CABIN OPENER

MAY 15, 2026 – Departing the big city at 9:30 this morning, I enjoyed a beautiful spring drive to the Red Cabin. Once there, After unloading the car and wolfing down lunch, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon hosing off the screens, letting them dry in the zephyr off the lake, then hauling them inside for installation. Next, I cleared the yard of the branches and crop of large twigs that had been harvested by a late winter ice storm. These tasks—coupled with attaching the hose to an outdoor faucet to clean the screens—were part of the “cabin opener.”[1]  Since we don’t close the cabin for the winter, we don’t have a “cabin opener” at the Red Cabin in the same manner that’s undertaken at the old family cabin down the shore, where things are sealed up tighter than a drum between October and . . . soon.

But this time around, the cabin opener involved a special project. The main objective of this weekend’s Red Cabin trip was to meet with “Mike,” installer of our new furnace. The old furnace had given up the ghost sometime in March, but despite unseasonably cold weather in April, including one night’s outside low of 9F, we avoided a frozen pipes scenario. We’re now surely beyond the last frost of the season, and the choice of today for installation of the replacement furnace was filled with irony: Not only was it a furnace, for crying out loud, but by the time Mike had finished, the outside thermometer showed 79F.

I pulled up to the back of the Red Cabin just after his departure. I let myself in, entered the furnace room and . . . Voila! There was the new kid on the block—a “Goodman” furnace. I also noticed, however, that the inside of the cabin was significantly cooler than the air outside. The thermostat at the base of the stairs read “60,” which is the temperature to which Mike had set it, apparently. I turned it up to 70, and as I’d hoped and expected, the furnace fired up, and purring like a kitten, soon breathed warm air through the vents. In furtherance of irony, I then opened the exterior doors and windows to the much warmer outside air to provide a celebratory boost for the new equipment’s inauguration.

I next called Mike. He was 15 minutes south of Grindstone, which meant we’d passed each other. After expressing my appreciation for his work, I questioned him about the wi-fi thermostat that we’d discussed by phone last week. He apologized for not having installed it, and said he’d return right after his next appointment. True to his word, he reappeared about 45 minutes later. His plain white van had no signs other than signs of rust—but the ladder and plumbing gear resting on roof racks and the inventory and tools inside the vehicle announced that he’d been in business a while. Probably in his 50s, Mike didn’t look as old as he’d sounded over the phone. In person, though, his volubility reminded me of . . . a forced-air furnace. His cheaters projected a nearly professorial image, despite his frequent reliance on double negatives. All in all, for my objectives, Mike conveyed assurance that he knew what he was doing.

In short order Mike gave me the bad news: the old thermostat was so old, it had only two wires, whereas the digital thermostat required five. For close to an hour, we investigated together just where the new thermostat could be located and rewired. The upshot of the investigation was that installation of the device would require considerable time at some later date, but before next autumn.

I’d brought a checkbook from home and told him I wanted to pay him for the furnace installation and wait on the thermostat replacement until I had a chance for Beth to weigh in on aesthetic considerations. He said fine, he could “generate a receipt” for work completed and await my call on the thermostat. He then climbed into his van, which doubled as his office, to attend to the “paperwork.”

“Here you go,” he said, handing me an old fashioned carbon-style copy of the bill. “It’s for 38 hundred—that’s what I quoted you, right?”

In fact, he’d texted me, “$3,700,” but I wasn’t about to quibble. In fact, while he was “generating the receipt” (I knew he meant “invoice”), I’d figured I’d add an extra hundred bucks for the time he’d spent trying to figure out just where and how to wire the thermostat. Plus, when I’d mentioned offhandly a malfunctioning damper in our wood-burning stove, Mike offered to examine it. To my delight, he identified the problem—and the solution: WD40. And most to the point, given what his multi-location, mega-operation competition had quoted us for a new furnace several years ago, $3,800 was a bargain. I liked Mike’s directness and that he seemed genuinely interested in customer satisfaction. His focus was on his service, not his “back office” procedures and processing, which I’m pretty sure were carried out exclusively in the passenger seat and dashboard of his jam-packed van. Given the exactitude of his work and his anti-inflationary pricing, I was willing to cut him ample slack on the “office management” front.

As of this writing, the outside temp remains above 70. I set the old thermostat at 64 for overnight and early morning comfort, given a predicted outside low of 47F between roughly 4:00 and 6:00. Thanks to Mike, all is good, I say, for this year’s . . . “cabin opener.”

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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson

[1] Not to be forgotten was the installation of the docks and lift, two weeks ago.