June 20, 2021 – Leelanau County, MI – Written by Jim

It’s been a whirlwind the past few weeks, and I’m happy to report that our cabin is dried in! When we last wrote, we had the roof deck on our trusses.

Once that was done, the framers moved inside to frame the interior walls. Having vaulted ceilings throughout complicated matters, but the trade-off was that 2/5 of the house is wide open. Richard and Paul did this while Ryan worked outside.

Meanwhile, I dug out the trunks of a few of our trees that were buried during excavation. I had to build a rock retaining wall to keep the hill in place. All rocks were unearthed during the crawl space dig. I left a gap for the propane line to be run from the tank.

Ryan put on the roof underlayment and then framed the smaller decks on the north side. Following that, he and Paul put in the windows and doors.

Ryan then shingled the roof, while Paul, Richard and I dug holes for the main deck. Paul is even more of a rock sleuth than I am, and he was in all his glory on our hill. He knew the scientific name for each boulder or rock we exhumed. He even found a piece of pyrite, otherwise known as fools gold. The straw you are seeing in the above photo is on the steep hill that I had to reseed after the excavator tore it up. There was only one way for him to backfill that side and it involved making a mess of my landscaping work from last fall. I’ll reseed the rest of the lawn as I find time.

Here is the front of the cabin, all dried in!

And here is the back. With that, we bid our framing crew farewell. It is difficult to comprehend that we have only been back in Michigan for two months and we have accomplished this much. We feel very fortunate and are extremely grateful!

One thing we found out during framing was that we would not be able to work on siding until we received approval on our rough framing. That doesn’t happen until the rough mechanical, rough electrical and rough plumbing are approved. Wanting to keep the ball rolling while those trades did their work, we scheduled an extra inspection for our deck posts. Those were subsequently approved, so that allowed us to fill the holes around the posts and start finishing the decks.

Since I could still poke my head between the joists, I figured this was the best time to put landscape fabric and rock underneath to keep the weeds to a minimum. I used larger rocks found on the property along the bottom edge to keep the gravel from sliding down the hill. That is 2 tons of gravel that I picked up on Friday, the most I was willing to put on our utility trailer. I’ll get more this next week.

On the social side of things, we went to see George and Grace’s home they just purchased elsewhere on the peninsula. We met them at Wild Cherry Resort in 2015 and they have also volunteered at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. You may recall that we visited them at their winter home in Rockport, Texas, six months before Hurricane Harvey came ashore at the end of their street. While their house survived, the town around it was devastated. They have since moved their winter home base to Austin. We also had Rod and Mary over to our place to see the progress, as well as our neighbors Jeff and Renate.

Stay tuned for our next post, where we will hopefully show some progress on the decks and the interior of our cabin. Until then, safe and happy travels to all!