My husband, Tom, and I originally thought we would build on a parcel of land situated on a wild river in Ellsworth, Maine. But, as fate and a tenacious realtor named Casper would have it, we ended up with the unbelievable good fortune a year later of being able to purchase a 400-acre tract of wilderness across the road from our original piece. This land had been a cattle farm in the early 1900s, no remaining structures, but a large, still-cleared hay field, forests, streams, three (encroaching) beaver flowages/trout ponds. We named the land Bad Beaver Farm and so far we have built the most cunnin' cabin.

    Tom and I made a pact that we would be mindful stewards of this land and be as respectful of our gift as consciously possible. In the summer of 2006, we put in a road to reach the field where we plan to build our permanent home. We slogged through the mud, chainsawed the trees, cut lengths for firewood, brought up Tom's huge, old Mobark chipper, chipped all the brush, reeked of gasoline, fought off black flies and mosquitoes the size of small pigeons. We slept in smelly, mildewed clothes. Even our dogs permanently stank of stagnant vernal pools. Once we got to the field, we had the road graveled with gravel from the land (there are many glacial gravel deposits scattered throughout the forests.) We seeded the banks of the drive with conservation mix (this winter the deer and moose have grazed every single clover plant to the ground.)

    We brought in electricity. Yes, there was a miniscule discussion about being off the grid. I lived off the grid for several years in the late Sixties, so I really don't have a driving ambition to recreate that lifestyle, unless forced to by current political idiocy. We hired an independent hydro-electric contractor (everyone up here in DownEast Maine is named either "Bud" or "Buddy.") The poles were wired to the entrance to the field where Tom and I put the remaining electric underground. We dug a trench with an excavator, slogged through the rain and clay and breathed in toxic fumes, gluing the PVC conduit together. Tom blew the string for the lines through 350 ft. of conduit with a leaf blower!

    We decided to build a cabin first (well, actually, it started out as a screen house and then morphed into a 22x24x20-foot-high structure — my fault.) Our pact with each other was that it had to be constructed with no out-of-pocket money! It had to be entirely built with all salvaged materials we had scrounged or hauled back from the dump for the last twelve years. Fortunately, Tom is a builder — and a pack rat. All the stuff he had piled in our front field at home in New Hampshire, that I had complained about for years as being white trashy, now was found gold! We decided to build our little fishing cabin hidden in a lovely copse of trees, an old oak grove/wind break, in the middle of the field.

    We hauled huge beams that Tom brought home from a construction job on a borrowed flatbed trailer. We excavated 6 holes for pre-cast cement pilings. (Note: No live trees were downed in this project. The cabin is built in the midst of some magnificent oaks. One is literally rubbing on the west fascia — much to Tom's consternation.) Tom had already trucked up his old 1972 LULL to the land, so it was a cinch to lift the beams and set them in place. Tom's father, Leo, a highway engineer, helped tremendously in this phase of the project, in the placement of the foundation beams. The beams were too long, but before Tom could saw them off, I said, "Honey, this looks kinda small — couldn't we just cantilever a screen porch over the east side overlooking the pond?" Yup. Now the cabin had grown exponentially.

    Because the cabin footprint had now increased by 8 feet, the gable ends also grew (funny how that happens.) Now it was 20 feet to the ridge beam — so of course this allowed for a second story sleeping loft and the new screen porch. We placed plywood on the deck and I was busy applying my mechanical drafting skills that I learned at Yestermorrow. I arranged all the window sashes that we had hauled up in the most pleasing/fabulous/light conscious design possible, painted them all deep green — and basically left it up to Tom to build the frames and make it all work.

    Repurposed windows came from unlikely sources:

~ On the South facing gable is the front entrance. The front doors are vintage French double doors that Tom dragged home from the Hopkinton dump. These doors have two side-lights that I rescued from my brother, David‚s barn before he moved. This entryway gets great wintertime sun. Up in the open gable are two ganged antique diamond-paned glass windows that came from Saint John the Divine Catholic cathedral in Lowell, MA.

~ On the West side (driveway side) are two ganged double-hung 9 over 6 windows mooched from our forester's barn, left over from when he retrofitted his house. These are next to the woodstove. In the "kitchen area" (I have this in quotations — because we don't have running water — yet). Supposedly the well is going in next week, but when I asked (yet another) Buddy-the-well-driller if he was still on schedule, he replied, "Prub-ly." Above where the kitchen sink is theoretically going to be are two ganged double hung windows from Tom's parents' barn of unknown origin.