Minimum Viable Cabin

 

The Minimum Viable Cabin is looking good. Not viable technically (certificate of occupancy usually requires you to have y'know... plumbing, heat, roofing... But the shell is done. This is the lovely Bensonwood/Unity crew who were here all week putting it together (missing only Andrew, who got things started before handing off to Rob). Professionals with an eye to detail and obvious pride in what they build, these guys are just fun to work with.

  I have a special rock I stand behind to take photos, so you can have a progressive idea of how the house is going up. 

Please listen to this while you read this entry... So, after I arrived, the guys started arriving with trucks fulla flat-pack stuff (roof, floor, walls, all the good stuff you need to build a house). Christmastime for Dani! The packages started to be unloaded by Greg, using the lull (big ole hopped up forklift). And everything was going fine until... The walls. The big 24' walls. And there were trees in the way. They wiggled around for twenty minutes just trying to get past the trees. There was this one particular beech tree. This lil guy. And beeches are slow growers - this one is probably 30 years old! So when they asked for a chainsaw, I said - aww, come on, I bet you can get past it. Can you just try one more time to see if you can get around it? And being the good sports they are, the guys said sure, we'll give it one more try. AND THEN... Here - let me just zoom out on that photo.... Yes, the lull is in a ditch. Sunk its front tire 4' into a mud pit that appeared out

6 am. Not even joking, not messing with you. That is the time I woke up. I wanted to get to the site in time to meet the crew. I walked there in my extremely reflective Proviz jacket (it's cool as hell, makes you basically  glow  in the dark. And my version is reversible! So I have a wicked bright yellow jacket for when construction starts. But I got here waaaay before those guys and got to walk around in the snow for an hour, trying to picture what the cabin will look like.

  Finally, after TEN THOUSAND YEARS (a couple months) the foundation is being poured. These are forms and atop those go frost walls and atop that goes the cement floor.

Now the hole has gravel and a drain pipe to keep the water away from the foundation!

  The tree clearing actually happened before the camper, but it's taken me a while to work up to writing about it, because I feel pretty terrible about it. The lot I purchased was heavily wooded, and I wanted to keep most of the forest intact, just clearing what was necessary. But this is a somewhat uncommon request, and it's a bit inconvenient for construction because there isn't as much space to maneuver the vehicles. Well, my long-distance request wasn't followed very well. The logger went in with instructions to clear a particular area, and then take out a few huge old pines that would be likely to fall in a storm. Because of equipment issues (and maybe a desire to add a little more hardwood to his lumberyard load?), instead of pulling out the individual large/old pines, he clear-cut up to each pine he needed to take out and took everything in front of it. This resulted in about twice as much clearing as needed. The day I saw it, the lot was a complete mess of torn

My neighbors are amazing. I won the benevolent & hilarious neighbor lottery. Kevin and Darlene have eclipsed my previous neighbor expectations. You know that quote about "Good fences make good neighbors" from Robert Frost? No? If you're not a Robert Frost nut, do you even New England, bro? Please at least go read this poem, "Mending Wall"   so you can superciliously "well actually" someone the next time they mis-represent the quote about good fences and good neighbors. A pedantic aside, please humor me here. We'll get back to Kevin & Darlene in a minute. Like many Frost quotes, people often quote this in complete misunderstanding of the actual point of his poem. In "Mending Wall," Frost describes the annual repair of the stone walls separating his land from that of his neighbor, and how he sometimes questions his neighbor about whether the wall is even needed. "My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his

  We hammered some stakes in the ground to show where the house roughly will be.

  Uncommunicative camper guy eventually came through! A friend of the original friend (friend-2-removed) found a friend (3-removed) who had a camper and wanted to sell it. So after a few shady handshakes and payoffs and other transactions I'd rather not get into, I have a camper. I've named her Babe and parked her in a partially-cleared trail at the back of the property. Her former family took great care of her, so though she's a turn-of-the-century model, there's very little wrong with her and lots of thoughtful little touches (command hooks, pots'n'pans, spare parts of various sorts). And so just in time for Independence Day, Babe is in the woods and has a fridge fulla beer. Bring on the fireworks and let's dig a foundation!

Campers are hard to find like whoa! Getting close to panic mode less than 2 months to Minimum Viable Campout and none to be found. I chase my camper guy every couple days, but he's not much of an email creature and I'm too busy to follow up on phone frequently, so we'll see how it goes... But meanwhile I remind my GC I'm coming in about a month and it's his turn to freak out! Contractors are hard to find - the excavator is completely booked up, and the tree guy is running several months behind. There's no way this is going to be ready in June. THINGS ARE LOOKING DICEY. I light the beacons across the northeast and a friend comes through with a cat-sitting situation that may provide me with accommodation until the site work can move forward enough for a camper. Fingers crossed, but the schedule is already shot. ✅ Fun Lessons-Learned Takeaway Corner Even if you've found a great builder, they are probably managing a lot of other projects. If you think they'r

The build planning marches on. I realize I skipped a few posts here, which leave minor tiny little questions outstanding about the cabin such as: What are you building? Who is building it? How expensive is it? How did you choose? How high over the cows are you hanging the electric? We'll get there. But meanwhile, let's talk about campers! But because of the wild flurry of building going on right now, it's going to be a while before the Minimum Cabin is up and habitable, but come hell or high water tables, I'm going to sit in that forest this summer, smell the unmistakable scent of the complex decomposition after the rain, paddle around in a canoe, make blueberry pancakes from wild blueberries, and figure out whether the sliding door should face east or south. What kind of wild lady of leisure is this Minimum Cabiness, paddling around in a canoe and sipping lemonade in a forest? - you might be asking. Well, it's not quite that. I work a lot, actually - but it's 2

You'd think they'd teach this in schools, but I guess they're busy with all the reading and geometry. Well let me read you the hypote-news then: you should hire a general contractor before you start picking out china patterns with your excavator and septic designer and god knows who else. Unless you're going to be your own GC, and in that case, you probably shouldn't. Be your own GC, that is. (Faithful readers may remember that time  Dick talked me down from my innate cheapness .) Why hire the GC first? Well it may be obvious to you. Maybe even so obvious you wouldn't post this on your blog - and to you I offer my sincere congratulations on your maturity - but it's because of relationships. Your GC is local to the area. They'll know everyone and their reputations, and they'll know how to put together a good team who works well together. Well, I didn't do that - because I needed to assess buildability before I closed on the land for this cabin, I