Cabin Buiding -- part 2

Revised Addition Plan

 
A lot has changed in the month since my last post about the cabin construction project. Most notably I spent hours staring under the current cabin and finding myself absolutely unable to figure out how to hook a new bathroom into our current septic system. Finally I spend a few more hours whining about my problems to Sue before I was able to convince her to let me redraw the plans. The new plan has us expanding and remodeling one of the bathrooms in the current cabin and limiting the addition to having a mini-kitchen. Removing the third bathroom makes the floor plan for the addition considerably more spacious.

Even before settling on a final floor plan, I was able to press ahead with digging post holes. Unfortunately, several tree stumps got in the way so I hired my friend Matt Foster to send Reese over with a back hoe to dig out the stumps. While he was there, I was persuaded to have him dig all the post holes as well. That turned out to be a very mixed blessing. A back hoe does the job quickly and powerfully, but it leaves one with post holes that are far too big. That forced me to build plywood forms for the concrete (a time-consuming job) and then to spend about as much back-breaking time filling the holes as I would have spent digging them in the first place. Fortunately, I have been able to recruit my friends Terry and Jim to help.

The first load of lumber was delivered on September 24.
 

Shortly afterward the three of us were hard at work . . . if you can call it working when Terry and I are joking and laughing while Jim sweats away mixing cement.


 
A few days later we had tipped all the posts into the holes, filled the forms with concrete, and attached bracing to keep everything standing while the concrete dried.

More days passed in the joy of refilling the holes with rocks and dirt, and then beginning the task of putting up beams and joists. By October 3rd something like a cabin addition was starting to emerge.

The construction site in our remote extremity of the Ozarks is very peaceful. Few visitors stop to admire our work, but in these final two snapshots you see two who did take the time to come by.

The eagle settled into a tree about fifty feet from the deck and spent most of a morning observing the surrounding terrain.

The tarantula was just passing through and barely seemed to notice or care what we were doing.