Cabin to go?

It’s not at all what I had in mind for the Loveless estate, but when Chris and I spotted this log cabin for sale at the side of the road a couple of weeks back, it looked like an opportunity worth exploring.

It’s listed at $10,000 (though it sounds like I could get it for $5K) and will cost about $10,000 to move it about 6 miles to Loveless Lake.

It was built in the early 1990s as an office for a company that built log cabins back in the boom times. The building later became a hair salon and most recently was a real estate office.

It has a bathroom, but no kitchen, not even a sink. It’s dark, in desperate need of more windows, and will require pulling out a lot of drywall and skanky carpet.

Yep, another rehab project.
 

Porch entrance with drywall of former office space.





One of two loft bedrooms

The roof leaked in the other bedroom. Supposedly fixed, but serious water damage.



Dusty catwalk.



 

I'm giving it serious thought. It’d certainly fit in with the neighborhood. And I could have a roof over my head for what seems like a good price.

Moving a 26’ x 30’ structure onto my land and down the hill will require major excavation. The path would cut right through those lovely river birches that I was so thrilled to discover this spring.

I’ve gotten attached  to the little footpath Chris and I created through the trees and ferns that reclaimed the former driveway. Somehow I never looked ahead and thought about the realities of rebuilding. Pretty much anything I do – digging a well, building a foundation, putting in septic – will wreck the land, if only temporarily.

Then again, moving some earth around will give us a chance to create rain gardens and add some natural vegetation to combat erosion and storm water runoff.

Damn tradeoffs.

Mr. Organized

Unlike my fleeting freak-outs, Chris is unflappable. He spent a day at Loveless burning, bagging up debris and organizing salvageable lumber. He went from this:

To this:

And in the process, discovered this:

Kaboom!

Mike showed up early with his mighty “come along” last weekend and finished the job of flattening the Loft to Nowhere and the rotten living room.

Chris and I missed the excitement, but Mike reported that the near-Sonic boom freaked out a couple of fishermen enjoying a quiet morning on Loveless Lake.

The scattered mess from the small, empty cabin is astounding. I can’t fathom how overwhelming it must be for folks who got hit by tornadoes this spring. Wonder how much of that stuff gets pushed right into a landfill?

Loveless in bloom

What a wonder this spring to see how nature has reclaimed the land. Purple lilac flowers greeted us at the side of the road and  ferns are growing in patches under the spruce trees and woodsy hillside.

This fern stopped me in my tracks (though it WAS a good stopping point on Stairmaster Hill from Loveless Lake). I'd never seen one before, but have since learned it's an aptly named maidenhair fern. 

After spying several skinny trees with salmon colored bark this winter, I was finally able to get a positive ID from colleague and master gardener Mary Jane, who said Loveless is blessed with a stand of river birch trees behind the cabin. How cool is that? 

Now that spring is springing forth with gusto, the rush is on to once again scour for trash before the place gets too overgrown with grass and weeds. I’ve collected another large bag of aluminum cans, which we’ll trade in at the Polk County Recycling Center on our next "first Saturday." With any luck, it'll offset some of the cost of paying to dispose of three more tires we discovered.

I also unearthed a second (or is it third?) steel drum for our friend Mike to scrap, as well as what would have been a most excellent cooking pot if it hadn’t gotten squished at some point.

Mike spied some wild strawberries up by the road, and showed me a stalk of Stinging Nettle, which he said his aunt used to make herbal tea.

He also noted that it wouldn’t be far-fetched to find another kind of herb on the land, as well ….

Still life of a teardown



"Tough lie," Chris said when I snapped this photo.




The Loveless critters make a statement.



Chris' hard hat survived the kitchen collapse. Not sure why it wasn't on his head...

Watercraft

Remember these?

We’re down to just one, now -- that rotten, soggy, fern-loving motorboat -- after Demolition Dave found a good home for the pontoon.

The fiberglass runabout remains a challenge. I've called boat dealers, sent e-mails to recyclers and posted messages on listservs.

Even the plant manager at the Larson boat manufacturer in Little Falls, Minn., told me they send excess fiberglass to the landfill.

Atomic Recycling in Minneapolis – which touts itself as the grand “green” recycler of waste – sent me an email with this bright "solution":

“The only thing I could suggest is to get a dumpster and put it in there. If you get a big enough one you could put it in whole. Let me know if I can help. Have a great day.”

This is what I’m up against.

It’s a bit mind blowing, especially when you consider that there are more than 863,000 boats registered in Minnesota -- more per capita than Florida. Boats are said to last 400 years in the landfill, a bit of hyperbole, but who's counting?

I told my contact at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency that we were thinking about sawing up the boat and tossing it bit-by-bit into our garbage cans to be trucked to the waste burner.

“At least it’s upstream,” she said, a bit sheepishly.

Life everlasting

Back when I was scoping out distressed lake cabins, my friend Ramona was trying to regain her footing. Her husband and my chum, William, had died two years earlier after a bruising battle with COPD.  Neither of us had a clue how much the earth would shift when William departed this mortal life.

William was a big-brain Mensa who never made it to college. He spent four decades working at a suburban stove factory. We’ll never really know whether his job, his cigarettes or a mean trick of DNA led to the emphysema and cascading health problems that sucked the breath out of him one February day.

William thought of “life everlasting” in practical terms, not religious ones. He believed that each of us lives on in another’s memories, stories and things left behind.

And so it is with the Loveless canoe.

Out of the blue last summer, Ramona offered to give me William’s canoe – a massive 17-foot Alumacraft, built in 1968. The red paint is scarred after decades of  rough-and-rocky river trips William had taken in his healthier days.

Last weekend, Ramona and I paddled the canoe from the boat launch at the southern end of Loveless Lake to my place on the northwestern side. We made light of it, but in reality it was a pretty heavy deal.

William would have loved the irony of his canoe landing on neglected property at a place called Loveless.

Chris says we're taking the canoe to its retirement home, where the waters are calm, the bottom is sandy and the bass plentiful.

Everybody say Amen.