Ah, the quirks and idiosyncrasies of old houses. And this old cabin is no different! Or, as it were, two old cabins:

 

Even the floorboards in the kitchen and living room areas are different. The kitchen has wide planks where the living room’s boards are much narrower. And the wall between the two rooms that we were pretty sure is load bearing seems to be the exterior of the original cabin. So the entire building was two cabins smooshed together, then had two stories, and a roof added on top!

Unfortunately, three sides of the cabin have little roof overhang, leaving the log walls with no protection from the elements. This means there are quite a few logs with rot on the lower half of those walls. Not every log is bad, but the ones that are really need replacing. This is a long and involved process, sort of like a house sized jigsaw puzzle. Finding and cutting trees the right length and width, supporting the upper walls and roof while we remove the rotten logs, and finally squeezing the new logs in.

Add into this process that the original railroad tie foundation on one side is also a bit rotten, and one corner has sunk a few inches… At least we don’t have any old plumbing or electrical to deal with! But really, we’ve been mulling over how to fix the log walls for a few weeks now and we’ve finally come up with a solution.

Building a house within the cabin.

See, our first thought was to puzzle out the logs. Then we thought, why not replace them with stick frame walls? But that involved building a temporary wall inside to support the roof, knocking down the log walls, then building a second stick frame outside wall and finally taking down the interior wall. And that seemed like a lot of building walls just to tear them back out. So it was decided. We’ll build the interior walls to support the roof and relieve some of the pressure from the log walls. Then we can replace the logs at our leisure, beginning next summer.

Is it unconventional?

Absolutely. But right now I’m surprised a stiff breeze, or one of our famous Alaskan earthquakes, hasn’t already taken this cabin down. And thank goodness the floor is on the inside of the log walls on its own foundation running parallel to the logs. That should make it easier to build load-bearing walls on it. And we should be able to replace the railroad ties when we are working on logs too. So, a little bad news, a little good news, and a plan to get things fixed and still keep the log cabin charm!

 

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