When you last heard of our cabin, our rocking chairs were glad to have a new home and I was glad to have a home out of the heat!  

We really liked the cabin when we bought it but almost immediately started thinking of tweaks we could make to make it ours.  The first tweak didn’t seem like a huge deal but absolutely dominated our first few days of occupancy.

I was not a fan of this corner unit.  I wanted to move it out to slide the desk into that space. 

That meant removing the bottom cupboard, moving some wiring, repairing-texturing-and-painting the walls and those weren’t the bad parts of the project.

The worst part was the hours Randy spent trying to build an insert to fill the floor space.  There was some leftover material from the two floors that had gone over the original and he did the best he could.  It is not up to his usual standard but is also something no one would notice if we didn’t tell you about it.

We both like the desk moved into that space and Randy likes that we decided to keep the shelves above it.

The second thing I thought I wanted was to remove these upper cabinets in the bedroom.  This picture is how we first saw the bedroom and it seemed small and dark with that big cupboard above the bed.

In the end we decided to keep the cupboards and hide the shelf storage with canvas prints of colorful flowers we had photographed over the years.  It is nice to use the quilt my Grandma Dee made us as a wedding gift all those years ago.  We have had a dog on the bed for most of our marriage so rarely had the quilt on top.  One side of the room is mirrored closet doors and usually the shades are open so the room doesn’t feel small at all.

We finished that first trip with a new kitchen faucet, bathroom light fixture and a new shower fixture.

The focus of our second trip was to replace this vinyl accordion door going into the bathroom.  Yeah, it is tacky. We didn’t have a lot of options and decided on a barn door.  Great idea but tricky to implement in this miniature space. Barn door kits were too large and too heavy for our park model construction.

A saleswoman at Lowes suggested a 30″ interior door that cost $5 on clearance and separate barn door hardware.Randy had to use his engineering skills and his camera scope to get placement positioning and we measured and measured and re-measured.

Randy sanded, painted, touched up and installed the barn door and it looks MARVELOUS!  

The previous owners came over to see the barn door and asked if we wanted to sell the cabin back to them.  It is that great!

We took up a new entertainment stand with an electric fireplace and put that together.  It was time consuming but low drama!

Randy took down the previous owner’s satellite dishes and put up our DISH dish from the RV.   He set the dish and configured all the wires inside so it is a five minute task to hook up our home receiver and wireless Joey for the TVs in the cabin.

Then he installed our new bedroom TV.  It s a little big for the room but better too big than too small!

He installed a Lazy Susan triple shelf in one of the kitchen cupboards.

The sliding door lock was marginal so he replaced that.  It was another project that doesn’t sound like it would take all day but did.  He eventually won the battle.

I spent most of those first trips assisting Randy when needed, weeding our walkways and little forest and sitting on the deck.  I love reading on the deck.  The weather was superb and we have been very glad for our cabin in the woods.

Our little vacuum robot, Eufy, thought she wanted to escape to the deck as well.

By the time we went up for our third trip to the cabin, I was glad for Randy that we had come to the end of our list!   He could now enjoy life on the deck as well.  He sat there for a couple hours and dreamed up his own list.  I was not responsible for anything in this part of the blog.

He discovered that the stair supports (stringers) for both the front and back stairs to the deck were rotting and needed to be replaced.  

He wanted to have a ten foot section of rain gutter put up at the rear of the cabin.  He called the company who had put in another section in the front and found they were scheduling twelve weeks out and the cost would be $350, their minimum charge. That is a lot for a ten foot section of gutter.

He decided to do both projects himself but was unable to get supplies anywhere close.  He spent half a day driving to Payson and back but got what he needed.

I wouldn’t say the rain gutter project was quite as bad as the desk floor project but it was close.  At one point he considered abandoning his efforts and just letting the professionals do it for $350.

He eventually prevailed over the gutter demons and it works very well. It’s too bad that something that took so much time and energy isn’t supposed to be noticed.

He hadn’t been able to find stringers that weren’t already cracked so he got to buy a new saw to cut his own from 2″ by12″ pressure treated boards.

He prepped and painted the supports so our stairs should be safe and stable for a long time.

Randy was able to spend a lot of time inside his little storage cabin seeing what he has and organizing things. 

Then he decided it needed to be painted with a stain protectant!

When we left the cabin last week, the aspen leaves were starting to turn color.  Randy winterized the cabin and we heard that it snowed a day or two later.  We have tentative plans to drive up for a few days this winter and see how it is to be there with snow.  We bought a snow shovel just in case.

Randy installed a new thermostat with wifi to be able to monitor things but wifi is a problem.  We left our AT&T wifi device there from our RVing days but it is very marginal.  In fact, our biggest challenge going forward with the cabin is internet availability.  Cell phone coverage is also bad and there really aren’t any good choices given our location.   So, we are in the queue for Elon Musk’s Starlink. It is still in Beta testing phase but we know it is working well for a few people in our community. Randy has paid our deposit and we are hoping our equipment will be shipped to us sometime over the winter so we will be good to go next spring.

We love our little cabin. It is too small for overnight guests but there is a hotel a couple miles away and a couple community cabins available on Airbnb. We hope to see you in Show Low sometime in the future.

PS  Our fifth-wheel is still on the consignment lot.  We are a little surprised it is still there but the lot people set the price and they haven’t reduced it yet.  It will take as long as it takes and we are still content with letting it go.