Our first cabin we ever built | Construction and DIY projects | Forums

So my daughter was going through a box of old pictures for a school project and found a bunch of pics from the first cabin my wife and I built in Maine, man I was a hack

We had 5 acres in a small town called garland on a dirt road. The road had just had electricity run down it 5 years earlier, that's how rural it is. There is a pond and a bend in the road with a church and a general store, and that's about it. We loved it.

So the first year we started clearing out trees and had a driveway and gravel pad put in. The goal was to build a log cabin, my wife had bought me an alaskan chainsaw mill so we milled up our logs 6 inches high with a flat top and bottom. It took a heck of a lot longer than I thought, so we had a portable mill come in a finish them up in two days. The idea was to just stack the logs, put sill seal between them and drill and drive 12 inch spikes to secure them. So we had enough logs milled up for a 20x20 cabin and stickered them and covered them for the winter to let them dry

the following spring after the snow had melt and mud season was over, we started uncovering the piles of logs and realized we had been robbed, someone had gone in and pulled out logs from the middle of the stacks, we lost about half of them. I was a little pissed.

Not to be deterred though, we went to a local sawmill and bought some rough cut hemlock timbers and started building the base. Looking back on it, we should have just did the whole thing with hemlock timbers, oh well.

we poured cement piers for footings and did a post perimeter with the timbers

my brilliant idea was to build 4x4 corners and then infill with the logs, here's a pretty basic mistake, sheath the corners before you stand them up to keep them square

once those were up, we started nailing down the logs we had left to infill between the corners and framed out doors and windows

finally I put up some sheathing, this was a door coming out the side for a shed addition

this time I sheathed the walls first on the shed before I stood them up, lol, nothing was square. I use to sit up in that window during deer season

my daughter was so small, she use to love going out to build. All I would hear was, Dad, we going to camp, Dad we going to camp?

We then sheathed the back side and the roof

that's all the pictures she found, I know we have some more somewhere, i will have to look for them.

I learned a couple of things on this one. Secure your stuff better. Get people involved that have the knowledge you are missing. Don't buy land to far away. It was about a 40 minute drive out to the land, which doesn't seem much. But by the time we gathered all our tools and supplies, seems half the day was gone before anything even started to get accomplished.

We ended up selling this 2 or 3 years later to a gentleman from mass who had a terminal disease. He always wanted to go live in a cabin in the woods in Maine. So he did. I have heard he has since passed away, but he did finish the cabin. I should take a ride out there and see if anyone is living there now.