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.

We Are Demo D-E-M-O

Spent most of the weekend doing demolition on the cabin. I’ve torn out the kitchen to the walls and have taken out a very unfortunately located closet in the bedroom. I’ve learned a few things.

1) It is possible for a building to have approximately 40% of its mass composed entirely of mouse poop. As disgusting as it sounds, I really believe that I have removed well over 20 lbs of the stuff (of course even I recognize that such an amount is nowhere near 40% of the building, but it sure does seem that way.

2) Mice can chew through the electrical wiring, leaving lots of dangerous stuff exposed. I will have to get an actual electrician to help me with some of this.

3) My new cabin has some infamy. A neighbor stopped by expressing her relief that a “normal” person will be moving in. Apparently the place was a flophouse for heroin and meth addicts over the past several years with an ever-changing cast of characters sleeping it off inside. It explains how they could live with the vermin and also fail to care for the place very well.

4) Someone actually wants to take the mouse-poop covered cabinetry, saving me a couple of trips to the landfill.

That’s all for today. The missus and I are off to Phoenix for a wee break to celebrate our 13^th anniversary by hanging out at a hotel pool, eating Ethiopian food, and taking a break from the gallery, the construction, the lawsuit, and even the dogs (as much as we love the buggers, a couple of days of having someone else walk them will be a small relief from the daily grind).

First Little Pig’s Expansion Pak

The project remains delayed by the lawsuit etc and might be dead for the time being. I will continue to post to this blog on the hopes that sometime over the coming 24 months we will finally get started on it. But do not despair me hearties! There is plenty going on to blog about.

Sometimes you build with the wood you’ve got….

So we are nearing completion of the addition to the gallery in Madrid. I will have some pics at some point, but the important point is that we’ve done much of the construction with bits and pieces that had been reserved for the Main Project (the Strawbale House).

Devoted readers might recall that during the process of getting ready to build the House, I sourced a large amount of old recycled wood to be used for beams and ceiling decking and etcetera. The evil fellow that I am waging legal battle against actually screwed the order up and we almost lost the wood to someone else. Worse, he charged me for the wood in spite of the fact that I paid for most of it directly (it’s all in the lawsuit). In any event, we had a large amount of very, very interesting old barn wood siding, beams and posts sitting out in the elements in the middle of nowhere.

Rather than risk it being damaged, and given the changes we will have to make to the main house design in any event, I decided to use as much as possible in the construction in Madrid proper – on the gallery and the cabin.

In the course of building the addition, I decided that I wanted to use one of the 13+ foot long old beams for the main support for the roof. Also, I have many long cedar beams that would make up the main rafters for the same. Those beams were supposed to be used for the portales around the house, but we’ll just have to go with something else when we get there.

Also for the portales, I had a number of smaller sticks that proved perfect for securing the metal roof of the addition (they were going to be used for the same in the portales.)

Finally, for the ceiling decking and the outside of the structure I decided to go ahead and use the old red-tinted barn wood. In the end, the addition will look older than the gallery itself.

More soon on the fate of the cabin.

The Header is Tempo

I snatched some elements of the header from the Go Daddy version of this site (which I found archived on Google (thus proving that they had been part of the blog) and put them above. Now that I am on the more-user-friendly Blogger, I will be revamping the look of this place from time to time as the project advances.

Coming soon: An actual post.

Angry at Go Daddy

Welcome to the new home for The Big Bad Wolf Was Wrong. After being frustrated using Go Daddy, I have decided to blog over here. Soon I will provide some background about the project, repost some classics and begin covering new ground. Things are happening, just not on Go Daddy.