Summertime At The Cabin

It has been quite some time since I’ve posted an update, however things continue to progress at the cabin. I must say that I am taking some time to enjoy the cabin. A recent development has been the staining up the cabin. We went with a stain from Cabot called Frontier.

There is a new law in Pennsylvania that does not allow for the sale of oil based stains, only water based stains. The problem that I encountered with water based stains is that they do not soak into the wood as good as oil based stains. Also, second (or third) coats look “patchy”. The Cabot stain is oil-infused, even though it is classified as a water based paint. I have been very happy with this stain on how it is applied (soaks into the wood) and doesn’t look “patchy” or “blotchy” on subsequent coats.

Photo of the cabin in June prior to being stained.

Most recent photo of the fully stained cabin.

Last year we purchased a golf cart for use at the cabin. It made for easy commutes to my sister and brother-in-law’s cabin, plus the kids enjoy driving it around the property. We had an older, blue golf cart, with a lift kit and knobby tires. Unfortunately it also had a 2-stroke engine which decided to die on us this past June. Since I was accustomed to having a golf cart at camp, we decided to get a new one; with a 4-stroke engine and a roof. My niece calls it “Daisy”.

We have modified “Daisy” since this photo: she is now sporting daisy decals on her front and sides.

I have some good news and some bad news to report on the garden at the property. As I posted earlier, we were growing potatoes, corn, and cantaloupe at our satellite garden since we did not have room in the homestead garden. The good news is that we harvested some potatoes and the corn was growing well. The bad news is that the potato plants died off early (even though we did get a few small potatoes), the cantaloupe plants were chewed off even with the ground by some animal that was able to get through the deer fence, and a raccoon took out an entire row of corn, pulling down the stalks, and eating the corn of the attached cobs.

We didn’t get a lot of potatoes, but the ones we got were tasty.

We were able to harvest about 2 dozen ears of corn so far from our garden.

My parents provided us with a pink dogwood to plant on the property. It was root bound in the container, so I was a bit concerned about its survival. However, after being in the ground for over 3 weeks, it looks like it will survive. We planted it so that it would provide some summertime shade for sitting around the fire ring.

One of the more recent additions to the cabin was outside lighting. We are enjoying them but they do draw a large number of bugs.