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.
Boot Box Chute new stove from above shed
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