On the Road

Trouble with good weather in Alaska is you feel guilty for sitting on your arse. In mid August, we get a beautiful stretch of perfect weather–which happens when a high pressure cell stabilizes in nearby Canada. This guilt trip by mother nature signals us to launch another massive project–cleaning and oiling the logs. Last winter I got tired of watching drips leak through the roof and wind blow through the log walls onto my grand piano so I grab the pressure washer and get to work:

Take a look at 50 years of dirt and weathering effects. For those of you who have never painted a house (let alone a log one), it’s a trick but I’ve finally got it figured out. I use products by Sashco, starting with a powdered soap-like cleaner called CPR which I spray on with a simple pressure sprayer. Then, wait 20 minutes and attack with a pressure washer–it’s like night and day. When the logs dry, they are whitish and need to be reoiled. One problem with pressure washing logs is that it raises a fibre fuzz on the logs. You can ignore this and oil over it or sand each log. I couldn’t see much difference so I just cleaned off the big fuzzy stuff. Here’s the last of the stain being applied:

The last phase of finishing the logs is to caulk with Sashco’s “Conceal” which is a latex based material which comes in syringable 29 oz. tubes. It’s a wrist buster but it really seals and dries to a rubber consistancy. They also make an identical product called “log jam” which is used for wider seams. Here’s the before and after shot….

We added a little blue window trim to finish the job. We have rebuilt all the upstairs windows and will add copper gutters to the upstairs roof to preserve the windowframes–it’s a new house…and we’re pooped!

This is our Finnish sauna–it looks like it belongs on the Hobit Movie set. I grew up near Seattle where there were several hills notably Norway Hill and Finn Hill–I won’t go into how these hills got names but there were lots of saunas built behind the main houses. This winter we plan to use ours a lot but we need to make some improvements first. We demolish the roof and gut the insides and find that all the perlons are rotten as well as the back wall.

Next is the problem of rebuilding the roof–we use a similar plan as the main house and cut a few small trees in the woods for replacement logs. After rebuilding the log structure, we add a new roof–we’ve all the left-overs from the main house.

Here’s the final result….we can’t wait for the first snowfall:

To take a true Finnish sauna, we heat the stove inside for about an hour. This stove has a crib on top full of round beach rocks. After the rocks get hot, we throw water on them to create steam. True Finns slap each other’s backs with birch branches, then roll in the snow–sounds fun, huh? …stay tuned as we work on the house logs next.