Closing up the cabin

We faced all odds with weather dumping an inch of snow on us each morning and early morning lows in the teens. It was a bit chlly for tenting but hopefully this will be our last time to stay in the tent. Mid week we moved the tent inside to cut the chill and keep the moisture off. Despite the very tough conditions we managed to get the steel on the roof and close up the gable ends. We still have to put in the windows, doors and floor but at this point these seem like details. The next trip we anticipate getting the floor put in which will be one step closer to getting things closed up.

Long Haul

Its been a long haul finally getting to a point that our pile of logs now resembles a cabin. We just finished the roof 3 years after taking down our first tree. Well not yet "finish" the roof but rather, set the truess and got the OSB board put up. It certainly feels like we finished but I guess considering the challenges associated with cabin to this point it seems like we have finally made some progress.

The first year was spent harvesting, limbing, skidding and transporting our logs to their temporary building site in southern WI. We owe a very special thanks to Jacob Blue a great friend and work acquintance who allowed us to harvest his pines from his backyard grove just south of Albany, WI along the Sugar River. We are also very thankful of Steve Apfelbaum and Susan Lenhardt's generocity, patients and humor allowing us to assemble the cabin in the backyard. Most certainly we could not have built this cabin w/ out their contribution and their generocity will always be appreciated.

The second year was spent peeling, fitting, scribing and cutting the logs. This was done at Steve and Susan;s Farm. Once we got going this actually went pretty fast. I would say the biggest hang up during this stage was that our logs were so imperfect. We were working w/ logs that had excessive bends, challenging tapers and dimensions that were only sufficent if we stategiclly placed the windows. This was also challenging considering we 3 logs short of finishing. Even though it seemed like we got better and better at this stage we still were only able to get 1 to 1.5 logs set, scribed and cut per day.

Our final year has been figuring out the logistics associated w/ the finishing touches. We ended up going w/ parrell chord trusses, 10/12 pitch and a steel roof. Our last trip was spent putting up the OSB. It was the first time I could actually visualize what the cabin will look like. I'll put some pictures up to see it to this point.