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If it don’t kill ya, it makes you stronger

Posted by on August 20, 2013

Or so the saying goes. The way this month, August 2013, has gone I’m hoping there’s truth in those words.

The septic system is done and all I have left to do is grade the yard so I can seed it next year and get a final photo of the grade to complete my report to ADEC. I figured I deserved a couple of easy days down at the cabin and loaded up Thursday night and drove on down early Friday. A nice drive too, the sun was coming up as I left and the skies were clear and blue. Couldn’t ask for better day in the mountains.

We’ll things were going good, including the ATV ride into the cabin, the trails were dry and there were lots of blueberries out and I was simply enjoying the day thinking about what I needed to get done for the furnace add on I was planning to do. Then I drove up to the cabin and stopped dead in my tracks, no, my eyes must be off or else I’m having a 60’s flashback, dang it… The piling posts the cabin sits on are leaning about 5 degrees to the east, not a good thing.

Aug 2013, Hurricane Cabin Falling

Cabin tilled to the east

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After the initial shock wore down, I won’t say off as I’m not too sure it has worn off even now, 4 days later. I had to evaluate the situation and did a walk around, all 15 of the post were leaning about equally to the east, the photos show this quite well.

I knew two things right off, 1) everything else had to go hold and I had to support the cabin, 2) I didn’t have the materials and needed help. Back to the road I drove till I got in cell phone range (yeah, even my cell phone won’t work at the cabin site, a plus on most days) and started making calls. I reached Jake first and asked him to get some materials and come on down to help. I know he had plans to go to his cabin this weekend but I was really happy that he said he’d come on down and help out.

After about a half dozen tries I also reached Dean and asked him to come on down as well. The plan was to get what materials we thought would work and they’d be down Saturday morning. I just had to temporarily brace the cabin and hope it didn’t fall over during the night with me asleep in it. Yeah I know, why would I sleep inside a leaning cabin about ready to fall over, if it’s meant to be it’s meant to be, I needed somewhere to sleep and didn’t have a tent, so cabin it was.

I did get some temp bracing up and started some prep work clearing out the materials I had stored under the cabin so we could access the corners to place a crib system in each using railroad ties. I was also going to start dragging up the railroad ties we had been adding to the creek crossing the last few years and use those for the crib until Dean said he had picked up a bundle of 25 ties and Jake was bring down 4 more which added to the 6 I already had on hand gave us 35 ties to use, enough for now.

So as it stands (and I hope it stays that way) we got 32 inch cribs in the four corners and a 48 inch crib in the center and added a little more bracing with 2×12’s. This should be sufficient to get me through the next winter. Plan at this point is to bring in about 50 more railroad ties after the snow flies and then redo the cribbing and level out the 3 main beams next spring and add enough bracing to the beams that all should be good and strong.

So thanks again to Dean and Jake, don’t think I could have done it without them.

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