It was with great sadness that I read about the fire that destroyed the house I built on Basin Road in 1980. I built it myself with the help of my friends. Alan Rosenthal came down from Anchorage to frame it, another friend, Michael Peterson, a 24-year-old architectural student, did the major construction, my partner, Bob Roark, and I did all the finish work ourselves. We made handmade wainscoting, we used salvaged doors from St. Ann’s, and a big old cannery window, light fixtures from an historic Seattle building. It took four guys to carry the 6-foot lion-paw bathtub up the 90 stairs. I installed 50,000 little hex tiles in the two bathrooms. The vintage pedestal sinks came from an old house in Auke Bay. I kayaked out to a nearby island with my friend Lewis Schnaper to gather flat stones for the hearth. One kitchen had reclaimed cabinets and a 1950s Tappen gas range, the other side had a Wolfe commercial stove. We got on our hands and knees to install 60 boxes of fine wood flooring — all carried up those stairs by friendly sherpas. “D-8 Dave” Whistler built terraces up the hillside for our veggie gardens. Everything was done with such loving care. Even though I moved away and no longer owned the house, its loss leaves a hole in my heart.<\/p>\n
Phyllice Bradner<\/p>\n
McMinnville, Oregon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was with great sadness that I read about the fire that destroyed the house I built on Basin Road in 1980. I built it myself with the help of my friends. Alan Rosenthal came down from Anchorage to frame it, another friend, Michael Peterson, a 24-year-old architectural student, did the major construction, my partner, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-12647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12647"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=12647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}