“It would have been a smart thing to have a power drill, but I was stubborn,” admits Doug whose arms took on lumberjack proportions that season.īy the end of the summer, he had most of the 18x22-foot cabin up, everything except for the ridgepole. He should have bought a generator, given he had to hand-auger large notches through the logs every 3 or 4 feet. I was running my chainsaw all the time and didn’t even think about it,” he laughs.ĭoug wasn’t too long into his cabin project when he realized another error. “Thinking back to it, I probably wasn’t the most favorite neighbor on the block. That spring, having built a practice outhouse in his backyard, Doug was as ready as ever to start on the real thing. “It was a lot more work getting bark off that time of year, and I ended up with brown-colored white pine because of the sap,” says Doug who shrugs it off with a smile. This kept the bark from stripping easily with a drawknife, instead requiring it to be chipped off. “Once I start something, I can’t stop,” say Doug, who committed the rookie mistake of starting to peel the logs too late in the fall after the sap layer under the bark had frozen. They gave me a truckload full, and then I bought the rest for a buck a board,” says Doug.Īfter extensive planing, pulling bolts and staples, and an old-fashioned scrubbing, Doug turned this wood into his cabin’s floors and countertops. “They were 9-foot pieces of Douglas fir tongue-and-groove, a good 3-inches thick. Doug came upon the pile when making a delivery near the docks. “Once you’re doing stuff, all of a sudden your eyes are open, always looking,” says Doug.Īnother great find, owed to driving the big brown truck, was a huge stack of old railroad car flooring. Log dogs hold logs in place while you work on them. That was exactly what he needed for lifting and setting logs alone, a maneuver Doug calls “doing the dance of the block-and-tackle.”Īround then, a friend who worked as a metal fabricator offered to make some “log dogs”from scrap metal. While delivering to an antique store, Doug happened upon an old block-and-tackle apparatus (used for hoisting heavy objects) with 110 feet of rope just displayed on the sidewalk. While there was a friend who lassoed logs for a weekend with an old truck and a Bobcat, Doug needed to be able to handle things on his own for the bulk of the project.įortunately, his UPS route was located in an old industrial area. It was just raw timber, bark and all.Īlong with the arrival of trees came the problem of handling them. And in the huge lot of logs that was unceremoniously dumped onto the property that October, none were milled. “I sat down with a pencil and no plan and figured out the number of logs I’d need. ![]() These appearances included catching wind of a recently felled stand of white pine only miles from the Vuksons’ new property. “It’s amazing how once you start doing something, the things you need just appear,” he says. ![]() Soon Doug and then-spouse Linda were signing a purchase agreement for lakeside property and signing up for a hard summer of clearing the remote lot.Īs Doug poured himself into the project, he felt a shift. He spent the next several months reading books on cabin building – lots of books. “It was enough to get me started,” he says. This provides the exact roadmap for chiseling or sanding off excess wood to create that necessary tight fit between logs. Scribing is an old world technique for building with logs that uses a simple compass fitted with a pencil to transfer the natural profile from one log to another. We really just wanted to have a good time.” But despite goofing off during his cabin course, he did walk away from the experience with a new interest in construction and an important new skill: how to use a scribe. “I was working for UPS at the time and only had two weeks off. It started back in the early 1980s when Doug went to log building school with a friend.
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