Temporary. As in over 100 years old.

So work has commenced on the miner’s cabin that we are remodeling into a livable space. The kitchen and bath have been gutted to the bones and we are putting in the foundation for the laundry/eating nook.

Some 100 years ago or so the original one-room shack was built on the hillside. The way they built that room was simple: stack a bunch of rocks with a small amount of adobe mud between them, and set the cabin on top. At some point they added a kitchen and bedroom. Then what was the porch for this set-up was enclosed as part of the main room. Finally, after tiring of using the outhouse, someone added a bathroom, though made out of cinderblocks and only tentatively connected to the main body of the house. Aside from that room, the rest of the cabin just sits on the piles of rocks, threatening a careening down the hill.

I am going to guess that the bathroom was added sometime in the past 20 years and until that time the outhouse was the “facility” for the place. But I could be wrong and the bath only added much more recently given that the Old Church next door (now a private residence) was the location of a local public restroom and “hippy bath”. In any event, it is the only part of the structure with anything resembling a foundation. When a couple of the workers discovered that the old brick chimney was being held up by some pieces of 2x4 that rested on a floor joist they took shelter – only briefly but to great comedic effect – by running away and hiding in the bathroom.

In addition to having to shore up the chimney, we will have to retrofit a frame for the kitchen walls as they are made up of long, flat boards without the benefit of studs. When we ripped off the drywall we discovered we could see daylight between those boards and the outside wall has a definite bowed out shape to it. On the bright side… ok, there is no bright side.

I am also going to add additional foundation support to the north wall and to the main beam under the house. I am going to use some fairly massive 6 inch cedar posts we bought for use in the aborted house project. Rather than have them sit uselessly out on the property I might as well use them for something.

Should I tell you about the pack rat nest under the bathroom shower? They were all dead. Gruesome scene, really. And they had packed in a plastic toy tarantula among their treasures. Just to freak us all out.

I was relaying all the work that we are going to do to the house to a long-time local resident. His response: What did you expect? All these cabins were built as temporary homes while the miners worked the mine.”

100 plus years is a long temporary.