Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [88]
The next step for us was the installation of the windows. A double-hung window is an ingenious device, and a world of its own inside the universe of carpentry. There is the window frame, which is made up of jambs (the side walls), a header (the top) and a sill (the base). Inside this frame are set two sashes (windows)—one up and one down. An elegant but strong crosshatching of millwork called muntins divides each sash into numerous lights (or panes). The sashes ride between interior and exterior stops, and between them is a so-called parting strip (or bead). This allows the sashes to move up and down as needed, without rubbing against each other. In a double-hung window frame, four pulleys are set into the jambs, through which ropes are attached to window weights. The ropes ease the opening and closing of the sashes and stabilize them in a fixed position.
I was proud of my windows, with their multiple panes crosshatched into ten over ten and ten over eight. They would give the cabin a distinctive traditional appearance and admit generous quantities of light. At the moment, with the window openings roughed out but no windows installed, the cabin looked like a man without his dentures. But getting the windows ready for installation was going to take some clever retrofitting. We had to make new parting strips and stops because the old ones were damaged. Paul made them from leftover pine stock. Since we didn’t have any of the old windows’ exterior trim, we were confounded by the problem of fitting the windows to new trim. The original trim had been milled with channels that slipped onto the original jambs, making a tight seal. Paul solved the problem by running the new trim over the blade of the table saw several times to create a dado (or groove) that accepted the old jamb. It worked perfectly.
A cabin without a porch is a lesser creation. It is a hat without a brim, a boat without a prow, brandy without a cigar. My plan was to put the porch in the cavity we had created when we thrust the ell forward from the front of the cabin. There was a full fourteen feet from the inside wall of the ell to the corner of the cabin. If the forward edge of the porch finished even with the front of the ell, which it should for a pleasing appearance, I would gain a porch with dimensions of fourteen feet by ten feet. It was plenty of porch, creating enough space to accommodate four Adirondack chairs or a card table and four folding chairs or four cords of wood, plus a path to the door. In cinematic terms, it was just enough space for Fred to spin Ginger, but not quite enough, as the old saying goes, to swing a dead cat. I also wanted it screened against bugs. With a depth of ten feet, we would have to pitch its roof less steeply than the main roof of the cabin; otherwise, the roof would come down at about five feet at the front edge of the porch, the height of my Adam’s apple. Reducing the pitch had a big drawback. Snow was less likely to shed of its own accord from the metal surface. It would need to be pulled or shoveled off a couple of times a year. There was nothing to be done about it. We needed the height to make the porch work, so the pitch would have to be diminished. Could I have avoided this? I guess I could have pitched the entire roof less steeply but still made it steep enough to let gravity do its work with the snow. I could have also raised the top plate of the wall. I ran those cabin profiles through my mind and liked neither of them. Our plan had been sound. I would just buy a roof rake and brace the porch’s roof against the eventuality of me failing to get up some weekend after a giant snowfall. It would be fine.
I had to break my summer work for a trip to New York.