How to win friends and ...
The switch flipped to winter! In late November I drove all the way to the cabin, but by December 7 I got stuck in snow only about 100 yards from the highway (photo above). Did I have chains? Well, no. A shovel? Well, no. I did discover, however, that getting stuck in the road so nobody could get in or out of the area facilitated meeting the community. Quite a nice bunch actually.
We had no problem skiing in after the first snow. Later this winter, I anticipate the sage brush in the left photo will be nearly buried. Skiing in adds a touch of pleasant adventure.
Continuing the tradition of taking Skookum photos as we reach the cabin, the left photo shows the cabin after the first big snow storm, and the right photo shows the cabin after the second storm. I expect we will have good snow until April or so.
We burned two big slash piles that have been sitting in front of the cabin for three years. There are two more to burn, but since I haven’t done this before and I’m a coward, I only burned these two. The fires burned well into the night (above photo) and were still cooking the next day.
Last year I noticed that even though the solar panels are mounted at a steep angle, they still collect snow. The left photo shows the panels after the first big snow of the year. So I bought a — heck I dunno what you call it, snow-puller-offer I guess — and it worked great (right photo). There are little wheels on the edge of the snow-puller so it doesn’t scratch the solar panels.
Wylie and I also got some work done on the inside. The left photo shows the first part of a frame to a ceiling-light electrical box, and the right photo shows a completed frame. Because I used old, warped boards for the frame pieces, there will be some finishing work required.
I put up the chandeliers Elaine made using my grandfather Milo’s old horse team yokes (or at least I think that’s what they are called) as well as a couple LED lights in the back of the cabin. Due to gross incompetence, I can’t seem to get the track lights to work over the sink, so there’s more left to do but the cabin can now be well lit.
With Wylie’s help I put in the upper parts of the walls to the kitchen (left photo) and bedroom (right photo) areas. These parts of the wall are anchored to the ceiling so when the logs shrink the upper wall will slide over the bottom portion of the walls without buckling (or so goes the theory). I cut slots into the upper wall for the kitchen hood and it almost worked as planned.
According to code (a bit of a sad joke with me), the kitchen must be wired on two separate circuits with Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter (GFCI) outlets as shown above. (Hopefully color differences don’t impact code compliance.) It turns out that if you wire the GFCI outlets in backwards they don’t work… Fortunately, they are not damaged by this and they work fine after rewiring. Now, if I can figure out how I botched the track lights I’ll be nearly done with the wiring learning curve. I hope!
I hope your snow sticks around. This morning, we have high winds and it went up to 61 degrees. Dec 9.