It's been quite some time since I have updated this blog. The main reason for this is that work on the lake lot and cabin pretty much came to completion, and there was no real news to report. Well, there was one big thing that I didn't mention... namely that we sold the whole set-up.
Mike and I liked our lots very much, but we had a chance to buy a pair of lots that were actually on the water at our lake. One thing led to another and we wound up selling our lots and buying the lakefront ones.
I regret that decision every damn day. But what's done is done.
Mike and I kicked around some ideas on how to develop the lakefront lots, and we spent a couple of summers not doing very much other than docking the boats on our dock. Mike put his camper on his sons lot, just a short walk up the road, and I put my camper on a friends lot on the other side of the lake. It turns out that the lakefront lots did not lend themselves to being used like we really wanted. Eventually, Mike asked me to buy him out, and I did. We are still best friends, but we could never really agree on how to proceed with the lakefront. Mike is buying his sons lot, so we will remain close, just not together on the same lots.
With the lakefront lots fully mine, it opened up some options. First thing I did was put my camper up on the top of the lots. It's a bit snug, but it was doable.
The lot is terraced or "stepped" with a camper pad at the very top. In the picture above, my bedroom slide winds up actually across the property line when it's slid out. The next level could be considered the 'main' level. It has a deck, and a large 'carport' for putting a camper under.
Kelly and I discussed just docking the camper under there permanently, and then getting another camper for traveling. It made some kind of sense, as the payoff on the camper would be less than the cost of building a cabin, and its 100% complete with all systems already installed.
But the cabin bug starting setting in again. We have a storage locker full of all our cabin 'decor' that there would be no possible way to use in the camper. And while the camper is very comfortable, it would just get older and go down in value, rather than appreciating.
I had some company stock that I bought on a whim a few years ago. It went up nearly 10X, and I realized that if I cashed that in, I could build the cabin for about $1600 of real money. I started pondering ways to use the existing carport as a base for a cabin. It well built and in very good shape. It's 18 feet across, and the low part of the roof is roughly 28 feet long, but if I use the existing posts as the cut-off, I could use 24 feet of it. That would be plenty big enough for a nice cabin.
I worked up a couple of floor plans to see how things would fit in there, and I came up with this.
It will have a bedroom, a small living room, and a kitchen area. The kitchen will just be some cabinets, a microwave, and a fridge, just like the old cabin. One addition this time will be plumbing and a shower. The new lots don't have a well, but there are plenty of guys here who pack water in, in a 300 gallon cube-type tank. I already have one mounted on a small trailer that I was setting up to supply the camper, and I will use it.
I made some renders of the layout, and this is how it's going to look, more or less.
I'm hoping it winds up looking exactly like that. I am in love with that look. I rendered the old cabin out with an older version of the software, and it came out looking pretty damn close.
Now, you might be asking, if I have that large camper carport, why am I only building the camper using half of it? Well, the back half will become a garage of sorts. That way I can keep my Polaris side-by-side down at the lake and not have to haul it back and forth every time we go. I really wish the roof-line was only one level, instead of having that tall roof in front, but I'm not about to mess with that.
So strap in and stay tuned. We're gonna do it all over again!
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