By Joe Crain
As I’m sure most of you who have been to camp would agree, one of the best features of camp’s cabins are their huge and numerous windows. They’re a wonderful feature for a summer-only camp that both allows for great air circulation during those hot summer days as well as an unfettered view of the natural beauty that surrounds us in the Northwoods. And as I’m sure those of you who have been at camp know, with 200 boys running around, we get quite a few holes and tears in the window screens. It’s up to us Caretakers to help patch that new hole that’s just the right size and shape of a football thrown inside a cabin! With few exceptions, the windows in the cabins are at least three feet high and anywhere from four feet up to nearly eight feet wide. The original screens that cover these huge windows were made of galvanized steel, and they lasted quite a long time, but now after so many decades out in the elements, some are now rusty, filled with patches, or have stretched loose at the edges. Unfortunately, the size of the screens and the original installation method make it extremely difficult to replace the screens, so a number of years ago I set out to both start to replace these older, steel screens, and come up with a better and more serviceable method of installing new ones. After studying the job, I came to the conclusion that there were three main issues that needed to be addressed.
- The size of the window openings are so large that if a section of screen became damaged, the whole screen needed to be replaced. Considering that a lot of the screens were are close to 3ftx8ft, replacement is both very costly as well as time consuming.
- In order to replace a screen, the pull-up window blind, the tracks the blind sits on, and all of the surrounding trim needed to be removed.
- If a screen stretched loose at its edges, again the blind and its tracks needed to be removed in order to reattach the loose edge.
To address the first problem, window size, I installed 2” x 4” dividers to break the windows up into sections of 36 inches or less allowing for smaller sections of screen to be replaced when a section was damaged. Not only does this give more staple support to each smaller section, it allows us to preserve the best parts of having such large windows: the view! Thankfully both the second and third problems dealt with the same issue, needing to remove the whole blind assembly every time we needed to replace a screen or reattach its edges. To solve this issue, I wrapped the inside of the window opening with wood strips that I could staple a new screen to without having to remove the blind tracks and all of the trim beneath. So now, when a camper piles all of their worldly belongings on the window sil and stretches that screen out, it’s easy to remove the damaged area and pop in a small section of screen. I trimmed the new screen in such a manner that you can pull the trim for only the area needing repair be it a left portion, a right portion, or on the really large windows the middle section without affecting the rest of that windows trim or installed screen.
And as I’m sure those of you how have been at camp know, there are an enormous number of cabins and screens at camp! I started this replacement project several years ago in the Axemen Village, and that year I was able to get two and a half of the seven cabins completed; The Annex, Axmen 2 and half of Axmen 4. In 2020, with more time for less urgent projects, I was able to complete the replacement of all of the screens in the Lumberjack Village. So, with not much snow on the ground at the end of November I decided it would be a good time to get back to this ongoing project. I knew that it was only a matter of weeks before the snow would accumulate to the point that I would no longer be able to drive into forcing me to spend all of my time inside the shop. So, I figured I’d work on replacing the screens in the Axmen village until the snow depth forced me in for the rest of the winter. I’m happy to report I was able to complete the rest of Axmen 4 as well as Axmen 2 and 3 before the big two-day storm that struck us on December 14th and 15th. That monster storm left camp buried in 16 inches of super wet snow and shut down driving into the Axmen Village for the rest of the winter.
Looking forward to the spring melt, and hoping it comes early enough to finish replacing the screens on the last two cabins of the Axemen Village, it’s Caretaker Joe At Camp.