Building Home in Alaska Was Kit Stuff

Somewhere along the way we realized we were doing something wrong. We were shipping logs to Alaska, and that just didn’t sound right.

But by then it was too late to turn back. The vacation home that we had dreamed of building near Juneau, Alaska, had been launched, and before it would all end, we would become intimate with more bankers than we knew existed, we would look down the precipitous road to bankruptcy many times and we would meet dozens of construction workers who became our friends.

My wife, Sherie, grew up in Alaska as the daughter of a federal wildlife officer, spending many of her early years in small villages where her father had been sent to impose white man’s rule on a native population. It was not an easy life. For years she was a redhead because of the rust in the water in the home where the Morgan family lived on the banks of Bristol Bay. But she grew to love that magnificent land.

More than a quarter of a century ago, she left it. For reasons I will never understand she gave up the majesty that is Alaska to share her life with me. It meant moving to a smoggy city to the south where editors at a metropolitan newspaper could rule our lives, and it meant that only occasionally could she journey north to cleanse her soul, not to mention her eyeballs.

Many years ago I vowed that someday I would build a house in Alaska for her. But as we made our many pilgrimages north I grew to love the state almost as much as she did, so we can dispense with any sense of nobility here. The decision to build was made by both of us in the face of wise counsel that said we were nuts.

So about a decade ago we began to look for a lot in Juneau, where Sherie’s parents and three brothers live. But despite the fact that Alaska is by far the largest state in the union, very little land was for sale, and what was available commanded Southern California prices.

Nearly the entire state is locked up by federal, state and local governments, as well as native corporations established years ago as part of a land settlement act that cleared the way for the construction of the Alaska pipeline.

We had all but given up hope until the last day of our vacation three years ago.

While driving toward town we saw a “for sale” sign on a small beachfront lot. The lot was so small that locals thought it was unbuildable. It was only a third of an acre, minuscule by Alaskan standards. But it was at a price that we could afford, and the next day we bought it while we were literally on the way out of town.

That was our first mistake. Don’t ever buy a piece of land until you have studied every inch of it.

The realtor had insisted that the lot had a building pad on the beach beneath a jungle that had grown up in recent years. The next year, when we explored our lot for the first time, we learned that the jungle covered nothing but a steep slope that dropped nearly straight into the water. But it was ours, and we decided to build.

It seemed to me then that only a log house would do for our dream home in Alaska, and we spent weeks studying sales brochures from some of the 200-plus outfits that offer log home kits. We finally decided on a 1,400-square-foot, two-story beauty manufactured by Greatwood Log Homes of Wisconsin.

The brochure said the logs were hand-peeled, preserving the natural beauty of the white cedar logs, and it insisted that construction of the house would be comparable in cost to a conventional home.

That was our second mistake. Don’t believe everything you read in sales brochures.

We made our first of what was to be many trips to the bank that held the mortgage on our San Pedro home, which we had purchased 18 years earlier before prices went goofy. We are both just working stiffs (Sherie is a nurse) and we decided to use the equity in our home here to build our home there.

It made sense then, because our home here was nearly paid off, but you should see our mortgage now!

Within weeks our log “kit,” or so they described it in the brochure, was on its way north and we found ourselves shipping logs to Alaska. Even before they arrived, we realized we were in trouble.

Our beach lot threatened to become part of the inland waterway unless we did something to protect it before building our house. And along came Bruce Morley, an Abe Lincoln look-alike who owns a large gravel pit and never saw a vacant lot that couldn’t use a little more dirt.

Bruce said that what our lot needed was a retainer wall along to beach to protect our future home from a sea that can become fierce.

It sounded reasonable and Bruce moved quickly to the task. He trucked in rocks the size of small cars and tumbled them down the nearly vertical chunk of land that we called “our lot.” The huge boulders crashed through the trees and landed on the beach with a sickening thud, a sound that was to echo through my wallet every time Bruce’s truck stopped with another load of rocks.

One day, Bruce showed up with the largest rig I had ever seen, a giant yellow tractor with massive claws on one end that made it look like a refugee from the Natural History Museum.

“Time to get to it,” Bruce said cheerfully, and then he drove over the edge of the abyss that we still thought of as “our lot.” The huge contraption roared down the nearly vertical slope and stopped abruptly in front of the pile of rocks. Bruce used the claws to pick up each rock. He turned them this way and that until satisfied that he knew every one of them.

Then he began a bit of craftsmanship like I had never seen before. He put each rock in place with loving care, and by the time he had finished he had built a magnificent rock wall that ran the entire width of out lot.

Bruce climbed down from his mechanical beast, grinning broadly, and I blurted out: “It looks like an Incan ruin.”

The grin faded for a moment, and then returned. “I think that’s a compliment,” he said.

With the building pad in, our “kit” arrived by ship and workers began unloading it on the dock. And they unloaded. And they unloaded some more.

An entire house arriving at one time is a truly awesome sight. Especially if you had planned to put the thing up yourself while on vacation. Piles of lumber and logs towered over us as we walked through the mess, comprehending for the first time the depth of the hole into which we had plunged ourselves.

We needed help. And lots of it.

And along came Marquam George, a young contractor with a backward sounding name who took one look at our vertical lot and said: “No problem.”

Over the following months we found enough problems to tame the Persian Gulf. It seems our “kit” was not exactly what one envisions when contemplating a kit. It was more like a mountain of materials out of which we were supposed to build a house. The construction manual that came with the kit read a little different than the sales brochure.

The logs, for example, were only partially peeled. It was up to the builder to finish the task. That translated into weeks of draw knifing, resorting to 19th Century building techniques that left my shoulders sore for at least a year.

“No problem,” Marquam said.

Marquam and his buddy, Bill Bosse, whose idea of recreation is skin diving in Alaska, figured peeling the logs was the easy part. Getting them down the hill was the tough part.

In my inexperience, I had figured that we would hire a huge crane that would set the entire kit on the building pad below. But then we discovered that if we set the kit on the pad, there would be no room to build the house. And the lot sloped at just the right angle to make the use of a crane impossible.

It turned out that the entire house, every nail, every piece of wood, every door and every window, had to be carried down the steep hillside by hand. To me, it seemed impossible.

“No problem,” Marquam said.

Every few days, some poor devil would show up, looking for work.

“Grab a few logs,” Marquam would tell him. At the end of the day, the fellow would take his pay and usually disappear forever.

But in the end it all got done. What I didn’t know about Marquam when we first met was that this is a man who loves to solve problems.

A magnificent stairway with 56 steps now hides the steep slope. The house is nestled at the foot of the lot, protected by Bruce’s wall. As it turns out, each of Marquam’s friends who worked on the house was the best craftsman in his particular speciality that I have ever met, and there is absolutely nothing in the house that we would change today.

Ours was a rather extraordinary experience in that we were fortunate to hire a contractor who never gave us the slightest reason to question his personal integrity.

During my vacation I worked an the house myself and Marquam hovered over me to the point that I sometimes wondered just whose house it was. What was acceptable to me frequently fell below his standards, and more than once I caught someone else correcting my mistakes.

We had an additional problem in that much of the construction was completed while we were in Los Angeles, leaving the contractor in the difficult position of having to explain complicated matters over the telephone and asking us how we wanted something done. More often than not, we ended up saying “whatever seems best to you, Marquam.”

We never had a reason to regret that.

What grew out of all that was a trusting relationship between contractor and owner that, I realize, was quite unusual. When the price soared beyond what any of us had anticipated, we knew it was because of the peculiar nature of our project, and Marquam’s quest for perfection.

We never had an argument over a bill. A lot of bankers grew to appreciate that.

And now it is finished. Around the first of each month, when payments on various debts come due, from time to time I question my sanity. It is, after all, a house we can only use occasionally. But when we ask if we would do it all over again, we always come up with the same answer:

No problem.