I grew up in suburban Chicago, raised by parents who had spent their youths in Minnesota, “land of 10,000 lakes”. Once a year, we piled into the family car and drove to Minneapolis where we joined our relatives for a trip to the north woods and adventures into the joys of cabin life. Fish fries and massive fireplaces are still fond and vivid memories.
After college, I moved to Denver where I met my husband, Lon, a Colorado native. His great grandparents migrated from Kansas in the early 1900's and paid $90 for 640 acres in the mountains. They moved eight children by horse and buggy to the rugged wilderness now known as Conifer and lived in a shack attached to a large tent while they built their log homestead. As years wore on, depression blanketed the country, and they sold some of the acreage to family and friends. My mother-in-law bought one hundred twenty acres and eighty went to the family doctor. My husband and I married at the homestead beneath a wrought iron arch, which stood only twenty feet from the old outhouse and not much further from the ramshackle chicken coop.
Lon yearned to live in the mountains, but at that point in my life, I was still not ready, so we spent ten years in the Denver suburbs, often sojourning to the little cabin on his mother's property, which was an austere retreat. One day, while eating our picnic lunch on the tailgate, Lon lamented to his brother that I didn't “like” the cabin.
I said, “What's to like? Look at it! You've filled it with everybody's junk, it smells, it has no heat, no lights and nowhere to sit or eat. You don't even have a picnic table.”
Thus, began our “Save the Cabin” project. Within a few weeks, we had built a front porch and installed a sturdy front door. We cleared out all of the old trash and swept out the mouse droppings. Lon found a vintage cook stove, and we muscled it into the cabin where it provided much needed heat and a wonderful cooking surface. Each weekend during the warm seasons, we returned bringing treasures discovered at thrift stores and antique galleries. We resurrected the outhouse and built a cover over the cistern that captured the runoff from a natural spring a short distance from the cabin. Lon built a sink cabinet in the kitchen and ran pipes down to the cistern through a trench. A pump brought fresh, sweet Rocky Mountain spring water into the kitchen, but the cabin still seemed cramped, being comprised of only two large rooms.
So, we planned an addition and soon poured the concrete pods for the foundation, quickly putting the floor and deck in place. One morning we all gathered and the raised the walls and the laid the ceiling joists and roof trusses. As the addition progressed, we installed old windows we found at a garage sale and created screens by stapling the mesh to the edges of the window opening. We stuffed the walls with insulation and paneled them with rough sawn pine boards. At this point, I had developed into a full-fledged carpenter with my own tool belt. My husband called out a measurement, I measured a board from the lumber pile and cut it with the circular saw. A few boards got tossed back in the pile for incorrect measurement, but overall, I didn't do too badly for an amateur.
After we finished the interior walls, we painted the old furniture and I made curtains. Lon built shelves for storing food and supplies. We kept the 50's chrome and Formica table and chairs and put old metal-frame twin beds in the addition along with a full-sized bed in the main bedroom. One day as I wandered the property, I found a rusty iron headboard, quite old and ornate which I lugged it back to the cabin where we secured it behind the bed. A wall separated the kitchen from the main bedroom with a door at either end and made the cabin seem small. So, Lon cut a large opening in the upper section of it and created a counter top from a half log he sanded and varnished to a high gloss. We fashioned the other half of the log into a bench notched underneath to sit upon two stumps. He created bar stools out of three foot lengths of peeled logs leaving the stubs of branches for foot rests and shaped the seat to a person's behind.
We replaced the exterior slab siding (boards with bark on one side), and we and rolled on a new roof. Lon installed a showerhead on the outside of the cabin. It took true grit to brave the ice-cold spring water but once there, it felt pretty good after a long, hot day of hard work. The deck wrapped around to the front porch, and we built a wood box there under the kitchen window with a lid for storing the wood and a hatch on the inside of the kitchen for fetching the wood.
At the end of our fourth summer of cabin renovation, we built a fifteen-foot long rock bench with a large barbeque pit. By this time, weekends had become opportunities for entertaining friends and family. A dartboard found its way into the kitchen, and we added a small refrigerator. Nowadays, we even have a microwave oven and a coffee maker. The cabin, once warmed, stays toasty even on the coldest of nights with the help of a rotating fan installed above the stove to circulate the heat. No longer a shack, the cabin has become the much-loved family gathering spot for summer barbeques and winter escapes though a four-wheel drive vehicle is a must.
At last, I had fallen in love with the mountains and was ready for permanent mountain living. On the last weekend of the fourth year of the project, Lon and I drove home with heavy hearts dreading an extended absence from our beloved cabin.
“Do you want to try to move up here?” he asked
“Absolutely,” I answered.
Well, what seemed like a great idea was actually a difficult problem. We realized if we sold our home in the suburbs, we would have money, but no home. Still, we looked at plans and pondered the problem all winter until one day the following spring we received a phone call. The family doctor had died and left the original adjacent eighty acres and his two-story lofted cabin to his children who wanted to sell.
Serendipity. We both knew and loved the doctor's cabin and its location on property that once belonged to his great grandparents, so we bought it without even taking a fresh look. That was the beginning of another major cabin renovation and another story altogether.
