Tyler Cabin Adventure I

Some families gather in hotels and go to amusement parks.
Some families go to one member's home and sleep on the floor in their cousins' rooms.
Some families meet in foreign countries while on vacation.
Not the Tyler family.

The Tyler family owns a log house in Brooktondale, New York, just 20 minutes southeast of Ithaca. My grandparents had it built in 1976 (my birth year) from larch logs cut in the next door town of Danby when the forestry service decided that the state forest there needed to be thinned. My grandfather had the logs cut and placed without peeling them, under the assumption that larch logs are resistant to disease and insects such that they don't need to be peeled or treated. Well, this may be true of larch for 3 to 5 years, but not for 32. So the Tyler family (with additions--Uncle Jim, Christopher, George, Geo, Krissy, Sara, Emily, and myself) set upon the log house from Sunday to Saturday in order to make a dent in 32 years of deferred maintenance.


First we had to debark the whole exterior. Much of it just peeled off by hand (with the help of thousands of generations of insect activity--sorry, Grandpa--and 31 summers of sunshine and rain). Some of it required scraping. Some of the bark had to stay on, because we chose hand tools rather than cob-blasting. We just didn't have it in the budget to rent an industrial-power air compressor. Here are the backs of Emily and Geo, scraping away. Note the courses of logs above them, that still have their bark on.
When you defer maintenance on a rural home for 32 years, certain members of the rodentia and insecta families assert their rights to squat in your territory. As a result, the living conditions inside the cabin become offensive to anyone except the most rugged Appalachian mountain people. Thus, we made our sleeping quarters in a tent village on the lawn. (Thanks to a couple of tents borrowed from the Conas!)

By the way, we had this work week, whose major tasks were all exterior, planned for about three months. You'd think we would have had a shot at at least three days of sun. No such: it rained every day except the day we left.




Here's Emily, hard at work (don't let the smile fool you) peeling larch bark. She joined us all the way from Guelph, Ontario, to be part of this Tyler madness. Note the ladder on which she perches. It's an old-school wooden extension ladder, probably a few years older than I. Still works, though.
Here's my brother Geo, working so hard that he doesn't have time to look at the camera. One virtue of leaving the bark on (to give some credit to Grandpa's Thoreausian dream) is that the wood underneath did not grey as much as exposed wood (like the porch pillar that Geo's leaning on). Which is better: greyed wood without insects, or insect-damaged natural colour? You decide--before you build your own log house.


A persistent issue in the cabin is water supply. When Grandpa and Grandma had the house built, they dug a 60-foot well which, while providing chemically clean water, also spit out a lot of silt. So the water is always grey. What's more, the well has a very slow flow rate, so you can't use more than a gallon or two before the pump has to draw more and the pressure goes down. In their effort to echo the simplicity (and economy) of Walden Pond, my grandparents didn't put in a retention tank or pressure tank. So showers are out of the question at the cabin. There just ain't enough water flowing in.

However, the Tyler family has some extreme characters in it. Some of us are extreme dreamers and philosophers (like Christopher); some of us are extreme intellectuals and specialists (like Uncle Jim); and some of us are extreme experience-seekers. Geo is one of the latest. Case in point: though the ladies had a local state park scoped out to take free showers, Geo was not content to wait for the 20-minute drive. So, when it rained and we discovered that one of the gutters had clogged up, he showered under the waterfall from the north-east corner of the house:

I'll leave you with that picture for now. More to come from the First Annual Tyler Family Cabin Work Week.

~emrys