So, we planned an addition and soon poured the concrete pods for the foundation, quickly putting the floor and deck in place. One morning we all gathered and the raised the walls and the laid the ceiling joists and roof trusses. As the addition progressed, we installed old windows we found at a garage sale and created screens by stapling the mesh to the edges of the window opening. We stuffed the walls with insulation and paneled them with rough sawn pine boards. At this point, I had developed into a full-fledged carpenter with my own tool belt. My husband called out a measurement, I measured a board from the lumber pile and cut it with the circular saw. A few boards got tossed back in the pile for incorrect measurement, but overall, I didn’t do too badly for an amateur.

After we finished the interior walls, we painted the old furniture and I made curtains. Lon built shelves for storing food and supplies. We kept the 50’s chrome and Formica table and chairs and put old metal-frame twin beds in the addition along with a full-sized bed in the main bedroom. One day as I wandered the property, I found a rusty iron headboard, quite old and ornate which I lugged it back to the cabin where we secured it behind the bed. A wall separated the kitchen from the main bedroom with a door at either end and made the cabin seem small. So, Lon cut a large opening in the upper section of it and created a counter top from a half log he sanded and varnished to a high gloss. We fashioned the other half of the log into a bench notched underneath to sit upon two stumps. He created bar stools out of three foot lengths of peeled logs leaving the stubs of branches for foot rests and shaped the seat to a person’s behind.

We replaced the exterior slab siding (boards with bark on one side), and we and rolled on a new roof. Lon installed a showerhead on the outside of the cabin. It took true grit to brave the ice-cold spring water but once there, it felt pretty good after a long, hot day of hard work. The deck wrapped around to the front porch, and we built a wood box there under the kitchen window with a lid for storing the wood and a hatch on the inside of the kitchen for fetching the wood.

At the end of our fourth summer of cabin renovation, we built a fifteen-foot long rock bench with a large barbeque pit. By this time, weekends had become opportunities for entertaining friends and family. A dartboard found its way into the kitchen, and we added a small refrigerator. Nowadays, we even have a microwave oven and a coffee maker. The cabin, once warmed, stays toasty even on the coldest of nights with the help of a rotating fan installed above the stove to circulate the heat. No longer a shack, the cabin has become the much-loved family gathering spot for summer barbeques and winter escapes though a four-wheel drive vehicle is a must.

At last, I had fallen in love with the mountains and was ready for permanent mountain living. On the last weekend of the fourth year of the project, Lon and I drove home with heavy hearts dreading an extended absence from our beloved cabin.

“Do you want to try to move up here?” he asked

“Absolutely,” I answered.

Well, what seemed like a great idea was actually a difficult problem. We realized if we sold our home in the suburbs, we would have money, but no home. Still, we looked at plans and pondered the problem all winter until one day the following spring we received a phone call. The family doctor had died and left the original adjacent eighty acres and his two-story lofted cabin to his children who wanted to sell.

Serendipity. We both knew and loved the doctor’s cabin and its location on property that once belonged to his great grandparents, so we bought it without even taking a fresh look. That was the beginning of another major cabin renovation and another story altogether.