Minimum Viable Cabin

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...

  BeachHousesMuizenbergBeach by Stefan Schäfer, Lich   This is a post in a series of discussions of pre-fabricated and modular home builders I've considered. I'll cover the general experience researching and talking with builders, and the highlights of their offering in the "minimum cabin" space. Vermod Homes from Wilder, Vermont is next on the list.  The Design Unlike some of the other homes reviewed, Vermod doesn't have cute names for their designs. The options are described in utilitarian terms like "Single Box," "Double Box." Maybe a Double Quarter-Box with Cheese. I guess nobody would give me a job naming homes. Similar to other modular builders, the dimensions are long and narrow due to the width restrictions for shipping modules on trucks. The designs here are incremental, so it's essentially a 14'x40' box that can be combined with one or more other boxes to create the desired footprint. First Impressions & Website Conti...