AUGUST 26, 2025 – As is the case with many of my fellow members of the species, I am a person of episodic obsession. When we were building the Red Cabin and in the market for a wood-burning stove, about all I could think about during waking hours and in my dreams was . . . wood-burning stoves. This was before the internet was the centerpiece of our lives, so my obsession played out offline, as it were, at the library and inside various local showrooms of retail distributors of the desired apparatus for backup heating (our building plans called for a fully functioning high-efficiency forced air furnace) and aesthetic enhancement of our “dream cabin” in the Northwoods of northwest Wisconsin.
A related obsession was positioning the stove inside the cabin. I burned countless hours wondering . . . worrying . . . about the appearance of the stove chimney, which by necessity would have to rise inside the cabin from the planned location of the stove and hearth.[1] I drew umpteen renderings of the chimney, each an attempt to hide, obscure, or distract from view the big ol’ ugly jet black column that would have to run from stove to ceiling, a distance of about 25 feet.
After a week or two of this latter obsession, I presented the chimney “problem” one evening after Byron’s cub scout den meeting. My co-leader was an enormously clever and funny guy who happened to be an architect. I showed him my renderings, and with a raised eyebrow punctuating his somewhat serious countenance, he nodded politely. After a respectful few moments, he made his pronouncement: “You know what? You’re overthinking this. All you have to do is run that chimney straight up from the stove. You don’t have to put any bends or curves into it to try to hide it—that would only draw attention to it, and anyway, bends and curves would only interfere with the draft. I guarantee that within the first five minutes of its installation, you’ll never give it another thought.”
In retrospect I think the proper interpretation of his courtesy was, “You’re obsessed. Get over it.”
Now, back to . . .where was I? Oh yeah, “obsessions.” In case you haven’t noticed by my posts this summer, my current obsession is the Pergola-on-a-Platform. Before you close out this post and move on to more scintillating pursuits, hear me out . . .
A sub-sub-sub-obsession within my current general obsession developed yesterday as I tackled the crowning element of the pergola—that is, installation of the beams and purlins. My plans called for attaching flanges on each beam and once the beams are affixed to the supporting posts, resting each purlin onto the beams and attaching each purlin to its corresponding flanges. Lining up and screwing down the flanges onto the beams took far more time than I’d anticipated—precision being the main drag on the process. I didn’t master the process until I was about halfway through it.
With nervous anticipation, I took one of the beams and carried it up to the building site. I crawled up onto the platform and laid the beam onto two of the posts. As I did so, however, a new challenge arose: how, exactly, was I going to attach the outer purlins? They were just beyond reach of the platform, and gaining safe access to them would require a degree of engineering if not a degree in engineering. For a good 15 minutes I examined and analyzed; re-examined and re-analyzed. This process produced lots of ideas, each of them impractical, dangerous or just plain dumb. I was stuck but not discouraged: I knew a solution existed; I just needed to discover it. Or more to the point, I needed to obsess about it.
Ninety minutes later—while doing 60 on Highway 63 south out of Spooner—the fix came to me. The thing of it was, it was a “twofer,” that is, two solutions in the effort to find one. The first was eminently practicable, and I could hardly wait for my return to the Red Cabin next Thursday to execute the plan. The second solution, however, was elegant in its simplicity. It was so simple, in fact, I felt downright dumb and even embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of it when first pressing pencil to my sketchbook in the design phase of the project. It called for attaching an additional flange opposing each of the flanges I’d already screwed onto each of the pergola beams. This would be an easy task and one that could be accomplished by placing the beams on sawhorses and zip-zip-zipping a total of 28 half-inch #6 screws with my power drill. Once the beams were affixed to the pergola posts (a simple enough operation), all I’d have to do is slip each of the purlins between a corresponding set of flanges on each of the beams.
My sub-sub-sub-obsession paid off. I can’t wait to implement the solution that it produced.
The satisfaction that accompanies “problem-solving” is why I so enjoy cabin projects. Or perhaps a more accurate way to state matters is that the many problems I create for myself in undertaking cabin projects produce ample opportunities to obsess about the solutions that provide so much satisfaction. Call me obsessed but satisfied.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] My planned construction of the hearth made from cut stones retrieved from the fireplace of the old cabin that originally occupied the property—which construction became yet another obsession.
