The Do-It-Your-Selfers

The Do-It-Your-Self Cabin as finished in 1981

I don’t believe there is a government agency that issues certificates of Do-it Yourself, but I could have qualified for one by high school graduation. I came from a family of such creatures. My parents were born when most people drove horses, when “fast food” was a carrot plucked from the garden, and when the aroma of fresh baked bread wafted through homes. They entered their teens as the country sank deeper into the Great Depression, and had barely reached adulthood when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mom quit school in 1930 to help her family. Dad worked his way through college. Hardship tempered their youth, instilling in them an independent self-reliance. I like to think they passed a small portion on to me.

 Dad and Mom introduced brother Don and me to everyday fix-it tasks shortly after we left diapers by mentoring with example rather than instruction. My brother and I witnessed them doing things around the house from an early age. I remember Dad standing between floor joists as he remodeled our kitchen, and of him moving an inside wall a few feet to enlarge a room. Mom and Grandma cooked all our meals, did the laundry in a tub with a mounted roller-wringer, and made their own laundry soap using reclaimed cooking lard. They taught us persistence eventually gets rewarded, that if you tinker long enough with something and didn’t get electrocuted, or cut a finger off in the process, then you could eventually fix it, or get the job done.

Don and I became Dad’s gofers by age ten, learning the name of tools and how to use them by fetching and watching. We entered our apprenticeship as teenagers. Our school was an old building the family bought in 1953. It was a derelict whose upper floors had gone empty for decades. Brother Don and I got the job of rebuilding the old boiler that sat in the basement. We were then promoted upstairs to remove generations of wall paper, help repair broken plaster, paint rooms, wire, and plumb - all under Dad’s direction. It became ingrained in us to try to fix or build things on our own. To this day I will call a plumber or an electrician only after having exhausted alternatives.

Fast forward twenty years to a time when I sat in a skiff drifting in a beautifully protected cove in Seldovia Bay, Alaska. Another teacher and I were commercial fishing for halibut that summer. The cove, calm and serene, struck me as the most idyllic place I’d ever seen. The thought flicked through my mind of how neat it would be to have a cabin there. But I didn’t own the land, it was not for sale, and besides, my immediate need was a boat, so I replaced the fleeting image with a vision of boat building.



Boat building 101, building a jig

I bought plans for a 22 foot double-ender with a small cabin. A sorry fact soon became apparent - I had more confidence than experience. There are some endeavors in which its prudent to tread lightly, at least in the beginning, and boat building is one. The first line in the directions stated simply, “Loft the plans”; the second followed with “build the jig”. What the hell does “loft the plans” and “build the jig” mean? Those questions sent me to the local book store, to find further instruction on the subject.

Boat builing 101, Lofting the Plans

“Loft the plans” meant one draws the measurements out full scale. Most boat builders draw them on the floor. I connected six pieces of plywood and lofted the plans onto them. The jig is the structure on which the boat is assembled. The plans called for fourteen boat frames with the dimensions taken from the lofted plans. I mounted each finished frame on the jig, and the jig aligned them in the correct position to one another. It took me two days to make the first frame but just two hours to complete the last. That is a short version of my life. I’ve done many things, but did most of them only once, and never became accomplished at any. The skeleton of the upside-down boat slowly took shape. The keel came next. I looked through my wood pile to discover the board had gone missing, I was stymied. I began cutting and laminating pieces to fabricate the keel when I discovered the land on Seldovia Bay was for sale.

The Cabin, front view at end of summer, 1979

I wanted a cabin on the ocean more than I wanted a hole in the water so I abandoned the boat project, bought the land, and started designing a cabin. The full story of that experience is beyond the scope of this essay, but the location was problematic, no road, no electricity, and only water access. I pre-cut the lumber, labeled the pieces, loaded my cabin-kit, tools and supplies onto a rented van, drove to Homer, caught the State Ferry, and sailed for Seldovia in early June of 1979. 

The Cabin from the water, end of first season, 1979

A number of friends converged at the Seldovia boat harbor to help empty the van in a helter-skelter fashion. The van went back onto the ferry in twenty minutes for its return to Anchorage. My commercial fishing friend helped transport the material in his bigger boat. It took eight or ten trips to get it to the site a mile from town. We dropped pile after pile above tide line and I spent the next two days carrying the cabin up the small incline and stacking it around the building site.
I worked alone most of the summer. The pre-cut cabin assembled without a hitch, and the framing was completed by August when my parents came to visit. The original Do-It-Yourselfers helped me put on the wood siding and roof. I finished the gable over the door after they left and put tarpaper on the roof. That is how I left it at the end of the first year.

Dad visited the following summer. He fished, helped wire the cabin and install the metal roof. Mom came the year after to help insulate it. I did most of the work, but I had help at crucial times, help from friends, my parents, and my wife, Mary. No man is an island, but its good to be able to do-it-yourself