12/11-13/07 I went up to the property for 3 days: Tuesday through Thursday.

I arrived at 12:15, very happy to be back after being away for so long. There had been a lot of snow in the past week or so - my guess would be about 3 feet or so. But there had also been a lot of rain on top of it, so it was sagged and furrowed so it almost looked like the surface of a brain. The temperature was 20 degrees, so the wet sagging snow was frozen solid in layers with granules between the ice layers.

The gate was still locked in place so Mike couldn't get in to plow open a parking space. He had plowed as close as he could to the gate so that gave me enough room to park and still be off the road. I had to shovel off some big lumps of frozen snow in order to park, but it didn't take too long to do that. I measured the snow on the ground and it was 19 inches deep in the open flat areas. I carried my gear up to the trailer and went up to the cabin and got a steel scaffold frame. I carried it down to the gate so I could use it to remove the gate log. By that time the trailer had warmed up so I went in for lunch.

After lunch, I lit a fire in the wood stove in the cabin. Then I got a come-along, a chain, and the wooden wand I use to mark where the gate post is, and brought them down to the gate. Removing the gate log was a little more challenging than usual. I had never done it in deep frozen snow before. I couldn't swing the gate without shoveling a lot of ice and snow away to allow the counterweighted end of the log to pass. The frozen snow was well over the end of the log and the two concrete block counterweights. In fact, when I unlocked and removed the padlock, the log sprang up about six inches. The weight of the snow on the overhanging counterweight had bent the log by that much.

Another problem was that with the pickup parked right alongside the gate log, it didn't give me much room to maneuver the scaffold frame. But the strategy was to lift the log off center from the scaffold frame so that when it cleared the rebar hinge pin, the log would swing a foot or two toward the driveway and away from the pickup. I lifted and swung the log in this fashion a half a dozen times eventually working it over so that it was lying alongside and outside the area that Mike would be scooping out. The butt of it ended up just outside the gate post.

Finally I screwed the wand to the gate post, placed rebar safety caps on the two pieces of rebar sticking up out of the posts, and brought the tools back up to the cabin. I decided that there would be no point in my shoveling out the parking place since the pickup was already safely parked and it would be an awful hard job to shovel that frozen snow out by hand. I'll leave it for Mike the next time he comes around.

I spent the rest of the day finishing up the wiring channel in the Grid A1 corner of the loft. Most of the holes in the logs were already made, but I enlarged them in order to allow them to hold four or five Romex cables. I still haven't figured out how many wires I'll need to go through there, but I looked at the Grid E1 corner and saw that it would be even easier to run wires up through that corner so I am confident that I can run as many wires as I will need without a problem.

On Wednesday it was 20 degrees again. There had been just a skiff of new snow over night. I started a fire in the wood stove first thing in the morning. I was eager to see how much difference it would make while working inside on a cold day.

I spent the day installing an electrical outlet box on the outside wall in the porch. I opened the last receptacle outlet box in the string along the baseboard in the living room and pulled the receptacles and wires out of the box. Then I removed a knockout plug from the bottom of that box. Using a crude protractor made from two 1x2s held together with a C-clamp, I sat in the open front doorway and eyeballed the angle I would need to drill through the box so that it would come out the other side of the log in about the middle of the log. The angle was pretty near 45 degrees.

With a long 1/2 inch augur, I drilled the hole through the log and was very happy I didn't hit a rebar in the process. I hadn't kept track of where the rebar pins are in that wall so there was a non-zero chance that I might hit one. Except for the damage it might do to my bit, it wouldn't really matter if I hit one. In that case, I would just aim more to the right or left and drill a new hole leaving the vertical angle the same. Fortunately I didn't have to do that.

With the hole peeking through on the outside of the log, I now knew where the outlet box needed to go. But there was still the possibility that even though the hole for the wire missed the rebar, there might still be a rebar within the 4 1/2 inches where the box would go. I planned to recess the box 2 inches into the log. Brian Kemly had advised me that recessing the box would be unnecessary work, I still thought it would look a lot better and be worth the effort. So, I drilled a horizontal row of small holes 2 inches deep to see if there was a rebar within that 4 1/2 inch span. Again, I was relieved that I didn't hit any rebar.

So with the location of the box determined, I marked it out with a pencil and used a hammer and chisel to make a nice square hole for the box. I had already pre-wired up the outlet box with a GFI receptacle and a standard receptacle so it was just a matter of caulking around the box and screwing it into the hole in the log. Then I replaced the wiring inside the box and put it back together. I was very happy with how it looks out there.

Of course, I kept the fire going all day and I took quite a few breaks to sit in front of the fire and enjoy the heat while I watched the tiny little snowflakes float down outside.

On Thursday morning it was a little warmer -- about 30 degrees. I lit another fire in the stove and went to work wiring up the inside receptacle box, connecting it to the new outside box. I was happy that when I energized that circuit again, it didn't blow a breaker and the outlets, inside and outside, worked perfectly. I plugged the porch lights into the new receptacle rather than into the extension cord I had used before.

I spent some more time enjoying the fire in the stove and I did a lot of thinking about heating the cabin. Dave had cautioned me a couple weeks ago that he thought my floors would be cold unless I installed radiant heat pipes in the floor. I had given that a lot of thought, but now with the experience of how the wood stove heated the place on a 20 degree day, I came to the conclusion that radiant heat is something I want to do.

I had talked with Kim Miller about radiant heat and he told me that his brother-in-law is in that business. I had also done some research on the internet and learned quite a bit about how it is done. I decided that I would call Kim's brother-in-law and get his advice on how to proceed.

I have a couple unusual conditions to consider with radiant heat. One is that since the cabin won't always be occupied, there is a chance of a long-term power failure during the winter. That would mean that something has to be done to prevent the pipes from freezing and bursting. The other consideration is that I have a perpetual, free, source of 55 degree water flowing from the spring into the creek. That source could be run through the heating pipes in wintertime power outage to keep them from freezing, and, as a bonus, the spring water could be circulated through the pipes during the summer to help cool the cabin. I would like to discuss these considerations with Kim's brother-in-law.

I cleaned up the mess I had made on the porch and inside the cabin, had lunch, and left for home at 1:20. I got stuck in the parking place and couldn't move even an inch. I cleared in front of and behind all the wheels and still I couldn't get out. I figured this would be a good use of, and a test of, the 4-wheel drive in the pickup. (I didn't want 4-wheel drive, but I couldn't find a big pickup without it.)

I was just as stuck with 4WD as without it. I ended up doing some more complete shoveling around the wheels, laid out chains on the ground behind the rear wheels, and threw a couple shovelfuls of sand under the wheels. That did the trick. I finally got on the road at about 1:40. (I have yet to be convinced of the usefulness of 4WD.)