We are back. Last year some personal stuff happened, because of which our blog receded into the background. But with spring around the corner, I thought it was high time to pick up where we left off. Even though it was very quiet online, we have not been sitting on our buttocks. To make sure that the posts won’t get too long, I will write two posts, in this one I will update our house, and in the next one, I will show you what we have been doing on our property.

Our original idea was to turn the existing cabin into a house. However, relatively soon we figured out that the cabin is not in the best of shape. The cabin is built on skids, directly on black dirt. While inspecting the design of the cabin’s foundation, we noticed that the carpenter who built it used engineered I-profiles as floor joists. The problem with those I-profiles is that they consist in two SPF 2×4 flanges connected by an OSB central panel. If there is one thing that OSB cannot handle, it’s humidity. And right now, they are located about 15cm above a pretty moist soil. The bottom line is those beams are not going to stay good for long. Actually, they already started growing mushrooms.

This raised the question, what would be cheaper: Moving the cabin onto screw piles and renovating the floor or building anew. Then over time, we found more very questionable details in the cabin. In Canada when you are building a house/cabin onto fixed foundations (which we would have to do), you need to get a permit and a certified engineer would have to come and check the construction. Well, being an engineer, I would not approve this cabin without ordering several structural changes. Therefore, we decided to build a new house.

However, in the meantime, this cabin needs to be livable and safe. Winter being around the corner, and the most important thing was to get the cabin ready for the deep cold. The first thing we did was to buy a new wood stove. The one in the cabin was not airtight and thus smoking the whole building We went for a stove from Drolet. Their stoves are reliable and are highly efficient and people who bought them before us are very happy with their stoves. We did not need much more to be convinced so we went directly for their biggest model, which will be perfectly sized for our future home in such a cold climate. This was a very good decision. We did need half the winter to figure out how to work the stove properly because it is so over-dimensioned for this cabin. And you know how it is: you don’t want it to burn too hot, but also you can’t reduce the heat too much to avoid creosote building up too fast. So, we ended up getting some tropical temperatures in the cabin. After some weeks with outside temperatures reaching -35°C, we can confidently say that we’re delighted with this stove. It burns extremely efficiently. Some weeks, though the stove was on for 16-20 hours a day, we’ve only had to empty the ashes every 10 days.

The second thing was buying firewood. We knew we wouldn’t have time to prepare and dry our own wood on time. 3 months is not enough for it to dry. So, for this winter we decided to buy 6 cords (4 spruce, 2 tamarack). Our estimates were too pessimistic. This winter has been pretty mild and writing this post now in March, we used only about half of what we stacked.

In March Seb had to clean the stove pipes. They were so clogged that the smoke would not get out properly and the fire wouldn’t burn cleanly anymore. So, when using a wood stove full-time, you must clean the pipes every 4 months to reduce the risks of chimney fire.

Then Seb built a small, insulated shed leaned to the cabin, in which we placed a big water tank, a jet pump and pressure tank, and a small board heater (because the shed should always stay above freezing point). Then he installed our bathtub, a sink, and our washing machine. While building the bathroom we added some bearing walls to support the joists of the second floor, which solved a pretty sketchy load distribution that we found around the stairs. Let’s say that we’re quite happy to plan a new house.

This winter, we decided to not buy a compost toilet for the inside. Prices right now are ridiculously high for a bit of plastic. We did with our outhouse. We were lucky to have a very mild winter which gave us lots of time to work outside. In January though, we had a week of -30 to -40 degrees Celsius, and even at this time going to the outhouse was not a big problem. Afterward, you would only have to stand in front of the stove for a minute to warm up your cooled-down buttocks. Otherwise, the body stayed nicely warm. Lucky us.

The last thing we did to bring some luxury to the cabin was to install some kitchen cupboards for extra storage for our food, cutlery, and glassware. I painted them to give a bit of color to the cabin since we decided to not finish the walls anymore.