With wonderful snippets of advice such as “If you can’t find a perfect piece of land, buy an imperfect piece and make it perfect,” Cabin Lessons by Spike Carlsen is a delightful read.
Cabin Lessons: A Nailby Nail Tale is an easy read, authored by Spike Carlsen who is a writer, speaker and builder. He also was co-editor of The Family Handyman magazine. The tale follows the adventures of Spike and his wife, and their blended family of five children, during the process of building a small family cabin that they could enjoy for years to come.
The cabin’s name was selected with two principles in mind. The first was “Name your cabin carefully;” the second, “Life is short, so live and love while you can.” With that in mind, The Carlsens’ cabin was named with a Finnish proverb, Oma Tupa, Oma Lupa, meaning “One’s cabin, One’s freedom.”
There is a great story of looking for and choosing lakeshore property on the North Shore at a price they could afford, and where they could complete their dreams of building the cabin. After seeing a “Land for Sale” sign and meeting Dick and Jean Thorngren, the owners, they bought a small piece of almost un-buildable land, situated on a cliff between Two Harbors and Grand Marais.
The Thorngrens, familiar to many of us on the North Shore, were their closest neighbors and staunch supporters, supplying them with the names of best local workers, hardware stores, but most of all, fish cakes and other great Scandinavian foods, along with Dick’s great “Sven & Ole” jokes, to buoy their spirits along the way.
The compelling story tells of the joys and woes of building the cabin, as well as having full-time jobs in the Cities. The tale is about their great kids, wonderful friends, other family members, the local excavator operator, lumber yard workers, truck drivers, motel owners, storekeepers, plumber, and electrician whose work and advice was invaluable in the cabin becoming a reality.
Cabin Lessons also provides a lot of useful advice on “what to do” and “what not to do!” when building. You’ll enjoy this read greatly.
Carlsen also authored A Splintered History of Wood. He will be appearing at the Silver Bay Library at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, September 23. His books can be found at local bookstores and gift shops or online at www.spikecarlsen.com
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