Cabin Improvements
(9/23/02) This summer has been one long with cabin improvement
adventures. In the late spring, I started by tearing down the
front wall replacing the eight foot single pane commercial glass
windows with Anderson (tm) french style windows. I was lucky
enough to find one pane at the local home recycle store
. The paneled brown plywood, has been replaced with one inch tong
and grove pine inside and out. The smoky and inefficient
Franklin fireplace was removed along with several hundred pounds of
brick backing (thank you Pete). I used these bricks for the
floor of the wood shed.
Red river rock serves as the new hearth and been set all the way across
the front wall. On the opening side it ends with a boot
box. On the stove side it ends with the firewood box. A
chute opens to the inside of the firewood box from the small outside
shed. The extended hearth area should be large enough for
several people to enter and take off their boots off and warm by the
stove at the same time. An eventual re-decking will make this
front door the main entrance eliminating the crowding through the
kitchen area whenever people enter or leave.
The new chute should allow for at least a day's firewood to be stacked
inside the cabin without letting out heat. The new Quadra Fire (tm) efficient
stove will quickly warm and better heat the whole cabin. An
8 x 8 x 8 woodshed has been built largely out of recycled materials and
filled for the winter with equal parts scrap, hard and
pine wood.
Snow entered the great room through the open wall in the late spring,
but now the vast majority of the work has been completed early for the
oncoming winter. Coat hooks, boot box flooring and drying fan,
firewood box flooring and insulation, and a ceiling fan still need
to be installed, but all the critical summer projects are
successfully completed. This winter will be warmer and more
comfortable for our family and guests. To our guests of this
past summer, thank you for coming up and bearing with all the
construction. We hope that you will enjoy your stay and will
appreciate all the improvements in the coming winter.
Click on picture for enlargement !
(7/5/2004) Spent much of this 4th of July weekend getting myself
in trouble with another project. Late last summer and fall I
moved the water heater down into the basement to make way for a used
washer dryer combo. It works great and Beverly and guests were
very pleased with the small but wholly adequate washing / drying
facilities. It looked great too, but it was not entirely finished
and I decided to complete the job with knotty pine walls this last
weekend. So far I have removed the plywood wall material behind
the stair, in the little hall between the downstairs bedrooms.
This was not exactly part of the washer dryer project, but I
added it to my work anyway. It is going to look very nice, when
it is finished.
I've given the new pine wall boards a good start but am far from
finished with even the rough work. I suppose that it will take at
least a weekend to complete the rough work and finish the surface,
following this another weekend to put up the trim. Meanwhile,
Beverly has had new carpets installed in the bedrooms and
upstairs.
Cabin Resouces
Telephone Switcher MK2