – a massive pyramid of logs in all sizes. He dragged them
one at a time into the barn where his new toy, a 16-foot sawmill, turned the
logs into mountains of boards. That’s what kept him busy while he was awaiting
building permits last year.
I posted a photo of the almost-finished cottage the other
day. People don’t believe me when I say he built it himself but truly, no one
else has helped to this point. He’s decided he is going to hire a professional
to finish the roof, however. That is one challenge he is not up for.
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