The Wonders of Wood

Rainy day work shop

This past week, Mike has been installing the remaining few sections of wall and ceiling boards to the interior of our 12X14 cabin that we weren’t able to finish in the fall. And it’s not been an easy go for the guy.

As a lay person who knows little about such things as building and all that it entails, though I do consider myself perhaps a bit more savvy about the matter then the average person, based on helping Mike on numerous occasions over the years, including renovating our old house room by room, gutting it down to the studs, I know enough to know that when it comes to constructing or building, well, pretty much anything, it will likely take a good deal longer then one thinks.

Creative solution for allowing the boards to dry inside the shipping container

If a lay person, such as myself, meaning a non-builder, took a look around the inside of our cabin, it would be easy to think that the builder, AKA Mike, simply had a stack of lovely wood boards and put them up, bam bam bam, no problem and no sweat. Us lay people might surmise: Well surely that took some time, but it probably wasn’t THAT big of a deal. What a person wouldn’t know is that each and every single wall and ceiling and floor board is unique in size. (All 296 of them, to be exact. We counted.) No two boards are exactly alike, because they were milled using downed trees here on site, mostly Ponderosa Pine. Mike, with his keen eye for detail, and sincere interest in making the most of the resources we have here on site, spent a of time and energy trying to make the best use of each downed tree, so as to reduce the amount of waste left over as much as possible. And in case you didn’t know, or simply aren’t thinking it all the way through, no two trees are the same in the woods. The lumber we can purchase in a store is often pretty uniform in size, but a lot of waste is generated to make wood that way. When you’re working in the field, and you want to make the best use of the wood, it means you adjust each cut as you mill the logs. While you can of course cut the boards to the length needed, and the thickness is determined by how you set the sawmill, the widths are determined by the tree itself. In other words, one only has so much control over the dimensions of the boards.

With this current project, which we may be able to finish up today (Sunday), we’ve been having to operate around a few conditions which have caused delays, namely: the weather; the hours I work my remote job; and the simple fact that we live in a really small cabin. Living in a small space means that when you’re working on the interior, everything is upended: your sleeping space, your kitchen space, and your living room space. The two areas that Mike’s been working on to install the wood boards this past week have involved him needing to either remove the chimney to our wood stove (and then of course reinstall it before we go to bed so we have the ability to heat the cabin, which is still quite necessary here in these parts) OR remove our futon mattress and bedding and all of our clothes from the loft (and then of course put it all back up there before we go to bed, so we have a place to sleep!).

The weather has also been such that while on some days we’ve had the ability to set up our work spaces outside, on other days it’s required creative solutions in order to keep our boards covered and dry. Tending to the cabin in sections has been helpful, and perhaps even necessary. With so many boards to install, we simply don’t have the space to lay them all out and keep them covered and protected. And since each board needs personal attention in crafting it to the proper size, it’s not as though Mike can just rip all the boards at the same time. The walls and ceiling were what Mike often refers to as a puzzle. He literally had to figure out where each piece would go ahead of time, to make sure we had enough wood and that everything would work out materials wise. It looks super amazing. And. It took a lot of time and energy.

Last fall, when we installed the walls and the lower floor boards of the cabin, we treated the wood with shellac after we nailed the boards in place. The process involved: installing the boards; applying shellac; sanding the boards; applying another coat of shellac; sanding the boards again; and applying another coat of shellac. Though on the walls we wound up doing only 2 coats of shellac instead of 3, mostly because we were up against the clock in terms of weather and heading south for the winter. This time around, we are shallacking the boards before they get installed, which is the better way to go I think. Especially because it means we don’t have to do any sanding inside the cabin. In the fall it worked to do the sanding inside the cabin because we had to remove pretty much everything from the cabin and store it on our covered porch. For this current install session, since we’re working up in the sleeping loft and on the ceiling, everything is remaining inside. In other words, if we did the sanding of the boards after we installed them now, it would mean everything would get covered in fine particles of sawdust. Even if we did our best to put drop cloths over things, it would be a mess and a big hassle. I’m still doing a decent amount of cleaning and sweeping of wood particulates during each of our install days, but it’s way more manageable then if we had been doing the sanding inside.

One of the upsides of shellacking and sanding the boards after install is that you don’t need to find a place to store the boards while they dry. However, treating the boards outside means we can prep a lot more of them all at once. But we did run into some issues with rain and needing to find ways to keep all the boards covered. After all is said and done, we’re nearing the home stretch of finishing up the interior of the cabin. Well, when it comes to the floors, walls, and ceiling that is. We’ve decided to wait on building out our kitchen. Once Mike is finished with the what is left of the ceiling and casing the window up in the loft, he will be starting a new build: a 12X12 multi-use hut. The hut will house 1-2 people when they come to stay overnight, and when not in use for that purpose, it will be my writing room and morning meditation space, and also perhaps my library.

While working on the interior of the cabin whilst living in said cabin has involved a lot of disruption and disarray, gosh, we’ve also been managing stellar well. I consider it next-level mindfulness practice to live in a small cabin while constantly be upended by construction in progress. It’s been really good growth and skill-building work for me. As someone who highly values what I like to call comfort-zone expansion work, this whole process has been fertile ground. Despite the upheaval, the time management involved in working on the cabin and working my remote job, tripping over endless scraps of wood and tools, cleaning and recleaning and recleaning, and doing all the other things that life and living requires, our spirits are good and our attitudes are ripe with gladness - which, let me tell you, goes a super super long way. I consider it a mark of good progress on my spiritual path of practice to be in the fray of construction chaos in a small cabin while feeling genuinely full of good cheer. And I don’t mind telling you this has not been the case for me in the past.

So. To wrap things up. The interior of the cabin is almost finished! It looks awesome and it feels incredibly nice. The energy of the wood gives a heartbeat of beauty, ease, and comfort to the cabin. And something I find especially poetic is that the boards are peppered with holes that I find lend character, depth, and flavor to the wood, which were created by the dreaded pine beetle, who, in this part of the country, are masters of disaster to our lovely trees. The boards that line our cabin come from trees that were likely downed by the little critters. What they destroyed we turned into a lovely little cabin we call home.