Shabin Door

Our most recent, and somewhat daunting, project for the shabin was to install a sliding glass door behind the shed doors. The way I remembered it, such doors came disassembled in boxes roughly the height and width of one panel, but not anymore. The door came fully assembled, and cannot be laid horizontal. So the first challenge was to transport the door up to the land, which is well out of range of the nearest Lowe's delivery area.



To use our truck to transport the door, I made a couple of cradles out of three 2x4's. You can see them running about half way up the side of the door on each end. The door is packaged with a lumber frame, so I nailed the cradles to the door. I ran a couple of straps over the top of the door to add some more stability, and we were off at a cautious pace for the remaining 40 miles to the camp.



Miraculously, the door made it unscathed all the was to the camp. Even more amazingly, Lizz and I managed to get it off the truck and into the shabin without dropping it!.  The door is inside because my plan was to install the door backwards. Typically, the door is placed into its opening from outside the house and nailed to the outside of the jack studs. Because we want it to hang inside the opening for the shed doors, we need to nail it from the inside.



Since the door opening is already fully filled by the shed doors, and the glass door has a 1.5" overhang on its outside face, the first job was to install a secondary frame behind the original door frame. This also allowed me to size and plumb the opening just right for the new door.



After that, all we had to do was slide the door in place and screw it to the new frame.



Now we have a fully sealed structure, ready for luxury camping. This ended up as a single day project, inclusive of the time to drive up and back and buy all the materials; not too shabby.

Shabin Built!

Much progress to report! As planned, we contracted with a builder to put up the basic, weather-tight structure. We went with In-State Builders in Romney, WV. They did a great job! The total cost was a bit less than a similar size shed from a home center before delivery, and this was much higher quality and built to my exact specification. If you have a building project in or near Hampshire County I highly recommend Roger and his crew.

Here it is with the doors open, and Carleigh included for scale :-) We had the plywood siding stained with a semi-transparent oil based stain. The oil penetrates the wood to offer good long term protection from the elements. As a semi transparent finish, the wood itself still shows through. That gives it a rustic, weathered appearance we wanted. The silver-grey-blue shade fades in nicely with the surrounding trees, and the cabin is all but invisible from the road.

An important design feature of the cabin is that each of the windows have shutters which we can lock. This should provide us good protection against weather and people who may come wandering by. This was an important feature for us, given that the place will be unoccupied for long periods of time. The main shed doors function in much the same way, offering protection to the sliding glass doors we will install behind them.

On the inside, we have one big room and a sleeping loft. The overall size is 12' x 16', while the loft is 12' x 8'. In the right rear corner of the cabin is a utility closet, which is accessed from an outside door.

For our first working trip, we loaded the truck up with tools and supplies. We also stopped at Lowe's on the way to pick up a few more things. I ordered what we needed on Lowe's web site the day before. That is a great way to do the home center thing. Their web site is well integrated with the in store inventory, so you know if they have something in stock or not. After ordering and paying, they collect everything from around the store and have it waiting for you, and they help load it into your car! This let us just stop off at a Lowe's next to the interstate on the way up, and saved huge amounts of time and headache searching through the store.

The first project was to use the left over stain and cover the inside of the doors. As these will be open whenever we at the camp, we wanted them to both look nice and be protected from the elements.

I think they look great! Among the things we picked up at Lowe's was a cheap picnic table. It came disassembled and the wood unfinished. I used some more left over stain to coat it as well. So now we have a color-coordinated picnic table.

The next project is installing a sliding glass door behind the shed doors. Stay tuned!

Carleigh Sledding

We are getting a lot of snow today, much more than expected. We took Carleigh out to play with her new sled, and Lizz edited this movie of the footage she took: YouTube
- Sledding with Carleigh

New Project

Having sufficiently neglected this blog to shed all of my handful of readers, I thought it was a good time to start posting again. I have a new project that I have started rolling during the last two weeks. This hearkens back to the good old WV compound. We have been making use of it over the last couple of years, camping in the little RV, playing home base for a motorcycle trip each summer, and even tubing on the river a bit.

A number factors have lead us to consider making capital improvements to the compound. Among those factors are the desire to have somewhere comfortable for more than one person to sit out rain, the poor defenses of the RV against the local mouse population, and a gasoline-drinking, camp site vandalizing bear that has recently moved in. We started thinking about building something more permanent.

A full on house or cabin was considered, but those are expensive. They also require a great deal of time and effort to manage their construction. An alternative was proposed a couple of weeks ago, briefly negotiated, and settled as a course of action. The idea is to build a tiny cabin, really a shed that contains the virtues of a cabin, though in abbreviated or miniaturized form. The basic requirements were provisions for: a hot shower, a toilet, a king sized bed for the parents, separate sleeping area for children, comfortable seating for everyone, and pancake making facilities.

I quickly progressed from this to a working design. The basics are a simple 12'x16' box with a steeply pitched roof. On the outside it looks like a shed, with out swinging barn doors and shutters on all the widows to lock things up tight. On the inside, a set of sliding glass doors reside behind the barn doors. Walls are insulated and paneled. The front half is the living area is open to the rafters and houses a sleeper sofa. The back half has a loft above for sleeping and a small kitchen, toilet closet, shower stall, and utility closet. It is a lot of fun trying to work out how to fit all of these pieces in a small space. It has been dubbed the "shabin." Shed + cabin = shabin.

The cabin will be completely off-grid. Most systems will be adapted from RV components. Power will be 12V supplied by battery. Energy will come from the generator we already have, but could switch to solar panels in the future. Water will be brought in via car from the nearby spring. The toilet will be a composting model. Propane will supply an instant water heater and a cook top.

This week we secured a builder. He will be putting up the basic, weather tight shed structure this winter. We will be finishing and furnishing the insides our selves over the spring and summer. So expect more posts in the future to track our progress.

Virginia Weather

Two pictures taken two weeks apart...

January 27, 3" of snow


February 11, 72 degrees

Mud Room Project Finished

So I wanted to get back in to the swing of posting projects I am working on. I have in fact done a few, and I have a big one planned for this spring and summer. I just have been far too lax in posting them. To start off, let's see how the mud room turned out...



After plastering and sanding the walls, and many coats of primer and paint, I finally got the walls back in to shape from the mess removing the wallpaper created. This allowed me to finally move on to the fun part, the cabinets.



I got the cabinets at IKEA, from their kitchen collection. These are the closest things to LEGO you can do in home improvement. The room has windows on three sides. For the plain side, I have a large wall cabinet and a matching wine rack bolted to the wall, with a large cabinet and counter top below.



For one of the window sides, I wanted a bench to run below the windows. I also needed somewhere to put our small wine fridge. The base of the bench, being built here, is made from two long wall cabinets, the kind one would put over a stove. IKEA has a nearly endless selection of cabinet sizes. I completed the bench with a narrow wooden counter top that runs over the cabinets and fridge. For above the windows on both sides, I mounted more wall cabinets with doors that swing up.



And here is the final project. You can just see the matching wooden counter top mounted on the large cabinet. I think the wood counters look quite good. There were a lot of fun to finish using the vegetable based oil that IKEA sells. It provides a nice finish, and yet is safe for food preparation.

I actually have a couple more smaller IKEA hacking projects I have done since this, which I will perhaps post eventually.

Carleigh's First Swim

We started Carleigh on swim lessons at the local high school pool. This is in anticipation of our trip to Orlando next month, where we expect most days will involve a trip to the resort's pool.