It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Home

Robert Redford, eat your heart out

The cabin is beginning to look, and feel, a lot like home.  The roof with its black paper coat awaiting shingles is weatherproof, so we have been able to experience the shelter the cabin will provide from sun and precip.  The closer it moves towards completion, the more we love it.

The view from the loft

It’s been a week of decisions.  We reverted to our long ago flooring picks when we were advised that the vinyl floors we fell in love with were not only quite pricey, but required mar-free subfloors and days to mop up the oozing glue after putting them down.  Actually, going back to some original thought will give us a cabin with more of the casual “good enough” flavor we wanted in the first place.  The kitchen, bath, and bedroom will have foot square Armstrong commercial vinyl tiles, quite rigid, in a speckled color they call Granny Smith, reminiscent of the apple with some sages tossed in the mix.  We found an engineered laminate “wood” floor with a hand-hewn look named Sand Hickory which is very pretty with the hickory cabinets.  I’ll be looking at tile or slate for under the wood burning stove.  

I simplified the kitchen a bit, making it a straight L shape without the little return on the far end, saving not only on the cabinets, but more importantly on the Formica countertops which are a pretty hazy soft yellow just touched in places with apple green.  The simpler cabinet configuration saved some money on the countertops which are frankly, to me, the most outrageously expensive part of the build so far.  But you’ve gotta have them.  

What the Rocky Mountains DOESN”T need is another brown cabin with a brown or green roof.  We’ve chosen a sandy gray/beige color for the semi-transparent stain and the shingles are a driftwood color of mixed brown, blue-gray, and light beige speckles.  I’m thinking of painting the front door a dull medium red color.  I picked up interior paint chips in a color that looked good with the flooring and cabinets and put them up on several of the cabin walls and a week later they still look right, a yummy color I have only just recognized as the color of dulce de leche ice cream, pale caramel with a hint of yellow.  I’m bound to be hungry all the time here.

The view from the bottom of the stairs

Fireweed, the slimmest of silver linings

We’re getting afternoon into evening rains now -- one day we had 2.6 inches in just a couple of hours! -- and it is hurt-your-eyes green here.  The wildflowers are doing well, making a recovery from the late season hailstorm that drove us out of here almost two months ago.  I have never been here this time of year before and our site is riddled with thousands of raspberry plants, burgeoning with ripe wild berries.  You can eat as many as you can stand to pick, fighting off the chipmunks and golden mantle ground squirrels.  Our contractor, Brian Shelton, cannot believe we have never seen a bear up here, a critter that would be serious competition for the fruit.  Maybe it’s just that since we’re never here this time of year -- that is, up to now -- we’ve just missed this pilferer.  We know black bears inhabit these mountains and hear about their escapades in the interfaces between humans and wilderness -- scattered trash, stolen 40 pound sacks of dog food, and a taste for the sweet syrup from hummingbird feeders and cooling cherry pies on kitchen counters.  This is a place that makes it clear to you that you are only borrowing this land for a brief time and are still obliged to share it with its original inhabitants.  It feels right.  

Wild (and delicious) raspberries on red rocks behind the cabin