Cabin Site Preparation - Establishing the Footprint

My grandfather passed away and we attended the funeral yesterday.  Today, I took some time to be alone out at the property.  I sat around and enjoyed the day some and then worked on establishing the footprint for our cabin.

As previously indicated, the cabin my parents are providing is 16' wide by 32' deep.  Along the front side, there is a porch which is 16' wide by 6' deep.  The cabin will face in an east/west orientation for a couple of reasons:

  1) This allows us to sit on the porch and admire the view of our land.

  2) The east/west orientation minimizes sun exposure to the cabin as best possible.

Today we visited the land with a few wood posts and some string to determine a good location for the cabin.We laid out the corner post as best possible without going through all the effort to get it perfectly square.  At this point, we were mainly looking for a good general location and to see how the cabin would line up with the trees on the property.  

The following is a little difficult to see but this is viewing the proposed location from the front of the cabin.  The two posts up front are 16' apart and you can see the back two corner posts in the background.  We really want to keep the pine on the left side of the picture.  Unfortunately, this means the cedar elm on the right side will need to be removed.

The land has much more slope to it than I expected.  With the string six inches off the ground at the back, the front is 31" off the ground.  I'd like to find a way to change the grade of the land some to minimize this a little.  The cabin has 4"x4" skids and then the floor so 31" is just to the bottom of that structure which means the floor would be more like 40" off the ground

At the back of the cabin location is a group of tree trees which have had their roots all grow together.   The cabin is somewhat centered between the road which comes into the property and the cluster of trees.  There is about five foot between the front of the cabin and the road.  At the back, there is two or three foot between the cabin and the trees.

The largest of the trees at the back is rotten through the middle and needs to be removed.  I intend to remove them all including the cedar elm on the right in the picture above.  I'm not quite sure how I will remove the stumps.  If I need to leave much of them in the ground, leaving the cabin about 2-3' away will help a little as the ground shifts from the decaying roots.  

When I remove the trees, I'm going to leave a decent sized stump which can be get it out of the ground.  I'm not sure if I will dig around them and cut the roots with a chainsaw, burn them, or what but I'd really prefer them out of the ground.  Leaving them there would just be asking for problems with the cabin foundation later.  

To finish out the day, I used an axe to remove the tree on the left side of the proposed cabin footprint.  The tree was about six inches in diameter so the job was not difficult.  Surprisingly, the tree had about 40 growth rings so it has been there much longer than I expected.

Electrical Service - Existing Cabin Electrical Setup

The cabin is currently wired for electricity.  I took a few pictures of the electrical equipment today for planning purposes.

The exterior electrical box receives three 4 gauge wires from the electrical meter at the front of the property.  There is one 150 amp breaker in the panel.  In this picture, the front of the panel is off.  However, when it is in place, you can access the switch and easily turn off all power to the cabin.

This is the interior breaker box which is almost immediately directly behind the exterior box.  The panel has room for eight different breakers but only four are currently used.  One is used for the lights, one for the plugs around the walls, one for a dedicated plug for a window AC unit, and the last for a dedicated plug for a fridge.  

I'll need to decide if I will mount the electrical meter to the cabin and how I want to create circuits for items outside of the cabin.  I'm not sure that I need many circuits outside the cabin but I want to plan for additions later.  I might want to add a large light, run a power line to the shed, or who knows.  Better to do it right the first time than keep doing it over again in the future.

Atlanta Heater

I purchased this 20,000 BTU Atlanta heater from my grandad when we were holding his garage sale before moving to the assisted living facility.  He had used the heater for several years in his living room.  I had the heater in the garage planning to use it when working in the winter.  However, I've now decided to switch it to propane and use it in the cabin.

This weekend, I completely disassembled the heater and cleaned it really well.  It was full of match sticks and cobwebs.  I figured it would be best to clean it real well before putting it back into use.  The final product looks pretty good except one of the radiants is broken and held together with a piece of wire.

The plaque on the back clearly shows this is an Atlanta J-20 heater.  The remains of a label beside the plque indicate a certain type of corrosion resistance but I can't make out the name.

I expected it might be difficult to convert the natural gas heater to propane but the plaque on the back indicated exactly how it was done.  I've not worked with a heater of this type before so the only trouble was finding the location of the orifice.

While the heater was being run on natural gas.  You can see the orifice at the lower right of this picture.  It is the black orifice for use with propane.  I had to add the adapter on the left side so that it would connect to a propane hose I have and that was really all I needed to do.  The total cost was just $2,49 for the adapter!

The last thing I did for the weekend was connect it to the propane tank and light it up.  I wanted to make sure it worked well before calling the project done.  Sure enough, it lit without any trouble so now I'm going to pack it up until the cabin is ready and then I'll install it.

Grandad's Cast Iron Pan

Earlier this year, we helped my grandad move out of his home and into an assisted living facility.  As part of the preparation process, he started giving away many of his things.  In the laundry room, my uncle noticed a set of cast iron pans.  The two were roughly the same size except one was a deep pan and the other was shallow.

My uncle decided to keep the shallow one and gave me the deeper one.  The one I received was covered in a very thick layer of grease (not seasoning but grease) and rust in the very bottom but I did not care.  Since the pan was rusty, I decided to restore it completely which was harder than I expected.

The rust was not too hard to remove.  However, the rest if the plan had a thick coating or grease which did not want to come off.  As I removed it, I noticed some of the pain had what appeared to be paint.  Since there were areas without paint, I just removed it all to bare metal which unfortunately took a couple of hours.

Last night, I seasoned the pan last night using Crisco.  I heated it to 350 for three hours.  I put some oil on it ti start with and then each hour after that, and then wiped it off at the end.

The pan has a slight bronze look which is normal.  This is because I took it to shiny metal but it will darken with us.

Measuring the the Cabin Footprint

This weekend, I stopped by my parents property and took a look at the cabin which we will soon move to our land.  Part of the reason for the trip was to measure the footprint of the cabin.  

The cabin floor is mounted to four 4" x 4" skids.  I'll need to create a level area which supports the cabin using these skids.  I've not yet determined the approach I'll use but I wanted to measure the distance between the skids so I have the information for when I start the ground work.

My measurements are all from the rear left skid of the cabin.  

The distance from the edge of the left skid to the far right skid is 15' 5".  This is roughly 15' from the center of one skid to the center of the other skid.  If you measure 5' in from the outside skids, you are at the innermost edge of the center skids.  This should make it fairly easy to measure out the footprint.  Now I just need to decide how many footings to create and what to make them out of.