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Log Cabin Lessons Part 3

Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom recently adopted a new advertising slogan that urges visitors to “Embrace a Change of Pace.” If I were the ad exec I would have shortened it to “Embrace the Pace” – it’s popier – but regardless, it’s a decent slogan that promises simplicity to frazzled urbanites.

The catch however – as you all know – is that rural life isn’t simple most of the time. Most of us live this sort of hybrid life, where we’re in tune to the old ways and the old agrarian rhythms but we’re marching to a thoroughly modern drumbeat. We work and then we go home and try to get our wood in, or put up food from the garden, or hay the field. This work/life mix gets harder as the days grow shorter and shorter. In a lot of ways it seems like urban life would be simpler, where everything is just there for you to buy and you’re only living one modern life, not a modern one and an old one at the same time.

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of bringing things back to the log cabin I’ve been building with family and friends for the past four years or so. Here’s part one and two of the story for those who want a refresher. If life were an ad campaign we would have been done by now, sitting on the porch drinking coffee while the sun rises over the east mountain, making all the urbanites jealous with our laid back ways. But it’s not. So we’re plugging along, working weekends and snatching hours here and there during the week, trying to get a roof on by deer season and the whole shell up and stained before the wood rots.

If memory serves, I think we cut the trees and milled the wood in 2011, then spent the last two summers building the camp in my front yard, where we had power and easier access to equipment. Work on the actual cabin site, which is a mile or so back into the woods, started in earnest this past June, when we tore the old camp down and burned it. Happy and sad, that day. Twenty years of ghosts rising out of the conflagration.

We then poured concrete piers. This cabin is being built in the same spot as the last one, but it’s a bigger footprint, so the existing piers were mostly non-synchronous. We used an excavator to dig and set Sonotubes and then mixed 80-pound bags of Sakrete cement by hand in a tractor bucket using water dipped from a creek. It took around seven bags per tube. A 13-year-old kid and I bulled away at this chore and spent a good part of an afternoon getting a handful of tubes poured. Then a 65-year-old hooked a hose to the creek so we’d have running water, and a 72-year-old borrowed a cement mixer and a generator from a friend. Three hours later the job was done and the kid learned that wisdom really does come with age.

A deck was next, and we started to apply the lessons learned from the last camp which had been bedeviled by moisture and carpenter ants. We added pressure treated 6 x 6’s to the top of the concrete to really get things up and off the ground. We want the porcupines to be comfortable (and good air flow). We then built the whole floor frame out of pressure-treated wood, which seems worth the extra money for the piece of mind.

We gathered the boys together and had a cabin raising, where we numbered and disassembled the logs that had been stacked in my yard, dragged them up into the woods, then reassembled them at the building site. It was nice getting everyone together, but we soon learned that raising a log cabin is not as simple as raising a stick-framed structure. The logs were unwieldy, and everything needed to fit together like a puzzle, so there was no getting ahead. We had 12 people there, anxious to help, but we only had steady work for a half-dozen of them. We had grand designs about getting the whole thing erected in a weekend, but by Sunday evening we’d only gotten four courses up. It was a good illustration of why log construction is so expensive – there’s just a huge amount of down time, and you can’t speed things up by throwing labor at it.

At course seven, the second floor got framed. We cut and stripped a red maple log on site and used it as a longitudinal carrying beam. An oak beam runs north/south and a bifurcated cherry log serves as a center post, so we have our northern hardwood species well represented. We went up 10 courses and then built the gable ends traditionally with tongue and groove pine.

We’re now working on the roof, which will be a layer cake of 1-inch pine boards, under tar paper, under 2-inch insulation, under 2 x 4 sheathing, under aluminum. We milled the 1-inch boards 3 years ago, and stacked and stickered them in a pile about 12 feet wide. We should have known better than to make the pile that wide (I’ve edited instructional columns on the subject, for christsakes), but we didn’t, and the boards held the moisture and got all stained and fungusey. And so we unstacked the pile, washed one side with a bleach-based commercial deck wash, and left them bad-side-up to be cauterized by the UV rays from the sun. They’re sort of ugly, but I think they’re still structurally sound.

So that’s where we are to date – some pics below. One more blog should finish this series. With luck, two more months and we should finish the camp.

Cabin Part 3 Gallery

The old camp falls.
The old camp falls. | Photo: Northern Woodlands
Concrete and 6 x 6 piers.
Concrete and 6 x 6 piers. | Photo: Northern Woodlands
Pressure treated deck.
Pressure treated deck. | Photo: Northern Woodlands
The boys at work.
The boys at work. | Photo: Northern Woodlands
As we assembled each course we drilled holes at regular intervals, then sunk threaded rod down through all 10 courses to tie things together.
As we assembled each course we drilled holes at regular intervals, then sunk threaded rod down through all 10 courses to tie things together. | Photo: Northern Woodlands
We’re putting backer rod in each crack, followed by a face-bead of cabin chink.
We’re putting backer rod in each crack, followed by a face-bead of cabin chink. | Photo: Northern Woodlands
Moldy boards from a pile that was too wide to allow moisture to escape.
Moldy boards from a pile that was too wide to allow moisture to escape. | Photo: Northern Woodlands

Discussion *

Sep 30, 2014

Wow, this is a *camp* ? Sounds like you’re building a real house! (And also seems better built than houses I’ve lived in!)

Nice work, hope you finish in time for deer season.

Carolyn

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