This cabin in Sunset Bay has repurposed palettes as the floor, with windows and skylight recycled from an old family hunting camp and white spruce siding from a local sawmill.
I love that floor.
Monday, August 27, 2012
Friday, August 24, 2012
Cabot Cabin in New Hampshire
Just south of the summit at 4,170 feet. Originally built to house a Fire Warden who manned a now defunct fire tower on the summit of Cabot, the shelter is open to all for free on a first-come, first serve basis. Located about 0.3 miles from the summit of Cabot, it is conveniently located for hikers traversing the Kilkenny Ridge Trail from the South Pond or Mt. Starr King ends of the trail.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Black Butte Lookout Cabin
Cabin atop Black Butte Lookout in Deschutes National Forest, Oregon. In 1980 a one-room log cabin was constructed in Sisters, disassembled, and flown by helicopter to Black Butte's summit as living quarters for the fire lookout staff.
Monday, August 20, 2012
Indianapolis Island [I-Land] (Andrea Zittel)
Contemporary artist Andrea Zittel created an inhabitable floating island to be an installation piece at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, accessible by rowboat, and lived in by an art student. In this video Zittel describes the ideal resident of this fiberglass structure as a hermit-slash-park ranger.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
The Maine Cabin Blog by Lou Ureneck
Last fall I read Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine by Lou Ureneck and thought it was absolutely amazing. As Amazon says
Confronted with the disappointments and knockdowns that can come in middle age-job loss, the death of his mother, a health scare, a divorce-Lou Ureneck needed a project that would engage the better part of him and put him back in life's good graces. City-bound for a decade, Lou decided he needed to build a simple post-and-beam cabin in the woods. He bought five acres in the hills of western Maine and asked his younger brother, Paul, to help him.
Twenty years earlier the brothers had built a house together. Now Lou saw working with Paul as a way to reconnect with their shared history and to rediscover his truest self. As the brothers-with the help of Paul's sons-undertake the challenging construction, nothing seems to go according to plan. But as they raise the cabin, Ureneck eloquently reveals his own evolving insights into the richness and complexity of family relationships, the healing power of nature, and the need to root oneself in a place one can call home. With its exploration of the satisfaction of building and of physical labor, Cabin will also appeal to readers of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, and Tracy Kidder's House.
As I was re-reading this summer, I realized that I didn’t know if the cabin on the cover was his cabin or a stock photograph of another cabin in the woods so I went looking for the answer. I found it on the Maine Cabin Blog which is written by Ureneck as well as his archives from his New York Times blog called From the Ground Up.
If you haven’t read Cabin, you will want to because Ureneck captured for me both the drive and desire to build a place for the family and the feeling of how big of task it is going to be. It’s also a book about how projects like this change you as you get into them and make you appreciate things you never noticed before. The book didn’t just make me reflect on the cabin that he was building but how he got to this point. If you love the outdoors or even find yourself at a point in life where you are taking some time to reflect on where you are and where you are going, you are going to want to pick up a copy.
Oh yeah, it is his cabin on the front of the book. Here is a shot from his blog.
Back in 2008, Ureneck wrote this in the New York Times
The cabin will be simple, even primitive, maintaining contact with a tradition of frugality that reaches back to Walden Pond — a far cry from the big, fancy cabins that have become popular in recent years, with French doors, commercial-grade kitchens and wide decks for entertaining at the lake. With the extravagant vacation-home market in collapse, I’m happy to offer my simple and inexpensive cabin as a manifesto for the times. Let it declare the old New England adage, “Waste not, want not.”
THE project began more than a year ago as projects often do — with a modest daydream.
After a difficult month, I decided one day I needed to go fishing, and one thing led to another: I had been without a car for three years, so I bought a used sport wagon that would accommodate my fishing rods, which were stored in my condo’s basement. After driving around the city with the fishing rods unused for several months, the wagon more or less drove itself to Maine with me at the wheel. I happened to have a real estate ad with me. I found five gorgeous acres of land for sale on a south-facing hillside.
I bought the land in February for $32,000 and spent the next several months absorbing the fact of the purchase — my fishing urge had gotten expensive — and drawing up plans.
I had no fixed design in mind for the cabin, I just knew I wanted a porch with pegs to hold my fly rods, lots of windows for lots of light and a wood stove that would suck in cold air and send off waves of therapeutic heat as I worked my way through a pile of books. Eventually, I drew a picture, transferred it to an Excel spreadsheet, which turns out to be great for this sort of thing, and e-mailed it to Paul.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Looks good, but the writing room needs more width,” he wrote back.
I rejiggered.
I designed a cabin shaped like a stubby letter L, with the short leg providing space for a second bedroom. The long side will be 30 feet and the short one 16, meaning it would mostly fit inside one end of a tennis court. It will have a little loft space for small beds and visitors under five feet tall. A screened porch for sitting, talking and reading on long summer nights will be nestled in the crook of the L. I see it fitting three rocking chairs.
(Thoreau’s cabin, by the way, was 10 feet by 15 feet, about half the size of mine. He also scrounged his materials, but he was closer to town.)
My cabin (and my second life) will be rustic but comfortable. It will be off the grid. Solar panels in the roof will give me the trickle of electricity I need to power my laptop; the lights and stove will run off bottled gas; and I will have a generator out back to lift water from my well.
A Ship Shape House
Antiques dealers Chris Mead and Zoe Hoare found their port of call in a 1748 New York cottage crafted from a salvaged schooner. Then they filled the space with a more-is-more array of their best booty to date.
A Cornish House on the Sea
A converted net loft in Mousehole, Cornwall, built in the 1800s on 17th-century foundations. The house has 3 bedrooms, and 2 bathrooms on the ground floor, a living room and kitchen on the first floor, plus an adjoining self-contained, one-bedroom holiday let flat.
Cinco Camp, Brewster County, Texas by Rhotenberry Wellen Architects
Shipping container architecture is nothing new, but adapting the shells for living often undoes their built-in economy. With only minimal modifications, these serve as rugged guest cabins on a West Texas ranch. “We didn't want to leave a scar on that somewhat fragile landscape,” Mark T. Wellen, AIA, says of his solution. “If you disfigure the surface, the cacti and low shrubbery can take years to come back.”
Cloud 9 Ranch in Texas Hills
Designed to be a reflection of the summer camps the owner enjoyed in his youth, this weekend retreat nestles into the landscape of the Texas Hill Country. Each building serves a different purpose-the gathering area and kitchen are in the open-plan main house; the bedrooms and bathroom are in a nearby bunk house; and a pavilion steps down the slope to the lake with a screened sleeping porch at the top, an outdoor living/dining area in the middle, and a dock at the water’s edge.
House on the Drina River near Bajina Basta, Serbia
A house in the middle of the Drina River near the town of Bajina Basta, Serbia. The tiny wooden house has been standing on an exposed rock in the middle of the Drina River for more than 40 years, it was built by a group of young boys back in 1968 that used the rock to sunbathe. Every time there is a flood the house is destroyed, but it is built again from ground up.
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