At the end of July I spent a week staying in the Log Cabin at Century Wood, doing a few jobs and enjoying the woodland. The heat was a major factor, with temperatures above 30C most days and I could now see definite signs of drought with wilting leaves on some of the trees, and longer sight lines as undergrowth died back in July as it normally would in autumn.
The first job was to install a new back window in the Log Cabin. This corner houses the kitchen sink and small worktop, and has always been a little dark – often we’ve put the light on above the sink even during the day. The back wall used to have shelves for “things” and a strong shelf for the water carrier, which I took out when I installed the electric pump for the kitchen sink tap. I now marked the size of the aperture to cut in the logs of the back wall and took them out with plunge cuts with the 18V Ryobi chainsaw I now use for small firewood logs. Then I gave the logs a good shove and then fell outwards in the yard behind the Cabin.
The next step was to insert the window unit I had made at home during the heatwaves this summer and rest an old door and fence post against it to stop it falling out. Then I fastened the inner “flange” panels of the window frame inside the Cabin to hold it in. This is the same design used by the official windows that came with the Cabin: inserts that float inside an aperture to allow for expansion and contraction of the logs, with panels on both sides holding the window unit in place. You can see below that the unit I built from scratch has an integral shutter, with bolt holes drilled through it to securely fasten it all up. The window now makes a huge difference and we use it more than any other window now.
The next day I started on the main job: finally putting up the galvanised steel roof on the Covered Walkway between the the Cabin and the Barn that I started last autumn. I used the same method as for the Barn that I built in 2018. I worked my way along using a ladder to reach over and fasten the sheets onto the purlins with self-tapping roofing screws. This way I did not need to climb onto the roofing sheets and risk buckling them. With the Barn, I could just do the last pair of sheets from the end, but with the walkway I was up against the Log Cabin and climbed on its wood and felt roof instead with a couple of sheets of plywood put down to spread my weight across its rafters.
The new roof made an immediate difference in shade from the hot sun and there was even a little rain to test its main purpose. I still need to put in guttering on the Barn and Log Cabin so you don’t get dripped on in the doorways, and I thinking of installing a water butt to collect some of the rain. I’m also going to connect the walkway frame to the Barn and put some high vertical boarding to match its style and give greater protection from our “sideways rain”.
I was there for most of a week and the electrics really came into their own. I put the Starlink dish up (one month free with this link) which let me join some work meetings and stream films in the evenings after dinner, despite the total lack of cell service inside the wood. The first photo is the battery box which has a 120Ah lead-acid battery and an inverter, plus the gray Starlink adapter in its socket that runs off the Cabin’s 12V circuit. The boxes and wires are under the kitchen worktop, including junction boxes, fuses, an RCD unit for the mains circuit and a switch to turn the Starlink off overnight to save power. Last year I upgraded the solar controller to a 30A Eco-Worthy unit, which also supports LiFePO4 batteries and will allow me to use more solar panels to increase the charging rate. The sink tap pump which runs off the 12V circuit is really convenient and the water carriers are now tucked away under the worktop, and the hose is easier to make leak-proof this way rather than gravity fed and always under pressure.
As well as various jobs, including crimping more undergrowth in the Glade and in the Car Park with the tractor, I took time out to enjoy the place and re-explore some of the corners I’d not visited for a while. It’s surpassingly easy to find “new” places in 20 dense acres especially if you take the seasons into account.
I took these photos before leaving, showing the set up after the white coat of paint last year, moving the electrics around, and installing new shelves. I went with black for metal fittings, white for furniture verticals and walls, and dark brown for horizontal surfaces and door and window frames. I still need to update the big tables and benches which have the redwood varnish I was using a decade ago.
I’ve also put in some fittings to make it more homely, including a bottle opener for my ciders and metal signs, including a Smokey the Bear sign like the real US Forest Service signs I saw warning about wildfire risk I saw in and around Yellow Stone. I expect we’re going to see more signage like that in Britain after the summer we’re having here.
Later in the summer I did go ahead with some updates to the electrics. I replaced the cracked rubber cover for the hinges on the battery box and repainted it all with gloss exterior door paint. I bought an Eco-Worthy LiFePO4 battery with bluetooth monitoring from an app, which is very very convenient, and a Renogy solar blanket which gives me another 10A of solar power and is much more convenient than the heavy rigid solar panels for shorter trips. I also added a catcher to the bottler opener on the wall!
Lovely photos of the log cabin in summer! The woodland setting looks incredibly peaceful. I have been using musicgpt.pro to create ambient nature soundscapes that would be perfect for relaxing in a setting like that. Do you get many visitors to the woodland during summer months?