Cabin Building Volume Four

After our whirlwind winter of traveling, Nancy went to work down in Grant Village in Yellowstone and I took the summer off to finish the cabin. Nancy came up each weekend to help me, but her main task was to do the chinking.



For those of you who do not know about chinking, let me give a short explanation. The old-timers used to stack the logs pretty much as I had done, leaving a two or three inch space between logs , which you can see in the picture above. We used this method because it takes far fewer logs and far less time to complete. There are log building methods that do not leave this gap and have logs scribed to the logs below them but it incredibly labor intensive and time-consuming. Instead, Nancy now had to fill the space between the logs. The old-timers used mud, horsehair, straw, moss, concrete, i.e. anything and everything. Thanks to the miracle of modern science, we used Styrofoam with an acrylic substance called Perma-Chink over that. Most of Nancy’s summer weekends were spent filling the cracks with chinking, inside and out. Perma-Chink is elastic and doesn’t fall out with changes of temperature and shrinking logs. The Styrofoam provides some R-value for insulation and between the inside and outside applications is a dead air space for more insulation. It was an exhausting task and boring as well. But, bien sur, Nancy did a fantastic job.

My summer began by getting ready to have the roofer come. The roofer was going to be the first hired help we had used on the cabin, other than Elroy, Belle and Bobbi. I had gotten a quote for a green metal roof and he had told me what needed to be done before he could begin. We needed to finish the dormer exterior walls because they would become almost impossible to do when the roof was on. We needed to have all roof protrusions installed; meaning the chimneys for the two wood stoves and the vents for the kitchen sink had to be in place.



In the above picture, take in June of 1996 you can see we had installed board and batten gable siding and we were just finishing the shingle siding on the dormers. We had cedar fascia board around the roof, windows installed, porch and porch roof constructed and the roofing felt was on. The exterior was mostly finished with the exception of the chinking which would take several more months. But, we were ready for the roofer.



The roofer spent about a week doing the roof and when he was finished, we were “weathered in”. The cabin would stay dry unless the rain came down sideways, which was not totally out of the realm of possibility. I could now take the tarp off the radial arm saw and begin construction of the interior. I spent July, August and September building the kitchen from scratch and trimming the windows inside and out.

Many times during that summer, as I was working on the front porch (and elsewhere), I used to dream about the day when I would have time to sit there in a rocking chair and have nothing to do. When that day came I was immensely satisfied. Several years later, I would sit in the rocking chair on the porch and I was bored. We needed a new project. But that’s another story.

My entire family came for a week in August and helped do all sorts of tasks that would have taken Nancy and I forever or just would not have gotten done. (From Washington: Darrell, sister Leslie, Sarah, Noah, Andrew, Cooper. From Colorado: Tony, sister Peggy, Anna, Ellie, Kate. And from Texas, sister Amy. ) Many hands make light work, it is said, and so it is. They gathered rocks from along the road to enclose the foundation. They cleaned up the building site and made massive piles of firewood. They installed insulation underneath the floor in the crawl space. They painted cabinets and stained window trim. They did some carpentry work enclosing the crawl space. I know I’m forgetting some of the things my family did, but I appreciate them just the same. I did hardly any work at all that week, but spent a lot of time supervising the various tasks that were taking place. Everyone worked very hard and claimed to have a wonderful time. Andrew stayed on for a week and helped me with the masonry for the hearth and install the wood stove. To this day, there is no way to thank them for all the help they provided, and since they can’t go to the cabin, I hope they will come to Leran.

My sister Leslie and niece Kate, who was perhaps eight, spent one night with me in the tipi in late August. Incredibly, that night there was an early snow of an inch or so. Late at night we heard raindrops on the tipi, and then they stopped, but we did not imagine that it was because the snow was silently accumulating on the tipi walls. This tipi had seen a lot of abuse and was in pretty bad shape. A year before, a black bear had clawed his way in while we were gone. He left big muddy paw prints and a huge rip in the side. By this time the tipi had been standing for a couple of years and the fabric had begun to deteriorate in the relentless sun. We had apparently gotten some bad fabric when Nancy constructed the tipi. We had painted the tipi with latex paint in a faux Native American design of a yellow sun with blue hailstones. Where there was paint, the fabric was protected and strong. However, you could put your fist on a blue “hailstone” and push your hand right through the tipi, but have in intact blue circle. We had to tie plastic tarps to what we now called the “tarpi”. It only had to withstand a few more weeks of the elements before we moved into the cabin.