Cabin Work

Sometime soon, I'll be going up north to continue work on the camp we have on a hundred acres of land near the Canadian border. I haven't done much with it in the past couple of years because health and money problems, but I'd like to finish it up this summer, at least to the point where we could spend some time there. So I thought I'd begin this thread to post photos and such of the work I do there.

So far, I've done a lot of work on various parts of the land itself, but have only laid a floor in the cabin. We bought it from the Amish, who completed the shell of the building, including a metal roof and windows. Here's a photo of it as it was being delivered.



I found a few photos that I took of the floor as I was just starting on it, but it's been completed for over a year now.



I don't feel like searching for them tonight, but I do have photos of the completed floor, as I think I did a pretty good job on it.

This summer, I need to insulate and complete the interior. Nothing fancy, since it's a camp. Probably wainscoting and drywall. I don't know if we'll be able to do it this summer but I'd love to be able to get a stove in as well. I still haven't decided for sure whether I want to get a wood cooking stove that will double as a heating stove, which is expensive but perfect, or if I want to build an outdoor kitchen, in which case we wouldn't need anything quite so fancy on the inside, where a heating stove with a cooking surface would suffice.

 

You can do quite a bit of cooking if you have a flat topped wood stove, like a Fisher, especially if you are making slow cooking foods like soups and stews, or a pot of beans. Plus, it will hold heat overnight on chilly evenings. A cook stove would have an oven, which is nice; but not absolutely necessary, and they do not have a very large firebox since they are designed for smaller pieces of wood and being able to control the heat better.
I like the idea of an outside kitchen, which would be perfect for any cooking that needed to be done in the warm/hot weather, and then you could use the inside wood stove for cooking during the cold weather when you wanted heat inside anyway.
Do you have power and/or water, or are you having to carry in your water ? I think you have mentioned this before; but I don't remember what you told us about that part.

 

The cook stove I have in mind is made to be a combination cooking and heating stove, capable of putting more than enough BTUs to heat our cabin, and of holding enough heat to work for heating purposes.

Yes, if our only cooking options were the inside stove in the summer, we'd be afraid to use it because the temperatures would get too high. Even in Maine, we sometimes have temperatures above a hundred, although rarely. There have been some years when our temperatures never got above eighty degrees, but more often it gets hot in July and early August. So an outdoor kitchen, with partial walls and a roof would be ideal.

No power, but a well is one of the things we want to have dug this summer or early fall. The ATV club has a small piece of land and a well just past ours and they said they had no problem striking water. Given that we're in a valley-type depression with mountains on three sides, that's what I thought. Actually, we have mountains on all four sides but the mountain on one side is called Flat Mountain for just that reason; although elevated, the top of it consist of a lot of flat space so it doesn't really feel like you're on a mountain when you're on Flat Mountain.

 

We used to have a wood cook stove, but it was one of the older ones, so it was not designed to hold heat all night. It had a small burn-box so that you could feed the fire just enough to get the oven to the temp that you wanted it. It takes some practice to get the hang of putting in jut the right fuel to reach the temperature you need for baking, and not have it get too hot once it gets there.
If I was baking something, I pretty much had to be right there and paying attention to it and watching the litle oven thermometer to make sure it stayed at 350.
I had a small stack of small pieces of wood and even pine cones worked great for doing that, since we just added a piece or two at a time in order to keep the temperature steady.
The Fisher, on the other hand, had those spinners for air control, and you could fill it up at night, slose the draft down, and know it would keep the house warm all night. In the morning, we jut opened up the draft controls again, and had a hot bed of coals ready to add more wood and perk our morning coffee on.

 

Yeah, I can remember when my mom had a wood cooking stove and oven. I think she pretty much had it figured out but, at the same time, she was happy to trade it in for an electric one. I was a kid so I took it pretty much for granted but what I remember of our heating stove was that it was an oil stove but there was no electric regulation involved in it. It looked like the oil was fed to the stove by gravity, the amount controlled by a valve. I know that, to increase the heat, there was a valve that would be turned, and you could see the oil dripping into the burning section. It looked like a modified steel barrel, with a glass viewing area added. As I recall it, it looked like something that was homemade, although it had a company emblem on it. I don't remember what it was, but I am quite sure that it was low tech. Then again, that house did burn to the ground while I was away at college.

 

Oh, my gosh !
How I hated those old oil stoves ! ! We had one when I was growing up, too, and I think it operated about the same as the one you are describing, except that ours had a brown kind of enamel case around the burner part.
It would operate fine on low, and it barely dripped into the burner barrel on low.
When it was really, really cold (below zero), sometimes my dad would turn it up just a tiny bit. If he turned it up a hair too much, then it would start rumbling and the barrel would bulge out like it was trying to explode because the exhaust gases couldn't get up the chimney fast enough.
Mom would grab me and run out in the far part of the yard, leaving my dad in the house to deal with the stove as best as he could. He would have shut the oil valve off by then, of course, but it still took a while for the inferno in the oil drum to burn out and subside.
In the mean time, it would soot up the house, and we had all of the doors open to try and air it back out so that we could breathe inside the house.
Eventually, my dad could start the fire again, and then we would just leave it on low, and we closed the doors and bundled up while the house got warmer again.
No wonder we all spent most of our winters huddled around that stove......... It was the only part of the house that was warm !

 

That would probably be it. We weren't supposed to touch the oil stove controls but if no one else was home, I would turn it up sometimes. There were a couple of scary situations, not to the point you describe, but a sudden flareup of flame in the boiler. We also spent a lot of time huddled around the stove. As for the wood cooking stove, I think mom would have preferred to have both a wood stove and an electric one but there wasn't enough room for both. I don't know if there were things she preferred to cook on the wood stove or if it was the fact that the wood stove also provided some heat. Probably the latter.

 

Tomorrow, I'll be going up north to do some work on the camp. First, I have to drive the other direction for an appointment with my urologist to take care of the six-month prostate cancer check. Then we will be driving up north, spending the night in a hotel near there. Saturday morning, I'll go do some work on the camp, mostly just clearing my trails, mowing the lawn, and that sort of thing. Maybe I'll plant some lupines. I won't be spending the night in the camp though, as my wife and I will be in the hotel for a couple of nights.

 

I keep a lawn mower under a tarp there. I don't mow a large area, as I use a machete on the trails. I started the lupines in a garden space but they have spilled over into the surrounding area.