When you dig a hole, be smarter than the shovel.
Don’t let the nonambulatory state of a cabin mislead you; it’s a living thing. The 100-amp electrical service panel is the brain; the wires are the nerve fibers; the outlets, switches, and lights are the nerve endings. The hot and cold water pipes are the veins that nourish. The drain, waste, and vent pipes create the intestines that usher the waste away; the cabin is actually superior to us since it expels gas up and through a roof vent, versus humanity’s lower trajectory. The shingles are the hair, the siding and insulation are the skin, the paint is the makeup, the heating system is the lungs, and the rough framework is the skeleton. But you need to start from the ground up. With a cabin, as with any entity, you need to begin with solid feet and legs — the foundation.
There are two approaches we can take to building on a steep slope. The first is setting the cabin on a full basement; one where the backside would be buried 6 or 7 feet and the front or downhill side exposed. This approach would involve dozing a mammoth wedge of soil out of the earth to create a flat subterranean surface. The upside is we could create both a foundation and usable square footage beneath the cabin. The downside is it would rearrange both our budget and the landscape in a serious way.
The second option is the “stork” approach. The cabin would perch on a rectangular grid of legs or wood posts; taller ones on the downhill side, shorter ones on the uphill. It would be an inexpensive, low-impact way of building. We wouldn’t need a twenty-ton bulldozer rearranging the earth, only a twelve-pound posthole digger. Posts would allow us to leave the slope of the ground basically unaltered and to tread more gently on the land. And posts would allow us to build quickly and inexpensively.
We go with the stork option, eyes wide open about the drawbacks. With post footings on a steep slope, we realize we will give up the basement to store tools and obnoxious relatives. We’re committing ourselves to hard, tedious handwork — a solid chunk of blood, sweat, and tears.
To support our 16-by-20-foot cabin we need nine posts — three rows of three — plus two more posts to support the small bump-out on the back. We also need posts to support the front deck, bringing the grand total to fourteen. We run strings between stakes to indicate the perimeter of the cabin, then pound in stakes to mark where each post will go. Time to dig in.
The hierarchy of soil dig-ability goes as thus:
After spending 3 hours digging the first hole by hand — 16 inches in diameter, 54 inches deep — I calculate I will spend 42 hours on this task alone. This is Cool Hand Luke work. It’s not the way I want to spend an entire week. I need to be smarter than the shovel.
A gas-powered auger ain’t gonna cut it. We need a machine. Bradley is booked, so I find the only other excavator in the area who has a Bobcat skid loader with a hole auger attachment. He agrees to meet me at the site at five o’clock, after his day job. I recheck and restake the location of each hole as I wait. It’s fall, and the temperature drops to 40 as the sun sets. Seven p.m. and still no auger. There’s no cell phone reception, and I figure he’s been waylaid. I’m chilled to the bone and start packing up when I see headlights and a trailer bouncing down the driveway.
“Decided to do ’er tomorrow, eh?” I say, using a tone sarcastic enough to show my displeasure, yet friendly enough to not alienate the only guy within 100 miles who can get this godforsaken job done.
“Hell, no. I got headlights!” he says as he fires up the machine.
And soon it becomes clear this is not a one-man operation. He sits bobbling on his Bobcat while I, under the glare of headlights, use a shovel and pickaxe to pry and chop the sticky clay off the auger after each plunge. I use a clam digger–type posthole digger to try to lift loose rocks out of the bottoms of the holes when they fall in. Most of the time I’m on my knees. My pants and shirt are soaked, half from sweat and half from the sodden soil flying through the air. We’re working on a slope, so I hand-guide the auger to vertical before each plunge; I’m hoping he’s packed plenty of tourniquets for when this thing rips both my arms off. I spend three hours, frozen, wet, and bone weary genuflecting to the auger god.
I’m paying him; isn’t something wrong here? No, if I were on the Bobcat it would be a submarine on the bottom of Superior. Both hands and both feet are required to drive, steer, lift, and dump the Bobcat and auger in a coordinated effort. A good Bobcat operator is part excavator, part ballet dancer; Baryshnikov in a hard hat. By the time we’re done, it’s pitch black. I’m soaked, caked in clay, nearly deaf from the noise, and sleep deprived — but hey, look at those fourteen holes. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder — especially if the beholder just dodged five days of brutal work.
I ask what I owe him, and he responds, “Well, what’s it worth to you?” And while the correct answer is, “My firstborn son and ten thousand dollars,” we settle on a more reasonable two hundred bucks.
The support posts need to sit on concrete pads. Mixing concrete requires water, and there’s plenty of that around — it’s just 200 feet down a 60-degree cliff. We buy three old five-gallon plastic jerry cans at a garage sale, and Kat and I start hauling. To fill the jugs we kneel on jagged rock and force them underwater, using the muscle mechanics you’d use drowning a hippo. We tie ropes from tree to tree, and as we ascend, one-handed, with the forty-pound jugs, we slip, slide, grunt, and struggle to keep our footing. This is how people wind up in the “News of the Weird” column. It’s not how two reasonably intelligent people get water from point A to point B. It would be more reasonable to buy twelve-ounce bottles of Perrier from the gift shop up the road.
On our third trip up the hill we encounter Dick standing at the top. We’ve known Dick long enough to be able to judge his mood, even before he says something, based on the direction and velocity of his jowls. You do not want to see rapid horizontal movement. But they’re moving vertically, and he’s got a big grin.
We’re wheezing, with high-water pants and burrs stuck to our socks. “Now ain’t that somethin’,” he hoots — the phrase he utters when he doesn’t know what else to say or is reloading for his next quip.
“You know we got a garden hose, and you got a truck. I bet we could figure out a better way to do that.”
Yah, ain’t that somethin’.
Visitors are surprised to see the cabin perched on nine modest-size posts. Each is made from three “foundation grade” treated 2×6s nailed together, making each post 41⁄2 by 51⁄2 inches in cross section. Not that massive. But wood is incredibly strong in the vertical position, much stronger than it is lying flat or lying on edge. A single vertical 2×6, prevented from bending, can support fifteen tons before reaching its limits. That means each post can theoretically support forty-five tons, and as a group can support more than 400 tons’ worth of cabin.
Foundation footprint
When we dig the holes, the cabin still looks small on paper. One or two bags of concrete in each hole will support the posts that will support the beams that will support the joists that will support the walls that will support the roof. There can be no weak link in this chain of command.
We get the concrete pads poured and the posts positioned and backfilled. I step back and squint, trying to picture the cabin with all its parts, occupants, furnishings, and snowloads. But instead of hearing a deep, booming voice say, “And it was good,” I hear a scrawny little inner voice asking, “Don’t you think nine posts and fifteen bags of concrete are a wee bit on the light side?”
Yet getting the foundation in — whether it consists of nine posts or fifty tons of concrete for a poured basement — is a milestone in cold climates. It means you’re up and out of the frozen soil and can keep building through the rest of the winter. If you’re crazy enough.
I stand amid the grid of posts and beams that form the foundation of the cabin. The posts for the ill-fated bump-out are in the foreground.
It’s early October, and Kat comes up to help frame the floor. I am in dire need of her companionship, energy, and enthusiasm.
We build the four perimeter beams and the beam down the middle for the floor. Each is built from three 2×12s nailed together and secured to the posts. Normally the lumber used for a floor would be everyday H/F (hemlock-fir) or S/P/F (spruce-pine-fir). But we’re so unsure how long it will take us to build the cabin, we use pressure-treated wood in case the floor framework is exposed to the elements too long.
One of the beauties of carpentry is the way pure theoretical math and the savagery of a swinging hammer merge. You build the perimeter of the floor to the exact dimensions. You square it up by measuring diagonally corner to corner in both directions. You whack the framework with a sledgehammer until these diagonal measurements are identical. You brace the posts — or at least should brace the posts — so they don’t move. You lay out the positions of the joists every 12, 16, or 24 inches. And if you’ve done your legwork and headwork right, all the joists are the same length, the batts of insulation that rest between the joists fit snug, the ends of each sheet of plywood for the floor break in the middle of a joist. The tongues fit tightly in the grooves as you whack the sheets of plywood together. And things work just that way. I’m Pythagoras, and Kat is Archimedes. The weekend brings perfect fall days with crisp sun, crisp air, and a crisp sense of well-being.
We build the deck along the front of the cabin so we have a place to work from and store materials. It’s during this time Kat begins wearing her tool belt and hammer with a certain swagger. Tool belts are a true rite of passage. Rookies don’t wear them and waste hours fetching tools and nails scattered here and there; they’re on a ladder ready to install part X but, whoops, their hammer is over there under part Z. A belt keeps everything where you need it. Carpenters grow to love their tool belts like kids do their favorite binkies and blankies. It’s comforting. You get to know every stitch and flaw. The hand goes automatically to the pencil, the speed square, the nail pouch, the tape measure. It’s the gunslinger’s holster, and the hand draws the hammer as smoothly as Billy the Kid drew his pistol. One carpenter I worked with would signal the end of each lunch break with, “I better put on my tool belt so I can think,” and there’s some truth to it. Kat’s tool belt is beginning to mold around her.
Hammers also become sentimental things to carpenters, and Kat is no exception — she adopts one from my arsenal of tools. The old saw goes, “I’ve used the same hammer thirty years — only had to replace the handle three times and the head twice.” She’s getting it all down. Once she learns to dig out slivers from her hand with the utility knife, she’ll earn her place in the fraternal order of carpenters.
We install the posts and joists for the small bump-out in the back but don’t sheathe it with plywood. There’s something unsettlingly small about it. This is where a small refrigerator, a microwave, a sink, and a few cabinets to hold a weekend’s worth of food will sit. Kat has a vision of cooking bread and soup on lazy fall days, and this is not a lazy-fall-day kitchen. It is all work and no play. It faces away from the lake. It’s more of a compartment than a kitchen.
Cooking and breaking bread with family and friends is one of the main activities of cabin living. In The Seasonal Cabin Cookbook Teresa Marrone muses, “Cabin life runs on a different pace than everyday life. Because you’re free of the 9-to-5 schedule of the workaday world, your routines are likely to be less structured. Breakfast doesn’t have to be a bagel-and-coffee over the kitchen sink at 7:45 while waiting for the carpool. Lunch isn’t just the event that occurs between 11:45 and 12:45. Dinner doesn’t have to be orchestrated to sandwich between the end of the kids’ soccer practice and the start of the evening aerobics class at the gym. At the cabin, you can kick back and watch a loon dive for its breakfast, pack a picnic lunch to take on a hike and enjoy a leisurely dinner while watching the sunset.”
It’s clear the kitchen part of the design is ill fated. I begin to look at the kitchen bump-out the same way I do a bad paragraph: a lot of work has gone into it, it’s done, but it just doesn’t work. The wise option is to throw it out and start over. And sometimes it takes an editor to tell you this, even though you know it’s true. Kat is the editor on this one. We hold off doing anything more to the bump-out.
We finish framing and sheathing the floor for the rest of the cabin. It’s late October, and we know we’re fiddling with fate by trying to push the project much further. Rather than risk standing a few walls and having them buffeted by Superior’s gales and snows over the winter, we cover the floor and call it a year. A 16-by-20-foot, blue polyethylene tarp does the job.
We step back and take a look at our creation. We’re all smiley and puffy chested, when once again I hear that ethereal internal voice again, questioning. “What makes you so cocksure you didn’t build too close to that bumbling cliff?” The most irreversible building mistake a person can make is to put a structure in harm’s way. It only takes a film clip on the ten o’clock news showing a four-million-dollar house sliding down the hills of Laguna Beach or a modular home bobbing down the Grand Fork River to realize bad judgment abounds in places other than your teen’s head. Maybe someday Oma Tupa will be on that ten o’clock newsreel. But dammit, at least for now we got proximity; we got a view.
It’s a good thing we hold off completing the floor for the kitchen bump-out, because the next spring we take pry bars and sledge hammers and dismantle it. Over a winter’s worth of doodling and discussing, we realize that if we expand the space to 6 by 12 feet, we can shoehorn a bathroom, a closet, and an entry into this space, opening up more room for a kitchen in the main part of the cabin. As a bonus we could include a crawl space where we could house the water heater, filters, and pressure tank. And for the daily double we could create a loft in the upper reaches of the bump-out; a fortlike space big enough to bunk future grandkids. We have Bradley come in with his backhoe to dig a four-foot-deep pit to accommodate a crawl space for the larger bump-out.
A wood foundation makes the most sense, since we can use gravel for the footings and build the crawl space walls ourselves. Kat and I hand-level the pit, start spreading the gravel shovelful by shovelful, and look at each other. Hell, let’s not let the good stand in the way of the great; let’s kick it up a notch. With pickaxes and shovels we excavate the pit so we can increase the size to 10 by 12 feet.
We’re working in the muck. It’s April and 40 degrees, warm enough so we sweat when we work and cold enough to freeze when we stop. The mudflies are hatching, and we’re the nearest food. But the pure physicality of it all is refreshing. We dig a little, fill the wheelbarrow with gravel, dump it into the pit, spread it, then repeat. Over and over and over. No decisions to make. Bliss — until we hit a rock. We can’t divine how big this subterranean boulder is until we start whittling around the edges. After thirty minutes we realize this is the Orson Welles of boulders; absolutely massive. We ponder whether we should reduce the size of the bump-out or call Bradley. We make the call. He cruises down, jumps on his backhoe parked nearby, claws the megarock out in three minutes, smooths the bottom of the pit in three swipes, dumps the rest of the gravel in the pit with a few trips of the bucket, and heads back up the hill, all in fifteen minutes — and that includes five minutes of BS-ing. He could have done in twenty minutes what it’s taken us all day to do by hand.
We work a few more hours, grow weary, then perk up at the sound we love to hear — two four-wheel ATVs coming down the driveway. It’s Dick and Jean. They bestow upon us a paper plate piled high with piping hot fish cakes and three rib-cracking Ole and Lena jokes. Ain’t that somethin’?
Kat leaves to man the home front. I build the four crawl space walls from lumber and plywood that’s been pressure treated to withstand moisture, insects, and fungi attack. I whack the studs together, sheathe them with plywood, and secure them to 2-by-8-foot pressure-treated footing plates leveled into the gravel.
At first glance using wood for an underground crawl space appears, well, stupid. But tests by the Forest Products Laboratory show otherwise. In 1938 scientists from the laboratory buried treated wood stakes in test plots from the Canadian border to the Mississippi Delta. Every few years they test and examine these stakes. The results reveal that treated wood, like the Energizer bunny, just keeps going and going and going. Both Venice, Italy, and the Brooklyn Bridge are perched on pilings made of wood. If it’s good enough for these titans, it’s good enough for little Oma Tupa.
In creating the crawl space, we’ve also created a potential catch basin for rain, runoff, and groundwater to accumulate. I cover the walls with a waterproof membrane. I surround the bottoms of the walls with drain tile that leads to a plastic sump bucket in the crawl space. Inside this sump bucket is a pump that will eject the water when it reaches a certain level. Without the pump the crawl space would become a small underground swimming pool. A muddy, cold, unwanted swimming pool. And during the second spring of the cabin’s young life, the pump fails and we get our indoor pool.