New Beginnings

Hello,

This blog is “About our log cabin rental, who we are, how we got here, what we’re up to, and what we are planning.”

My name is Russell and my wife’s name is Kelli. We own and built (along with the help of some friends and family) the log cabin which is the main topic of discussion in this blog.  We’ve been renting this cabin as a nightly getaway since the early 2000’s. We retired in 2021 from being in the garbage business of 21 years and are now focusing our attention on continuing to rent out the cabin since it is now our primary source of income.

This blog isn’t going to be only about the cabin, as we intend to do other “wood working” related endeavors to help shore up our financial condition during our “retirement” years. We hope to keep you informed of these endeavors through this blog as well as helping you to get to know us and what we are about because we put a lot of “ourselves” into everything we do. 

I (Russell) started a homesteading blog back in 2005 which is linked here https://logcabinhomestead.blogspot.com/ but I didn’t really have a good sense of direction of what to do with it and how it could benefit us.  I like to write and did quarterly newsletters all the years we were in the garbage business. We got tons of positive feedback with the newsletter so hope to continue to hone my writing skills here with this blog and hopefully create a connection with all our past, present and future cabin guests.

We have a lot of timber on our 200 acres and have dreamed for years of harvesting some of it and making cool and unusual things out of it. We have a little chainsaw milling attachment for my chainsaw and have just recently since retiring been using it to make boards out of our trees for useful projects. I get a pretty big thrill out of saw milling and intend to get into that in a much bigger way in the future.  I am currently shopping for a band saw mill or trying to decide if I want to make my own as most of the manufactured ones are a tad out of our price range.  We will see what we actually end up doing.

Building more cabins from our own trees is also something we are aiming for but that is going to be a substantial financial investment so until then we hope to get established making smaller wood projects in the immediate future to help fund some of these bigger goals.

We’ve considered crowd funding for the future cabins but I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’ve often thought that if we make some definite plans with good drawings and design of a new cabin we could do a crowd funding promotion of “prepaying a stay” to anyone who might want to help us fund the project and eventually be the first to stay in a cool new place. It took us almost 3 years to build our current cabin, but hopefully now that we don’t have our time taken up collecting trash it would be a shorter turn around. But like I said I don’t know how I feel about “crowd funding”.

Kelli and I are not really “business” people as I liked to remind all our previous garbage customers. Though we have been self-employed for decades we just considered ourselves as “neighbors helping neighbors” and we have the same kind of mind set regarding the cabin rental. We have the gift of hospitality and really enjoy sharing what we created with other people. It’s a great feeling when we hear all the reports of what a nice time people had staying here. For many it’s more than a “great time” from what they say it seems to go “soul deep” and people get a much needed break from their regular hectic lives. When people find the time to reflect and perhaps grow closer to God through their stay here we know we are on the right path following Gods plan for our lives.

Until Next Time