My brother Joe Gyekis and I, with my mom as kids and again on a birding walk several years ago. Joe and his son Henry are my “Superheros of the Month”!

Hello Everyone,

WOW! It is suddenly summer! After a cold rainy may where we kept needing to have fires to stay warm, we are now getting some seriously summery weather. Though, it is still raining a lot! The lush greenery is exploding and it is hard to find a day where it is dry enough to mow some paths in the jungle of my now overgrown, still torn up and muddy “yard” that is waiting for some more fill and final grading (we to create a proper ADA parking spot, since I am running a business I need an ADA parking spot, entry, and bathroom). Check out this video of how high the waterfalls are from all the rains.

In the meantime, I am busting my butt on all kinds of finish-work projects, mostly alone and sometimes with an occasional helper as my dad recovers from knee surgery and does some actual paying work building cabinets for someone else! As I have mentioned before, his greatest specialty is custom kitchens and cabinetry. 

Which leads me to this month’s Featured Project: Cabinets, Doors, and Windows! This kind of work is best done in my dad’s marvelous and spacious woodshop where he is perfectly set up for it, and it is great winter work because the shop has heat, and my construction site did not. In the winter of 2022/2023 we built almost every single door for my house and all of the fixed windows (we ordered the openable windows.)  In the winter of 2023/2024, we built all of the cabinets for both my kitchen and the guest kitchen, the counter tops for my kitchen, and a vanity cabinet for my bathroom. 

For my June SuperHeros, I want to spotlight my brother Joe and his son/my nephew Henry. They have been helping me all along here and there, but were especially involved in the next step of the house after we got it sealed to the elements at the end of 2023: insulation! We used rock wool, which is less awful than fiberglass, but still itchy and miserable and dangerous to breath too much of. In 2024, we insulated my side of the house, wall by wall and room by room. The work is simple and easy and low-tech, but totally miserable. I was super grateful that they plugged into several days of that work and efficiently conquered a lot of square-footage. 

Last but not least, for my Nature Spotlight:  Marvelous Mountain Laurel! While there is very little mountain laurel around the house, there is a ton if it across the stream and along the higher ground of the ridge/gorge downstream from the waterfall. On years where the mountain laurel is bounteous, it is like a fairy tale! It usually blooms in June in PA.

As always, it is a long one, feel free to just skim and peak at pictures!

All my love to you all!

Elody

P.S. Support Me: I just added five new paintings to my limited edition archival print sale! Each print is $20 or $22 (plus $5 or $6 shipping. If the shipping doesn’t add to your order please let me know and we will settle it separately, my website glitches and skips the shipping options, especially with Apple-Pay). Pics below, plus a link here to the print section of my shop!

Panorama attempting to capture Gary’s shop while we build cabinets for two kitchens!

Feature Project: Cabinets, Doors and Windows

So often, I feel like I am just writing “this process is so much more work that I thought it would be!” Everything has so many steps and takes so much time! I am learning so much about my dad’s career through this project, what his work is really like. I always knew he built doors and made custom cabinets, but now I truly understand what that means, and whew, it really is a lot of work. I am going to alternate text and pictures to give you a glimpse of what these processes entail. I was of course simply there to give a hand… help carry plywood, catch boards off of the table saw, be a second set of hands during assembly, and of course do sanding and varnishing and other surface finish work. But Gary is the brains and skill and frankly even most of the brawn of the operation. And this really is his specialty! We used all kinds of hardwood for these projects, much of it locally sourced: white oak, cherry, and sassafras on the doors, mostly cherry and some maple for the fixed windows, ash for the kitchen cabinets, and cherry and walnut for the countertops. I took lots of timelapse videos of this process but have not yet edited and posted any of it yet, so keep an eye out on Facebook and Instagram for cool videos in the coming weeks.

Creating parts, assembling, varnishing, and adding the glass to doors and windows.

Doors and Windows: 

During the winter of 2022/2023 we were designing and getting the building permits for the house. Long before we got permits and broke ground, we began making parts for the future house, starting with the exterior doors and fixed windows. It is excellent winter shop work, and good to have done and ready by the time you need them. To make doors and fixed windows, you need thick slabs of high quality hardwood, free from major knots or flaws of any kind. There is a lot of processing to get all of the pieces the right depth and width, and then after that Gary had to do his magic to the end of every piece to create all kinds of cool mortice-and-tenon joints. 

Then we assembled the doors, adding both glue and pegs for extra security. Then additional sanding and beginning the varnishing process. Any door with a window and all of the fixed windows needed glass, and we ordered double-paned tempered glass windows with a sealed vacuum between the panes from a local business that does custom windows. Assembling the doors with the glass also needed a proper seal, and we used weather stripping on both sides between the glass and the applied trim that sandwiches the glass in securely. The trim pieces of course also needed to be made and varnished ahead of time. 

A note on what I mean by “varnish”. Every face of every door and window and every piece of additional trim needed to receive this treatment: 1) sanding 2) apply sanding sealer and let dry 3) flip and do the other side 4) sand both sides again 5) apply first layer of wipe-on-varnish. Let dry. Flip and do the other side. 6) re-apply varnish until there are at least three layers, more if the wood is thirsty. 7) do a final coat of spar varnish (used on ships!) for exterior side of door or window. Given that drying time was many hours and that the doors and windows were so large and plentiful so I could only put so many out to work on at once, this took me literally months to complete. 

Fast forward through the spring and summer as we built the house and began hanging doors and installing windows, we discovered that despite building what felt like a million doors, we were five doors short. So be bought three sturdy used doors from a historic salvage place, once of which has a cool stained glass window insert and all of which needed to be totally repainted to my own standards and to match the house (video here of one) and also quickly built the two basement doors from leftover pieces of siding!

Whew! A lot of doors!

Above: Assembling cabinet boxes, faces, drawers, doors, and counter tops.

Cabinets:

First, you design your kitchen. To the inch. Every cabinet height width and depth, every shelf and every drawer. Then you do a lot of math and diagramming to help you figure out how much material you need and how to most efficiently use it. Each sheet of plywood has a plan for how it will fit the most sides and tops and bottoms and shelves with the least amount of scrap. Graph paper is essential for all of this! Then you order your plywood and start to process it, trying to keep track of what each piece is for. You don’t want to get your 24 by 32 side pieces mixed up with your 24 by 30 top and bottoms for a different cabinet, or everything is ruined! Always double check everything.

Then, you assemble the basic boxes and shelves. I can hardly imagine how Gary does this solo sometimes! It was very handy to have four arms involved. And the boxes take up SO MUCH SPACE. You begin to have towers, miniature cities of cabinet boxes stacked every which way, constantly having to move them around, and they keep getting heavier as more parts are added. 

Then, you begin to create the moving parts and visible surfaces. Faces for the cabinets, all of the doors, the boxes and faces for the pull-out drawers in the lower sections of cabinets. More and more pieces to create, keep track of, assemble. At this stage there begins to be a lot more finish work for me to do, sanding, varnishing, and painting. The cabinet doors for both kitchens I decided to do a painted panel surrounded by wood, and the panels will eventually get decorative painted details as well. Finally, you begin to attach the hardware for the pull out drawers and such. Hinges for the cabinet doors are added later after the cabinets are installed in place. Then, we stacked everything in giant stacks in the corner of the unheated part of my dad’s shop, where they wait for the kitchens to be ready for them, anywhere from 6 months to a year and a half later! 

Below: Top images: Sneak peak of some of the cabinets being installed in my kitchen and the vanity we built in my bathroom. You can see a hint of how colorful my wall choices have been in both of these! Bottom row: Transforming a salvaged door to match my exterior! See a video here.

Top Left: Elody, Gary, Rebecca, Joe and Henry awkwardly holding up drywall in a cramped closet space. All other photos: Joe and Henry helping to install insulation in 2024.

Superhero(s) of the Month: Joe & Henry Gyekis

This month, I want to talk about my brother Joe and his son, my nephew Henry. As I mentioned in the intro, they have helped with all kinds of things when they can, but were especially helpful during the big push to get the insulation done on my side last summer. I will come back to that and the other ways they have been involved, but first I want to talk more about who they are. Many of you reading this newsletter know me personally and have met my family, and many of you have not. So this is my chance share my personal life, my fantastic brother, and since I am not a parent myself, brag about the amazingness of my brother’s offspring. I take my role as the “cool aunt” very seriously. Cheers to all the aunties out there!

First, Joe Gyekis, is my only sibling, and older brother of three years. Gyekis is an exceedingly rare last name. If you meet someone who knows a Gyekis with the same spelling, they are closely related to me. There are only like a dozen of us in the whole world. If you tell me which Gyekis you know, I can readily guess what community you are involved in. If you know of me, you are connected to the art world. If it is my dad Gary, you could be in the building/carpentry world, the music world (have I mentioned that he is in three bands and has gigs all the time?) or perhaps you are into flyfishing. But if you know my brother Joe, there is a 99% chance that you are a birdwatcher. 

Joe is faculty in the Bio-Behavioral Health Department at Penn State, and he is an excellent teacher of science and biology and statistics and the relationships between genes and behavior in animals. But really, I think of his career as just a day job to support his birdwatching habit. He co-writes scientific papers about very specific migration habits for ornithology journals for fun. He leads bird walks and helps collect massive amounts of data for the current Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas and other projects. He raises awareness about bird-safe glass treatments to prevent birdstrikes (bird deaths from collisions with windows) especially during migration season.

Speaking of which, did you know your home could be killing birds and you don’t even know it? Often other predators will drag off a dead bird near your house before you have seen it. Here is an article featuring Joe, and here is a great simple resource about options you can do to your own home.

Below: For our Bird-Safe window treatment, we went with the simple and cheap options of using washable window markers and doing it by hand on the most vulnerable windows on my place, sometimes getting creative (see Henry below, top row) and sometimes keeping it simple and doing a tiny dot every two inches (see Loanne using a stick to help her make a grid, bottom row). The dots are highly visible to the birds from the outside, but surprisingly unnoticeable from indoors.

Back to Joe. We had an idyllic childhood tromping around the woods and I think all things considered got along really well, but like most sibling relationships, my older brother teased me mercilessly as a little kid and was too cool for me as a teenager, and I am sure I was an annoying little princess as well. But we became the best of friends as soon as we were adult-ish and out of the house. In fact, we lived together a few years during college. I am going to share a bunch of pictures of us through the years below, and you will see in the awkward teen years there was a moment where I hit puberty before he did and I look like the older sibling. But then he sprung up to a little over 6 feet and left me in the dust again. Joe also took advantage of my mom’s position at Penn State, using the discount to get his undergraduate degree. Then he stayed at Penn State for his masters, then his PHD, and finally began teaching there. He met and married his wife, Yuejiao (who also goes by Heather) a wonderful woman from the Yunnan province in China and a brilliant statistician. They combined their super nerd genes and had a son, Henry, who as you might imagine, can’t help but to be smart. All in all, Joe is a wonderful person, and of course a bona-fide bird nerd, and honestly, birders are the best kind of nerd out there. 

Above clockwise from top left: Loanne with newborn Elody & Gary with toddler Joe, Joe & Elody as kids, Joe (17) and Elody (14) in China, Joe & Elody as young adults.

Henry was born on October 13th, 2010. He went from being the cutest child imaginable to now somehow transforming in to a ridiculously handsome man-sized teenager of almost 15 who is as tall as his dad and probably still growing. He seems to be combining all of the best of his parents qualities, and is funny, kind, and has an easy-going disposition that is easy to be around. While there is no doubt some teen angst going on in there, he does not seem nearly as awkward as I was at that age! Henry has so much confidence, and pretty much lives in colorful Hawaiian shirts and muck-boots, and rocks the look with style. He plays tuba in his school band, does all kinds of gaming with other kids, and loves learning about animals of the past and present.  One of my favorite things about him is that he is generous and sweet about playing with younger kids, but also very comfortable hanging out with older kids and adults, a multi-generational maturity which is not always the case with teenagers. Pics below of Henry through the years.

Henry was just 10 when I bought this property, and has spent much of his summers camping out, hanging out by the camp fire, exploring the woods, and bringing his friends for overnights campouts. Joe has discovered so many birds in the diverse habitats on and around my property. Both of then have helped out in so many ways in addition to the insulation project last summer. Just last week they came for the afternoon to help me put tarps over tents and move furniture and boxes and other heavy things I needed a hand with. Once again, I am so lucky to have my whole family involved in this gigantic endeavour. Thank you Joe and Henry for all of your help!  

Above: Henry from the day he was born to about six years old. Below: Henry from age 9 to 14. Center photo Joe pretending to be shorter than Henry last fall, and bottom right of Henry now, when he actually is beginning to surpass Joe in height!

Close-up of pink-ish Mountain Laurel Blossoms. Note the ready-to-spring stamens!

Nature Spotlight: Kalmia latifolia

Kalmia latifolia is a flowering plant native to the eastern United States with a range that stretches all the way from Maine to Florida. Mountain laurel is the state flower of Pennsylvania, and is on the tail end of its blooming season right now.

The plant thrives in the acidic soil of high rocky mountain slopes of forested mountains and is an excellent pollinator plant, supporting and attracting hummingbirds, butterflies, and many other insects. One of its most fabulous features is its unusual method of dispensing its pollen. As the flower grows, the filaments of its stamens are bent and brought into tension. When an insect lands on the flower, the tension is released, catapulting the pollen forcefully onto the insect. Experiments have shown the flower capable of flinging its pollen up to 15 cm! Next time you encounter a blooming plant, stick your finger into the center of a flower and watch it get whacked with a stamen or two full of pollen.

Speaking of touching these plants, there is a persistent myth that the designation of State flower affords Mountain laurel a protected status. This is not true. No one may remove any plant from public or private land without the landowner's or land manager's permission. But there are no legal restrictions on the cultivation of Mountain laurel. There are many native plants that are less abundant and less hardy, such as a trillium flower, that you should absolutely not pick. But, next time you are in a gorgeous glade of Mountain Laurel in full bloom, don’t be terribly afraid to pluck a blossom and tuck it behind your ears.

Hiking through the bountiful blossoms just north of my property in Summer of 2023.

Sirona Falls