MAY 24, 2025 – (Cont.) My latest confrontation with lumber hoarding was precipitated by a sign . . . in the woods (where else?), more precisely, the upper reaches of the Björnholm tree garden. Not so many years ago, I’d fashioned a prominent “BJÖRNHOLM TRÄDGÅRD” [“tree garden” in Swedish] sign painted on wood, mounted on another piece of wood and suspended from the lower branches of a mighty oak. Earlier this spring, however, I found that the member to which the sign was affixed had rotted around one of the eyelets to which the chains from the holding branch had been attached. The result of this inexorable natural process—wood rot—was one end of the five-foot-long sign dangling freely, twisting in the wind.
Initially, I felt indignant. Of course, eventually, nothing that a man says, does or makes avoids the same fate as the works of Ozymandias. But—in just four years or so? The sign’s vertical attitude was how I might expect it to appear 100 years from now. How dare nature undo my efforts so soon, mocking to extreme my ephemerality!
Miffed and motivated, I was determined to make immediate repairs but with new and improved materials to withstand the assault of the elements. In the first instance, I’d mounted the sign on a cedar 2 x 4, to which the eyelets had been fastened. Because of its lesser weight, I’d chosen cedar over treated pine—cedar, nonetheless, having rot resistant qualities, at least. I’d erred, however, in thinking I could forestall the effect of rain and snow by slapping a strip of duct tape across the top of the 2 x 4. This clever (so I’d thought at the time) maneuver produced the opposite of the intended result: UV rays had compromised the integrity of the tape. Moisture had then found its way through cracks and breaks, but because remnants of the duct tape held to the wood tenaciously, rainwater and snowmelt couldn’t easily evaporate. Rot set in prematurely, eventually weakening the wood to the point where one of the eyelets could no longer hold. The other eyelet was about to give way too, I noticed. Another month or so and the sign would have landed ignobly flat on its face at the base of the tree.
“What to do?” as my pen-hoarding (and general all-around hoarder—he was in the moving and storage business, after all) Grandpa Holman would say; or closer to home, since the context here is a classic cabin project, “What would my dad do?”
I knew exactly what Dad would do, which would be to replace the cedar 2 x 4 with a treated pine 2 x 4. Despite the added weight, which could be easily accommodated by larger eyelets, the treated pine would last forever. I know forever is a long time, but if you’re familiar with anything constructed out of treated lumber, you can attest to its ridiculous longevity. (Chemists of the world unite! Creosote, by the way, is even better, as evidenced by the eight-foot-long creosoted cedar posts that Dad installed (four-feet below grade) 67 years ago to anchor the staircase (of treated pine) that leads down to the dock at Björnholm. Unlike the Third Reich, those posts will last a thousand years. The staircase? I’m betting 800 years.)
The question then, was where to find the requisite treated pine 2 x 4. The lumberyard in Hayward you say? That’s not where Dad would go. No, siree. Even without Trump on-and-off again tariffs to take into account, why spend money that doesn’t need to be spent? Dad would have gone straight to his own private lumberyard in the basement of the cabin. And that’s exactly where I headed.
Ever since I was three, watching watched Dad and Grandpa Nilsson construct the basement—after the cabin was finished, mind you[1]—I’ve been down in that basement a gazillion times. In fact, when I was in high school and Dad was still working on his “forever project,” I served as his chief assistant, mixing batch after batch of concrete, which he then poured, screeded and troweled (to perfection) what would become the basement floor.
The best description of the basement is “organized Appalachia.” It’s a combination workshop, hardware store, building materials recycling center, antique tool and equipment storage vault, and . . . private lumberyard. While Dad was in his post-retirement prime, two principles governed the basement: 1. Save everything—that spare piece of wire, that set of hooks from an old wood cover to something that needed to be replaced 50 years ago, that stub 2 x 4, those trim boards that were salvaged when the new porch windows were installed, the old casement porch windows, galvanized pipes that were replaced by copper tubing, and of course, all those glass food jars, properly labeled for the infinite varieties of fasteners and other hardware—new and recycled—that Dad kept in full supply at all times, and of course . . . 160 acres’ worth of quality lumber, most of it recycled, some of it unused, some of it unused but beautifully finished.
As I poked around in search of a treated 2 x 4, fresh in my ears was a conversation I’d had recently with my sister Elsa and her husband Chuck, the prime stewards of the cabin since Dad died 15 years ago. “And all that stuff in the basement,” they said. “What are we going to do with it?”
Honestly, I’d never considered the question. “Organized Appalachia” was simply a permanent state of affairs. No matter how many generations might visit or not visit; care for the cabin . . . or not . . . all that stuff would remain forever and pretty much as it has appeared since Dad & Son Construction Company, Inc. installed the basement floor over a half century ago. But now with the question clanging around inside my head, I saw “Organized Appalachia” for what an objective observer would call it: “Organized Hoarding.”
Things were about to get worse.
I soon found a treated 2 x 4. Stored decades ago on some rainy day while Mother was upstairs reading, no doubt, to pass the time, while Dad was organizing down in the basement. In his draftsman-quality style, he’d written a bold “8’” on the clean backside of some kind of (recycled) order card cut down to size and tacked onto the end of the 2 x 4. It was neatly stacked with a whole inventory of labeled dimensional lumber on the deep (concrete capped) shelving that runs from the masonry retaining wall around the perimeter of the basement interior (the early 1960s phase of the basement project).
Immediately after pulling the 2 x 4 out, I experienced the hoarder’s curse: the insuperable challenge of putting the hoarded object to use. Compounding the problem was that for my sign back in the tree garden, I needed only 61” of length. If the 2 x 4 I’d pulled had been six feet, fine. If I could overcome the main hurdle of using it at all, the vault would be made easier by only 11 inches of “waste”—except there’s nothing about treated lumber to be wasted. Even a three-inch long stub can be put to good use as a spacer keeping something off the ground—a yard border log, for example, or the corner of a wooden dock frame stored on shore during the off season. But an eight-foot-long 2 x 4? This would mean an extra piece not quite three feet long. Something anathema to a lumber hoarder is having to cut a long 2 x 4 down to size.
Thus began my hoarder’s dilemma: (a) cutting the eight-foot-long 2 x 4; (b) continuing my search for a shorter treated 2 x 4 (in the basement or back at our place, where I definitely have my own “lumberyard” going on); or (c) rethinking my perceived need for a 2 x 4 and jerry-rigging an alternative.
“What to do?” or “What would Dad do?”
Suddenly, it came to me: continuing my search but not in the basement. I staggered out of Organized Appalachia and headed down to the dock at the base of cabin hill. Again, just as many of the larger objects in the basement, stuff and things that occupy space elsewhere eventually vanish from view if you wait long enough. So it was, years ago, with the wooden slide that Dad had constructed (our of treated lumber, of course) 55 years ago for installation of the lower, removable staircase leading down to the dock. It was part of a clever design that he’d devised and that served us well for many years. For the past 20 years, the slide had been out of service. Its integrity was as good as ever, but it blended so well with the surrounding vegetation that it eventually . . . faded from attention . . .
. . . Until yesterday, when I faced the hoarder’s dilemma. I chased down a claw hammer, then pulled the slide up the lower bank to the relatively level area that overlooks the (new) dock arrangement. Soon the hoarder’s dilemma yielded to the hoarder’s delight: careful disassembly of a wholly obsolete object. Why is this such a delight? Because if the object assembled is not particularly “hoardable,” its constituent parts certainly are. I mean, now that I examined it, this bulky thing, this curious assemblage consisted of two 10-foot-long 1 x 4s, four four-foot-long 1 x 3s—all treated, all perfectly usable and nailed together with galvanized 4d nails, which, if carefully removed could be kept straight and salvaged (just as Dad would do)—and . . . drum roll, drum roll two very nice, very long treated 2 x 4s, so long, in fact, that they measured . . . 10 FEET!
Wh-a-a-a-t?! Cut a perfectly good treated 10-foot-long 2 x 4 IN HALF or worse, not quite in half, because what I needed was 61 inches, not 60?! It would be a sacrilege.
The supreme irony of my hoarder’s dilemma (with the interlude of a hoarder’s delight) was that it drove me to a much simpler solution: deploying a (treated) three-foot-long 1 x 3 that had been kicking around in my stash of miscellaneous treated lumber that I use on an improvisational basis back at the Red Cabin. This morning I deployed Plan B, and in no time flat (except for the climb to the top of the tree garden), the sign was fixed and rehung—horizontally, as it should be.
Now that my readers know the truth about me—that I’m an incorrigible hoarder (of pens and lumber; let’s start with those, anyway)—please consider my pre-sentencing argument for why lumber hoarding, at least, has a basis in reason and in any event is not all bad, particularly in these times when the environment is under assault the world over. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] The cabin sits on top of a glacier esker. The entrance to the basement is through the garage, which sits attached to and directly behind—and below—the cabin. Originally, the “walkout” was nothing more than a narrow excavated corridor back to the water pump. After the garage was built, Dad and Grandpa manually excavated the rest of the space under the cabin to within a few feet—in some areas, yards—of the stone-masonry foundation. All the dirt was wheel-barrowed through the basement “walkout,” on through the garage, then up and around to the front of the cabin to level out the top of the steep bank of the esker. Grandpa then hauled stones 50 feet up from the lakeshore below and constructed a stone-masonry retaining wall about 60 feet long to hold the fill.
