My wife and I have some great friends who are in the process of building a cabin. It’s on a chunk of private land deep within the Medicine Bow National Forest. It’s an absolutely perfect spot for a cabin, and it’ll be amazing when it’s finished and ready to be put to use. But the whole construction process is a bit daunting.
Because it’s way back in the forest, and the road to it is more of a Jeep track than a forest road, it’s quite the production. And I don’t know if you’ve built a house, a garage, or even a shed in the past, but some of the pieces you need to build a cabin are quite large, and they’re not really things you can put together in place. Take the roof trusses, for example. Roger had his built at the truss factory, then we hoisted them into place using a rented telehandler. I was there for that part, and that was hair-raising enough. I’m glad I wasn’t there for the delivery of those trusses to the cabin site. The truck delivering them couldn’t get closer than about two miles away, and they had to hoist them all up with that telehandler and creep their way to the cabin on that sketchy four-wheel-drive trail.
But the cabin’s going to be well worth all this effort when they get it finished. It’s right up where he and his family always hunt, so it’ll make for a great hunting lodge. I’m hoping my help with the construction will ensure an invitation to hunt with him long into the future, so maybe I can reap the benefits of all that hard and pucker-inducing labor.
And it’s got me thinking I might need a cabin of my own, too. Somewhere to go to get away from it all. But if I get a cabin, I think I’m going to buy one that’s already there, rather than build it myself. Now I know I can, but I don’t think I really want to.
