The Trouble-Shooting King

I am convinced my husband could solve almost any problem we could encounter. He comes from an intelligent family and attended a private high school where he was trained by old generation craftsman who taught that any job worth doing was worth doing well. Then they taught him how do the job well, even working with sheet metal, welding, automotive, drafting, and electronics. As a child he spent a lot of time building things, building models, planes, and as he grew older, he tinkered in mechanics. He joined the air force and became a fighter plane mechanic and later worked in radar. Since the military he's worked in test engineering, run his own business, has a patent on an energy-saving train device, and taught himself how to build and repair computers. Computers are his real trade in life outside of building our home. For fun he plays guitar, composes his own songs and models the Great Northern Railroad.

While construction has not been my husband's trade, he had experience wiring his parents' weekend cabin and performing small plumbing jobs. He had also worked in a cabinet shop, so was familiar with working with wood, and understood basic framing. Even so, this was the first (and I hope last) house he ever built and he had a lot to learn along the way. I had NO prior construction experience (unless you count pounding nails in my uncle's house when I was 5), so I had everything to learn.

One of my husband's great skills is in being able to research information that he doesn't already know. He'll go on the internet or pick up books on topics he needs to learn more about. With that basic background, he'll talk to experts in the field, and because he's done the background reading, he can ask intelligent questions, and has handles to hang the new information on. He certainly doesn't have all the answers right now. But as situations come up, it seems he can always come up with a good solution. I hardly worry when problems come up, because I know he'll eventually solve them.

I will also make the confession that my husband is a perfectionist. Now he will insist that's not so and point out several things he's let go that are less than perfect, which I say only serves to prove my point. The true perfectionist never truly meets their own expectations. However, he is not a perfectionist in everything (like say tool organization), and I have my own perfectionist tendencies so I am not finger-pointing here. The point I am making is that my husband likes to have things plumb, square, and level. This can be a challenge when working with a log home project initially, but it makes later stages like attaching framed walls or putting up sheetrock infinitely easier. He's a great believer in doing things well from the outset to prevent compounding problems later on. He also greatly believes in protecting the investment, doing a little extra work now to make sure we don't end up with mold inside our framed walls and that sort of thing. That's not a bad thing. So as we describe our log home building journey, it will not be a description of the easiest way to do the job, but of ways to do the job well. And maybe as we share this experience with you, you won't have to struggle quite as hard to figure all of these things out.