Chapter 13

The Spring Bay #2

After three years the Jarvis cabin is practically unrecognizable! Two new rooms have been addedone for a new baby and one for a darkroom.

By Woodrow Jarvis

HEN A MAN has a home in the wil­derness his building work seems never done. He is only part way through one project when another demands im­mediate attention. We were fortunate to have finished our original building, down to the last nail and dab of paint, without stopping to take a look around. When we did take that look we saw a tremendous number of projects crying for immediate completion. We've been working away at them with a weird result: The number grows instead of diminishes.

In three years we have added an 8xl2-ft. combination darkroom-office, an 8xl0 ft. combination   pantry-nursery, a 50-ft.cribbed dock, and a 100-ft. tile line with two catch basins to drain the rear patio. Re­maining to be done are two more addi­tions, each one larger than the original lodge, completion of the dock into an L-shaped small boat harbor with five feet of water, and construction of a seawall to contain a shore side summer lounging area. The linseed oil was barely dry on our front wall before we picked up our ham­mers again and began building the dark­room. The immediate necessity was for a place to work on the rich crop of outdoor articles waiting to be harvested.

First addition to The Spring Boy was a darkroom-office. The porch in front was utilized as a sub floor.	Finished room measures 8x12 ft. Since it adjoins the bathroom it was easy to install a sink (see drawing).

Outside wall was stripped off to lay concrete floor for pantry-nursery. Interior paneling was left intact.	New room weathered wintry gales and low tem­peratures with only half-inch insulation around it

At far left is door to the new darkroom. Door at far right   opens   to   combination   nursery   and   pantry.	A two it. extension past main wall provided space for   a    small    window   to    supply   cross ventilation.

We planned the darkroom to fit on the bath­room end of the porch, where there was a simple through-the-wall access to water supply and drain pipes. At this point there was a door ready made, one complete wall, and a concrete sub-floor.

We raised a frame with the top plate eight feet above the porch. Then we cut eight-foot 2x8s to fit snug against the ends of the main roof joists and notched them over the plate. We held each roof rafter in place with a short piece of 2x4 and C clamps and nailed two 2x4 splices at each joint. A long 2x4 spiked to the house at the level of the top plate gave us a resting place for ceiling rafters which served as collar ties for the outer wall. We covered the ceiling rafters with white-sided insu­lation, face down, and floored the attic thus formed with one-in. rough lumber. A slid­ing trap door in one corner of the dark­room ceiling, with a built-in 2x4 ladder leading to it, gave us a  roomy  overhead storage area.   This proved mighty useful.

We covered the frame with half-inch rigid insulation with seams joined on the studs and nailing girts. For the outside finish we used a sheeting shiplap, figuring we could fasten log siding over the shiplap later if we wished. We also used surplus and scrap shiplap for the numerous counters and shelves inside the room.
We had on hand a broken sheet of 48x52-in. glass that had cracked when we tried to cut it for the kitchen window. From this sheet we cut a piece of glass 24x36 in. for the darkroom window. We made a two x two-in. frame for the glass and attached sash cord to each side so it would raise and lower on the double-hung principle. Because this window had to be made light-tight for darkroom work, we installed a one-fourth-in. plywood cover that ran in deep slots made from plywood strips. The principle governing the window cover is that light vanishes when turned three times at 90 degree angles. We set the window 42 in. above the floor so that the outside view of the river was easily availa­ble either when seated at the typewriter or standing at the counter. The darkroom took about a month to build and cost around $200. The cost was held down be­cause we utilized surplus odds and ends left over from our original construction.

Our next pressing need was for a place from which to launch a small boat. We scoured the river and hauled in logs and timbers and posts tossed up on shore by the storms of many years. Some of our finds must have been 50 years old—huge pine boomsticks used by lumbermen to contain and raft their logs. They had been preserved by continuous water-soaking. We built cribs and filled them with stones until we had a 50-ft. dock. That was enough for our immediate needs, and we turned from the waterfront to the back yard drainage problem.

Our place set on a gentle slope from road to river. The gravel fill of the drive­way was always soaked and messy during the months of the spring run-off. To lick this we smoothed the grade into a shallow cup and built two catch-basins with a 100-ft. tile line leading to the waterfront.

Then we filled the cup with about four inches of crushed stone. Water runs under the stone and into the catch-basins, leaving the surface dry and firm. The crushed stone also brushes off sand from shoes and boots and dog-paws on the way to the back door, greatly easing Jane's housekeeping.
Our daughter Tawn was born in Sep­tember, 1952, our first year in the new place. She spent her first winter in a cozy corner of the main room near the fireplace, but when spring came Jane pointed a fin­ger at me and said "baby room." So out came the hammers again.

We found there was room for a 22-in. door between the kitchen cupboards and the back window assembly. We built the pantry-nursery to the same size—8x10 ft. —and with the same roof line as the utility room. First we ripped off the outside finish where the door would go and cut through the insulation and bottom plate. This ex­posed the concrete floor of the main house and we used that as the level for the floor of the new room. We poured an 8xlO-ft. concrete slab and raised a rear wall with a top plate 5 ft. 7 in. from the floor. We bolted 2x8 rafters to the protruding ends of the main roof beams, notched them over the rear plate, set in the studding, and covered the frame thus formed with half-inch rigid insulation joined on studs.

Darkroom window overlooks waterfront, where 50-ft. cribbed dock was built. Timber was taken from rirer.

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