Mud Season and Warm Room Detail Work

A 64 Degree sunny day,

the nicest day of spring so far which inspired us to do the 2 mile walk to retrieve the 4 wheeler from the storage building. The walk gave us a close look at the road and the frost boils squeezing up to the surface, it's going to be quite some time before it dries enough to drive on it with out rutting the crap out of it.

On Saturday the 23rd we woke to another 2" of wet show and there is more snow in the forecast this week, so it looks like Pat is going to win the snow prediction. There is some signs that spring might be here though, her daffodils are starting to poke up although some are pushing through snow.

Not the best photo but here is our 1st Daffodils.

We have also been working on some of the warm room details including hanging the celling fan and lights, installing electric switches, plugs and lighting.

Outer space celling fan.

Our building design has a very large roof cantilever that we temporarily supported against snow load with a 2X6. The ultimate plan was to support this corner of the roof with extra large custom made ABC kids wood blocks.

Well, thanks to North House Folks School for supplying the 6X6 inch wood timbers that were scrap ends from their timber framing course. They were even kind enough to cut them into the block shape.

We then loaded them up for a run down to Lutsen were a very helpful guy by the name of David Woerheide, owner of Border Designs Signs, did the carving of the letters on 2 sides of our blocks and he did an exceptional job, Thank You, Thank You, David.

After picking them up from David we started the layout and drilling the blocks to fit on a 3/4" steel rod that will support the roof.

Here is a temporary stand built to hold the blocks which help us see the design and insured the holes went in the right spots.

So one side has MURMUR CREEK on it and OBSERVATORY is on the other side. The entire stack is 6 feet tall.

After getting the stack back to the project site we pulled it apart and Pat primed and painted. There are 5 colors Yellow, Red, Green, Blue and Purple, they look great.

We are now looking for images that can be decoupaged onto the other 4 sides of the blocks. They will be finished with poly coating.

We also started the trim work both inside and out,

We're experimenting with crooked looking trim around the window and installing this self watering window flower box.

We started painting our huge steel flowers

This flower is 2 feet in dia.

Last but not least,

our article was in the April 16 Cook County News Herald, it was called Making tracks through the backwoods. A full page article about our tracked vehicles and our business dealing in tracked vehicle solutions for remote access to difficult properties. It's a fun read, our thanks to Jane Howard the writer of the piece (it was a fun afternoon) and also the Cook County News Herald for printing her work.