We had finally arrived home and survived the first winter by the skin of our teeth and only because we had the help of some very good neighbors who certainly had to be wondering if the city kids at the end of the road really had what it took to live in Mink Creek. We were wondering the same thing. We had built Lynn Nelson's log cabin in the front yard right up to the square, which meant that the next step was to start some kind of a roof which we could not do until Lynn decided where to put it. So, freed from that project, we decided to focus our attention on our own abode. We knew now that there were more things that needed serious attention before another winter hit us. Remodeling was going to be put into high gear, well remodeling on a shoestring, because we certainly didn't have any money. Wynn put his arm around me and said,"We didn't buy a farm, we bought twenty years worth of work. Where should we start?"
  Wynn gave a tug on a loose piece of wallpaper in the living room and it began to rip away from the wall, a domino type rip, like a sound wave getting louder. The paper came off in one big piece, it ripped away from one wall, turned the corner and started falling off the next wall. The oil cloth on the ceiling began to sag. You could hear the rumble of an avalanche of loose plaster falling from the lath beneath and suddenly we found ourselves standing under a tent held up by the center ceiling light bulb while a cloud of plaster dust billowed around us.
   "I guess I'll start by cleaning up this mess," I said, and that's kind of how all of the remodelling started, first we made a really big mess and then we worked our way through it.  Sometimes it was a technique we used to motivate each other. I remember one wall we debated back and forth about removing, and one day while I took ten minutes to go down the road and return a neighbor's bowl, Wynn tore into the wall with a sledge hammer and when I got back it was gone. There was just a big pile of rubble to haul out in a wheel barrow. I had a very hard time deciding about some projects. They looked totally different on paper and in my mind than they did in reality. The joke is that I moved the stairway around like most women move furniture, and it's true. The hole in the ceiling for the stairway was cut in three different places and the children climbed up a ladder to their rooms for many months. It was really something to watch two year-old McKay climbing up a ten foot ladder to get to his bedroom. But, by the end of the summer we had made good progress. We removed the lath and plaster and re-wired everything, We were given some water-damaged sheetrock and put it up. We tore off the roof of the lean-to kitchen and built a second story above it. We hauled away the discarded aluminum printing plates from the newspaper in town, cut them into shingles and re-roofed the house. This was something we learned from reading "Mother Earth News." From our hoard of used windows, we replaced the single panes that were letting the snow in and we installed a new woodstove. Then we went to the forest and cut enough firewood to last for six months. We stacked it near the house where it would not be covered by sliding snow and felt like we were prepared for another winter.  If there is one thing we've learned from being in Mink Creek, it is to be prepared for the worst.