Red Cedar

It’s the end of summer and the dinginess of my office environment has finally gotten to me after ten years in the same damned cube. Ten years! (Fifteen at my job, ten in this building)

The federal government doesn’t really have much of a policy involving sprucing up workplaces beyond providing a carpet cleaning once a year. Hell! We don’t even get a deep clean of our office spaces – ever. Which makes for an accumulation of dust, stains and other assorted sads that cling to the fabric cube walls like the very essence of work itself.

So I’m going to do something which is pretty much unheard of in the environment I work in – I’m going to decorate my cube beyond putting up a new poster or two. I’m going to get an area rug! A new chair for the visitors (that isn’t a derelict rolling office chair)! A covering for the seventies bookshelf that looks like it was made in a prison (it was, too – thanks CorCan)!

Of course I can’t do it all at once because I only have so much money and time — so consider the above my before pictures – and as I go I will post in-progress and “after” pictures. I would really like to cover the beige cube walls with a coloured fabric in addition to some other smaller projects – but I’m not sure yet as that would be somewhat costly and it may turn out that some smaller fixes make the space more livable. Today’s project is to affix some stickable “wall art” to the overhead cabinet (on sale at Rona yesterday for only $5) – and to peruse the office supply shop across the street for something to replace the ugly plastic tray that serves as my in basket. Start small – work big, right?

Last week when we started working on our lot, it started to feel *less* real to me than when we bought it – for a day or two anyway. Like I couldn’t believe that we were actually able to do this thing. That we actually bought this little slice of non-city to work on and were working on it!

It’s hard to describe how much I have wanted to do something like this, for how long I have looked at little properties and thought about a piece of land that could be ours, for just a little cabin and a quiet place to go to. I think the desire has been with me for all of my thirties and half of my twenties – growing alongside my years spent in the “big city”. For as much as I love my East Vancouver neighbourhood, and the downtown in which I work – I also love solitude and quiet and peace and calm and away. It’s what propelled me to try living on the Sunshine Coast for four years until the commute almost killed me. It’s why I work on my little oasis in the city – the garden and studio – to provide a breathing space in between tightly packed houses.

Over dinner last night we met with our land partners and discussed what to do next. Burn the big pile, finish the outhouse, look into the permit-process. But mostly I just want to make a space to put up a tent, so I can be there whenever I want — so I have a place to make mine even if it is just a little flat ground beneath the trees. This place deeply satisfies the itch that I have wanted to scratch all these years – I can imagine creating times both social and solitudinous – once we get our first living spaces in place.

And so, having waxed rhapsodic for a moment – I bring you some pictures of our very first (and most urgent) building: The OUTHOUSE (not yet finished but we got a good start on it).

This hole was dug by our backhoe and is much larger than it looks in the picture. It is also close to seven feet deep. We will never fill this hole. Even my father approved. It is a very good hole.

Because the hole was so big, we had to build a very big platform (8×8) to cover it. This is Brian and Will holding the platform base up so I could measure the rough heights our posts would have to be. Since our lot is pretty sloped, everything has to be on stilts.

The posts were made from logs we cut on our land, put onto leveled concrete pads and stabilized with a “y” formation. It looks a bit flimsy, but it’s really very sturdy.

Will did so much work getting the platform level that he left it up to Brian and I to hammer down the floor. We still need to cover it with plywood to make sure there are no cracks for smells to leach up through. Also we need to cover up below the base so that the hole is well and truly sealed off from animals and things.

After the platform was finished, Brian and Will selected logs to make the outhouse structure from. Obviously 8×8 is way too big for an outhouse, so we determined that the structure would be comprised of an enclosed outhouse, with a washing area outside, and a rainwater collection system to the side of it. I left at this point to go to Keremeos and buy fruit.

The view from the platform! if there weren’t all those trees in the way, you could see the lake.

When I returned a few hours later, the framing for the main outhouse and structure was finished, as was the outhouse bench. Again, we need plywood to cover the bench, plus some metal sheathing where the hole is so we don’t get bad smells leaching into the wood.

This is where things were when we left them. Next we have to:

• Put down plywood flooring
• Nail shiplap to the outside of the outhouse structure and then paint/stain it.
• Cover the bottom of the platform
• Create some ventilation from the hole
• Sheath the hole with ducting and finish seat
• Build a door for the outhouse
• Put up the roofing material
• Put up some guttering and install the rain barrel
• Build a table/shelf to hold a wash basin, put up a clothes line

Quite a lot for a simple outhouse! But I’m confident we can get it done before winter since I’ve got two trips planned in September already. If all goes well, we’ll have a rudimentary woodshed up as well.

Then the big burn in December!

Then we get to start the rest – main cabin, tent platforms, storage shed etc. As I said, I will be happy once I have a place to sleep on the land, but first a place to shit. Indeed.

For you land watchers: to give you an idea of how much work we did last week on our lot (and because the photos on the flickr set do need some explanation)  – here are some before and after shots.

Before: Driveway
There was no driveway, and what once existed had been severed by the ditch put in by the regional district

After: Driveway
A big machine came, dropped a culvert in the ditch and pulled a bunch of dirt over it to make us a regulation-size driveway with a parking pad at the top.

Before: Lot from the road
Lots of trees and bushes, obvs. This lot hasn’t been worked on in 20 years.

After: Lot from the road
This is a slightly different angle, but you can see that the trees are a lot sparser and there is more light overall.

Before: View down from our proposed tent-platform site
If you look to the left of the photo, you can kindof see a hump behind the trees, which is the large boulder that Brian and I want to build our tent platform behind.

After: View from the proposed tent-platform site
Doesn’t even look like the same place does it?

Before: Old cabin site and main part of lot
You’ve seen this one before, collapsed cabin and lots of brush

After: Old cabin site and main part of lot
Yup, that pile is the cabin and all the dead tree matter that we pushed and cut down — and it’s destined for burning this winter. We are looking for people who wish to drive to Princeton for a big burn party in November or early December.

Those are the most dramatic before and afters – but if you want to see all the photos, check out the Flickr set.

And stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment of “what the hell are we doing with this land?”: building the outhouse!

This is the last shot from the last day of work on our lot. You can see here that we now have a driveway, a half-cleared piece of land, and to the right up there is the beginning of our outhouse and wash station. More detailed photos will follow later this week, but you get the idea: five days of work got us a usable piece of land, a giant burn pile (to the left, you can’t really see it here), and the beginning of our first outbuilding.

Next steps will include finishing the outhouse, erecting at least one tent platform and burning the giant pile of debris.

I’ve got a ton of before-after shots which I will share this week, and canning recipes too! More to come as I get readjusted to being in front of the machine again.

This is the smallest-town road trip ever. Eagle Bay and Bankier aren’t even towns, they are just settlements: the first being the homestead where my German family set down over a hundred years ago, the latter being the settlement closest to the land we just bought. It’s not wilderness travel, but we won’t have cel or Internet access either.

Eagle Bay is where I spent all my summers until I was about seventeen. My grandfather gifted each of his children with a 1/2 acre on Shuswap Lake, and all my mother’s siblings (save one) had cabins just down the road from one another. When I was six, my father and uncle spent a summer building our cabin which we spent our whole summers at every year after until my parents sold it because the taxes got too high  (fourteen years ago now). The last time I was up there was in the early summer of 1999, to commemorate the death of my grandfather — and I’ve meant to go back every year since.

But the closer we get to leaving, the more I wonder how much I want to see it again anyway. It’s the whole “you can never go home again” feeling, where the memories of being there don’t square up with the reality of the changes, and you’ve moved on anyway, so there’s a dissonance between what was and what is. Or who was, and who is. What made the place special to us — the people, the bustle of our family in the summer, the childhood freedom of going shoeless all summer and swimming whenever we wanted — all that is gone and we haven’t created new memories of the place in the intervening years to carry  forward into our present.

We’re only there for two days — camping down the road at a a private site in Sorrento — with one day of family activities and hopefully some time to drive around the take a look at things. I think it might be my last time going there, because there isn’t much left to go and visit. I don’t know most of my family there very well, there are only two cabins left in family hands (and my uncle’s place, where he lived full time until he moved into Salmon Arm. burned down a few years ago which makes me so sad – I remember it being built), and the rest of the community has turned into a hyper-developed Calagary oil money retreat – summer houses tucked into every other corner. Even if we did still own the cabin,  it’s not an area I would want to spend a lot of time — it’s no longer the quiet dirt road community of my childhood.

After Eagle Bay, we drive to Bankier on the holiday Monday where we will commence work on the new cabin property in my life. A nice counter-balance to leaving the past behind. We’re meeting with a backhoe operator first thing, getting culverts and a driveway put in, and starting to clear the land with chainsaws and machetes and axes! A couple friends will be coming along for extra hands and I plan to swim in Link Lake every day since the weather should get sunny again around Monday.

I hope to find some Internet access either at the place we are staying or in the town of Princeton so I can post photos  as we start to do land-clearing. But if that doesn’t happen? I will return on the 11th with many stories to share. I’m nervous, really — the cabin project is so beyond the scope of anything I’ve ever done — getting into the beginnings of it makes me a little twitchy. By the end of next week though I should be getting the hang of the land clearing part at least – and by the fall? I’ll be swinging that machete like a pro!

Have a great long weekend people!