A Door with a View

When it was first built in 1952, Lloyd’s Landing was a wee little rectangle with a door on the North side.  With a cabin that small, there was no need for a second door.  In the seventies, Maurie built a porch and decided that the porch needed its own door, so he installed one on the North side, just 15 feet from the original door.

Since 1952, the most spacious land, the place where families set up their lawn chairs and watched the sunset, was on the South side of the cabin.  Grandma Anne’s giant wooden glider was on the South side.  The Aas’s installed a fire pit on the South side.  The pristine State Forest is on the South Side.   The North side has the strangely-named Bath House and a dull view of the neighbor’s cabin.

In short, the South side is where the good stuff is.  In 1970, it seated 50 people for a Mass:

And yet, since 1952, the Hyldens have been coming and going from the North side, employing a screen door that has that familiar squeak and slam sound of a hot summer day.  There is no pathway between the doors and the South side, so in every vacation, a small child is scolded for tracking mud or pine needles into the house, by virtue of circling around the front to get from the good stuff to the door.

And so it has been for 60 years at Lloyd’s Landing: slamming screen doors, chiding children, padding across pine needles, all in the pursuit of connecting the necessities of the indoors with the perfection of the outdoors.  And yet, as our relatives have told about the evolution of the cabin and the goals of its varied caretakers, no one ever relayed a story about a desire to change the entryway to the cabin.

Enter the Andersons.

It started on a warm summer night, as we watched the sunset and talked about the next phase of our windows and siding project: the South Side.  How much siding did we need? how lopsided was that long span of building going to look? could we find a replacement window for the slider in the living room?  And what about those flimsy combination windows in the porch, they’d have to go for sure. 

The porch.  Wait.  What if, we thought, we made it easier to access the South side?  What if--gasp--there was a door on the South side of the porch?  We could access the great view, the fire pit, the best place for a circle of lawn chairs, all from a simple access point!  We could have more privacy!  We could someday build a deck!

It didn’t take long to get from concept to the window & door department at Menards.  The choices weren’t onerous, since we needed to keep it simple and accommodate the dimensions of the porch.  So without much debate, the supplies were purchased and Dave’s reliable brother Derick was enlisted to help.

While I stayed home resting my back spasms, I received this status:

And although my back prevented me from being helpful, we got to this point by the time we closed the cabin for the season in October:

To paraphrase an old saying, when the Andersons rip out a window, they open a door.