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Looking Ahead

3/23/2014

As I write this, on the 3rd day of spring...

...there is still about 3 feet of ice on our lake. Angela and I are about to make the trek back up to our house, with enough provisions to last us though the thaw and well beyond.
We are looking forward to opening our business this year, and eagerly await our first guests.
This will be a year of continued discovery, magical moments, canoe trips, wild edibles, new friends, new babies, and endless possibility.

C'mon over!

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2013 - A Year In Review

3/23/2014

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As Angela and I prepare to return to our tiny house in the woods for another year, I can't help but reflect on how amazing the last 12 months have been.
It all started with a most fortuitous land purchase. We bought our property sight unseen; and although we had a rough idea of the terrain and water features from pouring over maps, we were stunned at what we found when we made our first trip to our new home. After stumbling through the bush guessing our way along a maze-like network of trails for some time, we finally emerged on the shore of a beautiful lake. A lake! But not just any lake, this was our new back yard. Crystal clear, far deeper than anyone could guess, and spring fed, it made sense why the locals call it 'Clear Lake'. We spent the next several months beside ourselves with joy, elated by how things worked out, dizzy dealing with the reality of a situation that seemed too good to be true.
Our first visit was in May. We began by spending weekends on Clear Lake, leaving our camping gear stashed in the forest, making room for us to start bringing more and more stuff with us on each subsequent trip. The weekends quickly turned into week long excursions, and by early July I had made the move permanently. I left Angela behind at her job in the city, and began the building process. My father and I spent several days in a July heat wave building an 8' x 12' shed, by hand.

Starting to look like a shed.

By August we had a newly built shed next to the build site for our house, and a comfortable lakefront campsite. We decided not to build our house on the lake, but rather to have it tucked away in the forest, leaving the shoreline natural. Several trees had to be cleared out. I prefer to felling them with an ax rather than a chainsaw

We took down, limbed, and further processed many large white pines with my trusty ax, and most importantly, the superhuman efforts of my cousin Tim. Without his help, this would have been a far more daunting task.
Once the site was cleared of trees and ready to build on, we were descended up on by wave after wave of friends, family, helpful neighbors, and kind strangers. All of whom made the task of constructing our house much, much easier.
All of our building materials had to be brought 2 kilometers by water, then a half kilometer over land. We utilized a few of the neighbors boats for quite a bit of the lumber, and our canoes for everything else. By rigging up a make shift pontoon boat out of two canoes, we were able to paddle the 2 kms of water with up to 1500 lbs of lumber at a time. We managed to transport thousands of pounds worth of windows, doors, bricks, shingles, and even a sliding patio door.

Tim and I rigging up the pontoon canoes to haul windows.

Once docked, our closest neighbors went out of their way to generously haul all of our sheathing and much of the smaller lumber to our site by ATV. All of the bigger lumber however, had to be lugged on our shoulders. Days at a time were spent making the half kilometer trek through the forest on foot, loaded down with as much lumber as our increasingly tender collar bones could bare.
The building process was a huge learning curve for us, and very enjoyable indeed. Although Angela and I had never built a house before, we had many skilled builders drop in and lend a much needed hand. Without the guidance and elbow grease of these brave souls, I am sure we would still be looking at a pile wood, scratching our heads.

Kyle & Kyle: A most excellent team!

Although we purchased new dimensional lumber and sheathing, much of the house was built with recycled, reclaimed, and donated materials. The siding for instance, was an old wooden fence. The shingles were donated from a multitude of different sources, in a variety of colours. The creative application of which, lent itself to a camouflage type pattern.

Siding our house with an old wooden fence. Note the shingles.

Luckily, the fall rains held off until late in the season. We were able to get our roof finished just in the nick of time. It was time to move out of our tent and into our house! Although dry inside our new home, it was now well into October, and getting increasingly colder. In keeping with our 'hand-built' mantra, we opted to build ourselves a custom wood stove out of the clay, sand, and rocks on our land, rather than buying a metal stove from a store. This meant spending weeks walking back and forth to the clay pits and sand pits that were up to half a kilometer away. One bucket at a time, eventually we had a couple tons of each.
With careful planning, lots of blisters, and months of careful construction, by the end of November we finally got to fire up our rocket mass-heater.

All construction quickly ground to a halt once the deep freeze kicked in. What little free time we had in the midst of all the building, was used to gather a modest pile of dry hardwood for our heater. Our hand built heater is so efficient it requires a quarter the fuel of a traditional wood burning stove.
New years was a blast! We were joined by several friends, did some ice fishing, and we had enough snow to build two large igloos next to each other.

...And that's pretty much how we left things. We all made the 2.5 km walk out of the property on January 2nd, which also happened to be the coldest day on record in decades. With a windchill of about -45, we walked up Kawigamog lake, against the wind, while journalists were busy making up headlines like, "Parts of Canada are as Cold as Mars Today!" Yikes. My eyelids were frozen open.

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Looking Ahead

2013 - A Year In Review

Kyle & Angela Morflem

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