My Cabin

The weather has been cool and rainy lately, which has me thinking a lot about both heat and water supplies (lotsa rainwater!). But first, I'd like to give you a quick tour of my current cabin.

I rent land from a friend who lives in what I refer to as the main house. The cabin I built last summer is intended to be temporary until I build the “real” cabin, so it's a quick and dirty job thrown together with 2x4s and 4x8s – commercial lumber and plywood/OSB. Sadly, the 2” blue foam insulation proved utterly inadequate to Maine winters and I ended up back inside the main house for a few months, and likely will again for a few days while I tackle the re-insulation job.

The cabin is a one-room affair, well lit with windows on three sides and a windowed door on the fourth. It has a shed roof with a 10 foot front wall and 8 foot rear wall. There's a decent overhang in the rear, but I wish I had more overhang around the other three sides as well. Lesson learned!

I consider the tall West wall to be the front. The door is on the North end wall. Standing at the door, on the left along the East wall is a table that serves for eating and writing, with some nails above it for hanging my coat and other misc. items. Then the window with the sawdust toilet below it. A bedside table is next to the head of the bed, which is under the window of the South wall. Currently the bed is on the floor, but once I get the insulation issue rectified and walls finished, it will be up on a platform with storage underneath. At the head of the bed are a couple more nails for hanging up clothes; at the foot is my newly rediscovered “Trees of Maine” poster.

Back at the doorway, on the right along the West wall is the kitchen, then a wood stove under the window, and a short heat barrier wall between the stove and the foot of my bed.

The kitchen climbs that tall South wall, where even I, at six feet tall, need to pull out the stepstool to reach the top shelves. I use a Whisperlite stove for cooking, a dishpan under a solar shower bag for a sink, and an ice chest on the floor for a frig. I rotate frozen water bottles every day or two from the main house for the cooler.

So I have a table and chairs, toilet area, kitchen, woodstove, bed and bedside table in here, with space left over to do pushups and situps. How big do you think it is? RVers are most likely to make a close guess. Did you catch the fact that my bed lies along the entire south wall? The building footprint is 8'x12', but with some loss to the walls, I have about 85 square feet. A friend of mine has dubbed it the Shoebox! He was shocked, having seen it during construction and unable to imagine it as a living space, to visit me living here and realize it really does work well! Except for that pesky heat issue, but that's a story for another time.

Since it isn't actually finished, I don't have a lot of stuff in here. No point in putting up storage shelves only to take them down to re-do the insulation and finish the walls. But I do have what I need, and soon will have what I want, at hand or at most two steps away. Plus the small space encourages me to be selective about what I purchase and keep. The space suits me very well. Besides, I have the woods right outside my door as my playground! And that's the most satisfying part of all.