As we were in the midst of our move to the Pacific Northwest, our son and his family made a move to a different home. They had been looking for a place with a bit more land for gardening and raising more of their food and found a ten-acre place with a 100-year-old home, a barn and more. Former owners of the home had undertaken a lot of home repair jobs, but some of them hadn’t been finished and others remained. For example, the home has new siding on three sides, but the original siding on the fourth side. Within the next few years, replacing the siding on the fourth side will be a summer job for us. Inside, they had updated wiring, installed a central vacuum system, and done a kitchen upgrade with tile floors and a new sliding patio door. But the job wasn’t finished. The new tile wasn’t finished where the sliding door had been installed. And there were no baseboards anywhere. And the patio door leads directly outside with no patio and no step to get up to the door.

Along with the house, however, there is that barn. It is huge, with space for us to park our camper and store our canoes and kayaks, and a lovely area to set up a shop. My tools have found new homes in that barn and I have been enjoying going out to the farm on a regular basis to work in the shop.

Milling wood to match 100-year-old trim for baseboards was a challenge for which I was ready. I have a lot going for me. I have a shop with room to set up my tools. I can have the planer, router table, table saw and chop saw set up all at once with a dust collector to gather up the chips and dust. Using half of our garage as a shop back in South Dakota, I had to set up my table tools one at a time, hook them to a shop vacuum and put each away before getting out the next one. I spent a lot of time pulling out tools, making space to use them and then putting them away.

Another thing I have going for me here is that it is much easier to obtain wood. I already knew that there were sources for wood out here that aren’t matched in South Dakota. I built a kayak with cedar that I had hauled back to South Dakota from Washington State several years ago. The big box stores have about the same lumber selection as those in South Dakota, but there are plenty of local lumberyards and specialty wood shops that have a much larger selection of wood. In South Dakota, if I wanted a few 1 x 4’s, I had to go to the big box store and sort through piles of boards to find two or three that were straight enough to use. Here, I stopped at the local lumber yard and they brought out 10’ 1 x 4 boards that had four sides clear and were straighter than I would have found anywhere that I know of in South Dakota. And they sold those boards at prices that are competitive with the big box stores.

Millwork, however, is a different matter. While the big box stores sell some millwork, they have nothing that approached the trim that was already installed in the farmhouse. Lucky for me, however, my son has a barn. I set up my router and with three passes per board I milled grooves into the boards to match those already installed around windows in the house. Our son did a great job matching the stain and finishing the boards and yesterday we were able to trim out the dining room and part of the kitchen. The house has bay windows, which means that the trim work wasn’t just a matter of 90 degree angles which are mitered by cutting 45 degree angles in the trim. There were 45 degree angles calling for two cuts of 22.5 degrees. And, as you can imagine, a century old home has some places where the walls aren’t quite as straight and plumb as they were when they were built, so we had to take some effort and empty a few shims to get everything to fit.

Which brings me to the other advantage of my new situation when it comes to getting a job done. I didn’t have to work alone. And that is the best part of working in our new situation. For the first time since he went away from home to go to college, I have our son to work alongside me on projects. In addition to not having to do the finish work because he did all of the staining and varnish work, he worked alongside me yesterday so that one could hold a board in place while the other was nailing. When we needed to glue a miter joint, there were two hands to hold each board in place. And we are having so much fun being together that we never run out of topics for conversation.

I’m sure that for our son and daughter in law their new home seems like an endless list of projects. After all, we still have a deck to build, with outside steps for the patio slider. We have one wall of a two-story house to remove the old siding and install new. There are trees to plant and gardens to tend and a huge lawn that will need mowing. There are additional rooms in the house in need of baseboard and rooms that need new paint. There is old carpet that needs to be removed and new flooring to install in some rooms. I have had the experience of being a bit overwhelmed by a house. I never did get caught up with all of the chores in the fixer upper we bought in Idaho and lived in for a decade. But for me, the list of chores is a real blessing. I’m having the time of my life thinking about the next job and how to tackle it. I’m excited to have about 60 feet of baseboard yet to mill.

If you’re looking for me, I’ll be out at the farm - probably in the barn.