The Bolt-hole

Having intended to be back in Canada in the spring, not halfway through the summer, I didn't really expect to build a cabin on my land this year. But a couple weeks living in Graham and Jenny's hectic house next door spurred us on. We really needed a space to call our own.

Our friend Ralf and his wife Agnieszka live in a wonderful lakeside timber house on Vancouver Island, near Strathcona Lodge. I've known Ralf since I did volunteer work at the lodge in 1982 and 1983. He builds beautiful things.

We sat on the roof  and designed a cabin together, on a scrap of paper, starting from this sketch. Then he worked out a materials list which I sent out for quotes. As they were all close, I picked the one where our neighbor, Tom, works. Wham, the load was delivered and we were off! We cleared the site and made a trail in from Graham's driveway. I arranged for a neighbor down the road to deliver three logs to use as the foundation. He brought them in with his logging team of Suffolk Punch work horses, quite an event for which most of the neighborhood kids showed up - and were loaded on the horses by Wes.

The design kind of evolved as we went along. Ralf came  for a total of nine days as we framed up and did all the stuff where you need to know what you're doing. Carolyn and I banged a lot of nails in between his visits. Eight weeks after the idea was born, we moved in.

The cabin is on a twelve foot by sixteen foot base, but four feet of that is covered porch so the downstairs is really only twelve foot by twelve foot. Upstairs there is a five foot loft over the porch and a seven foot porch over part of the living room. Having a conventional roof, there is just standing headroom for me in the middle of each loft. There is a window at the end of each loft and a big skylight over the high ceiling between the two lofts. The smaller loft over the porch is office/storage space and the bigger loft is the sleeping area. The ceiling is varnished pine and the walls are drywall, painted eggshell white. Downstairs there is a big sliding patio door to the porch, big windows on two sides and a small one in the kitchen area. The kitchen area is along one wall and consists of a lovely set of cabinets and counters given to us by Carolyn's parents as they renovated their summer house this year. Windows, some opening and some fixed, are all thermopane, double glazied safety glass. The windows are trimmed on the inside with varnished fir. We  insulated the place properly and wired in a dozen power sockets and a phone jack in each room. The loft floors have new carpet fitted; downstairs has temporary carpeting until we fit a hardwood floor next summer. Graham reckons to have enough flooring left from his house for us to do ours. A lovely Dickenson wood stove, from a boat, given to us by an old friend, waits to be fitted.

On the outside the cabin has a green shingle roof and cedar shingled walls. The overhang of the porch loft is supported by lovely cedar logs from Ralf, as is the small roof overhang at the rear of the cabin. The ceiling of the porch is more varnished pine and the porch deck will be pressure treated planks (next summer probably). The windows are trimmed in rough cedar.

The cabin is sited under alder and maple trees, right at the bottom of my property, far away from the road and about 150 feet across the creek from Graham and Jenny's house. The porch overlooks a cornfield and a hayfield ..... I dream of keeping an ultra light aircraft there one day ....