Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [23]
I poked around town, looking at camps and boathouses. I noticed that most of them used a simple pine-board siding that was milled with a cove along one edge. It is a common siding for Maine lakeside camps, practical and Doric with only a slight flourish. I liked it and found that a nearby lumberyard had it in ample supply. It was my choice.
The roof surface was a settled matter. From the beginning, I wanted a green metal roof. It would last forever and I would get my overhead timpani.
On a piece of graph paper, I fiddled with the design, and hoping that I would have an abundance of eight-foot timbers, I added an ell for additional space. It would come off the front and, if you were facing the cabin, would be on the right side. An ell added a bedroom and spatial texture, though, as Paul reminded me, it seriously complicated the roof. The cabin now would have two roofs, connected at a right angle, forming a valley at the line of intersection. I would need his help figuring out the framing of the valley. I worked out a floor plan with spaces marked for a kitchen and bathroom (left, facing the cabin) and writing room (with bunks) and storage room (right, still facing the cabin). In the middle was living space with a woodstove. The entire ell, ten feet long and sixteen feet wide—those salvaged sixteen-foot timbers being decisive—was the cabin’s biggest private room—bigger than both the bathroom and writing room. I e-mailed the plan to Paul. He e-mailed me back, “Getting there. I think I’d decrease the bathroom and kitchen two feet and increase the writing room and closet by two feet.”
These were good suggestions, and I made the adjustments. I left undecided how I would handle my water system. My guiding principle all along was to keep everything cheap and simple, and I was considering ways of employing a raised cistern, which might be filled with rainwater or groundwater pumped from a shallow well. If the cistern was set high enough, the water would flow into the cabin’s sink, shower and toilet. The cistern could be built on a platform outside the cabin like one of those old-time railroad water tanks, or it could sit in the cabin, above the bathroom. I let the decision stew for a while.
Once the snow had mostly melted from the hillside in late April, Paul and I went up to take some measurements.
The hillside had come with an important restriction. Nothing could be disturbed within 250 feet of the pond. The state had designated Little Pond and its surrounding marsh as critical wading-bird habitat. It was home part of the year to Canada geese, wood ducks, rails, gallinules, herons and cranes. The conservation restriction was fine with me; I was pleased, in fact, that it was in place. I had no need or desire to disturb the woodland below the cabin. The pond was a piece of the landscape that I looked forward to exploring. I was intrigued by the beaver lodge and the mounds of feeding sticks the beavers had scattered around the pond as food caches against tough times. In the early spring the pond wriggled with pollywogs, and already long-legged water striders were skimming over its surface. I was curious to see if I could catch a fish in the pond someday, maybe a small bass or even a trout that had come up from the brook below. I had no desire to harm what would be for me one of the treasures of cabin life that I knew would take me years to fully understand and appreciate. It was one more project I set for myself—a survey of the pond. I would collect leaves, make sketches, take measurements and conduct an inventory of species.
But once I had measured off the distance from the pond’s edge up the hillside, I was presented with a problem. The restriction allowed a path to be constructed up the hillside, within the 250-foot zone, but a turn-in to the eventual