BROKEN OAK HILL(R) Dispatches from the heart of Wisconsin 
Nap time on the front porch. The next best thing to a real bed, inside, under air-conditioning. As we keep telling ourselves, wait until next summer.
This is a little peek at the color of both the front and back doors. It's a deep cranberry. Right now both doors are still wrapped in their protective covering.
Sunday, July 31-Tuesday, Aug. 2
Sitting on the porch
and admiring the future
The way this summer is going, the favorite feature of the new tree farm house may be the central air conditioning. The weather has not provided for many pleasant visits this summer, and hasn’t made for pleasant conditions for the people building our house, either. It was hot when we showed up Sunday afternoon, although a little breeze helped it seem not so bad. We were there to sell the old kitchen cupboard to a couple who bought the kitchen stove a few weeks earlier. It’s actually nice to think that they will probably be side-by-side in a new 215-acre tree farm home (with a trout stream!) near Viola.
Each visit our procedure has been to check out the house and then put a couple of chairs on the front porch and set up "headquarters" there. We're so glad Jim the builder poured that right away. The goal was to build a great front porch with a house attached, and I think we're succeeding.
Our big surprise this visit was that the fireplace was already in, and it wasn’t what we thought we were getting. We had 
looked at a Heatilator brochure from the lumber yard that showed a fireplace with a 19-3/4-inch deep fire box – just like the one we have at home – but the one installed at the farm is 17 inches. It makes quite a difference in what size fire you can have. It turns out that Heatilator had changed the model since our brochure was published. It doesn’t make for a great fireplace. We’ll live with it and tell ourselves it’s better if people don’t have great big fires, and we probably won’t have that many up there anyway. But it’s another lesson in how closely you have to check everything and follow up on everything in the house-building process. We should have followed our original inclination and shopped some fireplace s
howrooms and purchased a unit we had actually seen and transported it up there ourselves. It probably would have been a different brand.
The good news was that the front and back doors were on and the car siding had been put up on the ceiling of the front and back porches. More wiring was in place, and the upstairs bathroom had been re-arranged according to our change in the plan. It required the builders to tear out some framework for the linen closet and move it to the other side, but it was an important change. We will now have an upstairs bathroom that is almost an exact copy (layout-wise) of Grandma D's upstairs bathroom (for those in the know). Some framing had been put around the front porch windows, and in general there were signs of progress.
Monday, Aug. 1
It was about 8:30 when we made it from Mauston to the farm. I may be repeating myself here, but I miss waking up at the farm in the mornings and going to bed there at the end of the day, but our motel lifestyle this summer doesn’t allow for that. We’ve talked about trying to camp at the farm, but that’s a less-than-appealing option under the best conditions, and with the heat and rudimentary water system and no place to cook besides a barbecue grill and no place to shower, we just have not been ready to try that.
We had a visit from Jim Langendorf about 9. He was over to pick up a ladder and take it over to a nearby site, but he came back later and we talked about the progress, the fireplace, and other things and gave him a check for the next draw. We decided that it would be a good idea to have a little tile in the front entry, and discussed whether or not we will need gutters, among other things. He is of the opinion that we won’t after the final grading is done, but we are keeping the option open. Jim told us that the heating people were supposed to be out Wednesday to get started on the duct work, and we said we might stay for that.
This turned out to be one of the longer days we’ve spent at the farm, and despite the heat we actually got some things done. I mowed with the Cub, and it was really starting to need it again. The rain gauge showed 2 inches since our last visit, and the grass and weeds are growing just like the corn in this hot, humid summer – like gangbusters. I burned a small pile of brush from branches that fell off the big white pine in the spring ice storm and garlic mustard we had managed to pull, and it burned fast and clean. About noon I doused the already cooling ashes with water. I worked a little in the woods between the house and the road and also moved the rest of the logs I cut from the sugar maple to a wood pile. I didn’t get the rest of the trunk cut up and we will still have to deal with the stump and roots at some point.
With electricity back on in the garage, the old refrigerator is operating again and we brought our lunch with us instead of buying it at Subway in Mauston before we came out. Our makeshift “kitchen” in the garage at least has a refrigerator and a microwave, even if we lack the stove. After that I tried a nap on a camp cot on the front porch, but the flies were going crazy like before a storm and it was impossible to really fall asleep.
In the afternoon we puttered at various things and then planted some scraggly flowers we hadn’t gotten planted at home along the south side of the garage. There are also a few cosmos and sunflowers coming up from seed, but they aren't doing very well in the sand that was brought in for the garage. I did find a second peony from Mom's house in Osage City that had survived after I thought it was gone, and I transplanted it at the back edge of the garage.
Tuesday, Aug. 2
We headed back to Hartje lumber in LaValle (less than a 30-minute drive from Mauston) and spent the morning finalizing our order on the kitchen and bathroom cabinets as well as on stone for the fireplace and the front support posts. The two men we have been working with there, Rob Snell and Dave Wermund, have been very patient and very helpful.
The gate was open when we arrived, and someone had stacked the concrete block for the front porch posts on t
he porch since we left Monday. The posts will have a stone surround about halfway up, and then a tapered wood beam above that.
We ate up the remaining sliced turkey for another simple sandwich lunch. There was a little breeze for awhile, but it didn’t last and it got very hot again and showered briefly on and off – great for a steam bath, but not much else. With our energy lagging, we decided to pack up about 3:30 and I called and left Jim a message that we were headed home. Two nights in the Mauston Super 8 is enough for me, and there is not that much we could do again on Wednesday. The duct work has to go in certain places, so it wasn't like we were needed to help decide where to put it. Now if they can just get it done and get the air conditioner working ...
