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Gulf Island Building.

1M views 8K replies 149 participants last post by  Katie Cabana 
#1 · (Edited)
Hi all:
Since the summer of 1997, I have been building a cabin and house on our 1/2 acre lot here. Before I dive into that part, I am going to show a few photos to set the stage a bit. We are remote here. No services of any kind, except that which we provide for ourselves. So don't expect to see any paved roads with big trucks delivering any materials.
We live at the head of a small bay, which is both a blessing and a curse.
When the tide goes out, we have to clamber over hundreds of yards of rocks to get to our boat. When it is in, I can float logs right up to my little railway to move them onto the log deck. Well, not any more, but more about that later.
This is the bay in front of us.
 

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#2 ·
I should mention that I have barely one year of computer use under my belt, so if something goes wrong there is no doubt it will be my fault. But I'll do my best.
Just happened to catch a rainbow over the bay, which I thought you might like to see.
 

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#2,351 ·
I should mention that I have barely one year of computer use under my belt . . . .
157 pages and 2,350 posts later . . . . . :thumbup:

cocobolo this is one of the coolest threads I've seen. Anywhere. I only got to page 5 before I had to fast forward to see if you were still going strong. Now that I know you are I'll go back to page 6 and try to get this thread read before supper. Haha. Not. I will get it read eventually though.


How do you like that Norwood? The LM2000 with the 23HP Briggs was the first mill I bought in '04 but pretty soon realized I need hydraulics so I got a WM LT40 Super.

I dated a gal in Vancouver in '99 thru 2000 and use to fly up there quite a bunch. We used to dive out of a dive shop on Nanaimo. What a beautiful area. We visited a few islands too. What a paradise you live in.
 
#3 ·
My neighbor is from Chagrin Falls, Ohio. He has had his property here for over 40 years. This a picture of the small deck in front of his cabin.
 

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#4 ·
At the other end of the spit of land we live on is a very small bay. The wind has been blowing from the south for awhile, and as you can see the bay is choked with logs.
 

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#12 ·
#5 ·
To give you an example of the sort of cabin you may find here, this one belongs to our friend Chris. He is about 100 yards away from us on one of the inside lots. They are typically about two acres in size.
 

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#6 ·
Just around the corner from the small bay above is Nayler Bay. It is surrounded by cabins of all sorts.
This one belongs to our friend Peter and his wife.
 

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#9 ·
I don't always look that grumpy! Honest!
A few years ago, a very good friend of ours - and indeed of almost everyone on the island here - passed away prematurely. His name was Ted Long, and in his honor the island folk asked that the pathway from where he used to moor his sailboat up to his cabin be named "Long Way".
It was my privilege to carve this sign in his memory.
 

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#10 ·
OK, last picture in the opening salvo. This is the original surveyor's cabin built sometime in the 1960's.
The charming sloping roof was not part of the original structure, but was built by a local "carpenter". Nice job.
Tomorrow I will get on and show you some shots of the actual cabin and house that I have been toiling at for lo these many years. Unfortunately, I did not get a digital camera until after I got the computer, so I can only show you photos dating to around a year back.
The preceding was to show you what is typically here. I must say that very recently some substantially better buildings have been going up. None of them are anywhere near finished yet though. The problem is mainly one of logistics.
How to get materials over here in conjunction with the tides and the weather.
That's a real story all by itself.
 

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#13 ·
Me again:
I busied myself with an archeological dig this morning, and unearthed the original model I made of the future house. I'm not exactly certain when I did this, maybe around '98 or so.
I hope it won't come as too much of a surprise to you all, but the house as built, isn't quite the same as the original model
This photo would be taken from the east - roughly.
 

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#14 ·
In the above pic, the small room off to the right is my wife's studio. That was the first part of the house that got put up. We had been using a storage locker over on Vancouver Island to keep a lot of our stuff in, and as soon as the studio was up, that became our new storage area. As much as I hate to admit it, the studio is still serving the same purpose!
OK, this pic is taken from what would be the south. You can see that highly technical piece of cardboard on the roof, well that represents the solar panels.
The round area in the middle on the ground was going to be a small pond - never happened. I'll be able to show you what happened there as we progress.
 

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#15 · (Edited)
Roughly from the west, the stairs going up in that nice curve were to wrap around a hot tub. It turned out that the outer part of the stairs would have encroached beyond our setback requirements. Not by much, just enough to annoy me. However, not to be deterred, I have shifted the tub location and altered the stairs to fit within the requirements. That is not done yet, but the material for the tub is all cut out and awaits assembly.
 

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#1,857 · (Edited)
Roughly from the west, the stairs going up in that nice curve were to wrap around a hot tub. It turned out that the outer part of the stairs would have encroached beyond our setback requirements. Not by much, just enough to annoy me. However, not to be deterred, I have shifted the tub location and altered the stairs to fit within the requirements. That is not done yet, but the material for the tub is all cut out and awaits assembly.

I would love to see the finish product.

I hope I get the order right here...but these are the alleged sunrise pics from the morning of July 21st. Sunrise here was at 5:32 a.m. that morning.

Pic 1, looking at what is supposed to be the sun, 17 minutes after sunrise.

Pic 2, looking over towards Ladysmith on Vancouver Island. You might be able to see some little orange dots...that is the sun reflecting off windows in some of the houses over there. About 8 - 10 miles away.

Pic 3, looking towards Vancouver, 23 minutes after sunrise, the far distant mountains are just behind North and West Vancouver. That would be about 35 miles from here.

Pic 4, here I climbed up on to the roof of the house and once again tried to find the sun - an hour and 37 minutes past sunrise.

Last one, two hours after sunrise and you can now see the sun peeking between the trees...it was another hour until the sun finally cleared the trees.

The trouble is that the fir trees are around 100 feet tall, and they sit up on the ridges on the island, so it takes awhile for the sun to get that high.

That looks like a beautiful place. Thanks for sharing.

:thumbup:
 
#16 ·
Last model pic from the north.
The plywood base does not accurately represent the ground here, which slopes very substantially. When you see the actual photos of the house as built, the changes will be obvious. The basic plan was followed, with alterations made as we went along to fit either the terrain or the budget! Ever notice how that always seems to get in the way?
This side of the house faces the bay shown at the top of the thread. The ground falls away a lot, and there is a series of decks which step down on the bank there, as you will see later.
 

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#17 ·
Pokerdonkey:
I wish you well with your project. Are you far off the coast, or reasonably close? We aren't too far from Vancouver Island, about 4 miles by boat. From there it is a 1/2 hour drive, mostly on a fast highway, to get to our main building material suppliers.
The actual transport of materials is about the biggest headache here. It may sound crazy, but you literally spend as much time moving materials as you do building. You cannot just call up your local friendly trucker and have him drop the load off later this afternoon.
We have some pretty big tides here, so it is necessary to work with both the tides and the weather condition.
We found out early on that it was a good idea to have something to move bulk materials in. So I picked up an old Reinell powerboat, 24 footer, and gutted it.
It has paid for itself several times over. It can be towed with anything. It will carry around 5,000 pounds of freight.
One thing I should mention quickly while I am thinking about it, only use galvanized nails - or stainless if you are terminally wealthy - for everything. Even inside. An ordinary steel nail will rust surprisingly quickly.
And where you are, the rusting takes place at least twice as fast!
If you have any oddball questions about this insane offshore building, please ask. I likely have run into the same problems you will, and may have an answer.
 
#23 · (Edited)
Pokerdonkey:
I wish you well with your project. Are you far off the coast, or reasonably close? We aren't too far from Vancouver Island, about 4 miles by boat. From there it is a 1/2 hour drive, mostly on a fast highway, to get to our main building material suppliers.
The actual transport of materials is about the biggest headache here. It may sound crazy, but you literally spend as much time moving materials as you do building. You cannot just call up your local friendly trucker and have him drop the load off later this afternoon.
We have some pretty big tides here, so it is necessary to work with both the tides and the weather condition.
We found out early on that it was a good idea to have something to move bulk materials in. So I picked up an old Reinell powerboat, 24 footer, and gutted it.
It has paid for itself several times over. It can be towed with anything. It will carry around 5,000 pounds of freight.
One thing I should mention quickly while I am thinking about it, only use galvanized nails - or stainless if you are terminally wealthy - for everything. Even inside. An ordinary steel nail will rust surprisingly quickly.
And where you are, the rusting takes place at least twice as fast!
If you have any oddball questions about this insane offshore building, please ask. I likely have run into the same problems you will, and may have an answer.
Your place looks absolutely gorgeous.

We're relatively close in; actually, we're on an interior barrier island off the coast of the FL peninsula between it and the gulf of Mexico. From our location to the public launch it's less than 15 minutes, even factoring for the no-wake zones for the manatees. I actually have a power pole on the site running from the mainland (I think it's an old Army Corps pole from years ago) and it is hot, but the rest of the island doesn't have power. Lucky me.

The build site itself is located off a bay that is only navigable by shallow draft vessels- airboat or skiff only at low tide with a bit more room at high tide.

I'm going to be filling in some of the front portion of the lot to make a beachhead; we needed a towable, waterborne "dumptruck" type vehicle to haul stones and fill but with a skimpy enough draft to traverse shallows- here are some concept drawings (in no way accurate)




An older post I made about it on another forum

Basically, you load up the payload deck with the materials (stone, sand, soil, loose reclamation vegetation, etc).
If you want to dump the payload into the water (as would be needed for shoreline and aquatic renourishing), you simply open the valves on the ballast tubes. The frontal weight of the water and the miracle of gravity causes the deck to pivot forward, thus dumping the payload wherever you aim it. When you want to return the deck to it's upright position, you simply pump the water out of the ballast tubes and viola- they're now acting as buoyant floats!
Of course, if you were hauling building materials, supplies, etc, you wouldn't want to dump those into the water. In that case, the platform would simply act as a tow skiff capable of traversing the shallows. Its main purpose, though, is to be a shallow water cargo dumper. It would be way easy to motorize too, although I'm not going to motorize mine when I build it. Version 1.0 is going to be a tow vessel only. I'm just going to rig it with some kind of a rudder for steering, some trim plates to reduce water speed and an anchor.
(For you engineer types out there- the above pics are simply concept renderings. Obviously, things like the interplay between the rigid aluminum frame and the front float are going to be fully integrated for increased structural integrity, the draft depth of the floats isn't to scale in the pics above, etc)
I've done some math and the design has changed a bit, but the basic concept is the same. I anticipate welding will start this summer.

I love love love the structural model you made... It's totally inspired me to make a scale model of our own place according to the plans. Great idea. As the hammers start flying on ours, I'll definitely have some questions for ya. Us island builder types aren't exactly a dime a dozen and the unique problems we face aren't understood by most...
 
#18 ·
Bondo:
You must have been reading my mail.
In order to get logs out of the ocean here, it was necessary to devise a way to do it. So I built a log lift from some recycled steel tubing. It is 8' long, and the same width as the short railway I built. It has a 1 ton chain hoist at each end, which carries a homemade grapple. On a high tide, a log is floated into the log chute, the chain fall with grapple attached is dropped over the log, and the hoist raised - hopefully with the log in its' grasp.
This is the log lift.
 

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#20 ·
At the other end of the railway is the sawmill. One of the very first mills made by Norwood, before they changed their name. It has done yeoman service. When I bought it, the previous owner had all but destroyed it. So $2,500 worth of parts later it was almost good as new. I guess I have cut maybe a quarter million board feet on it.
When I was out shopping for a mill, one of the main criteria was how much did the heaviest single piece of the mill weigh. I had to be able to pick it up and carry it from the boat to where it would be used. I wanted a Woodmizer, but that weight figure was over 300 lbs. The norwood I think was around 100 lbs. for the heaviest part. Everything else broke down nicely. There are now two other Norwood mills on the island as a result of me having this one here, new ones, of course.
 

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#21 ·
Not to be outdone, my wife ventured into the world of DIY construction.
This is her version of "Toad Hall" in the bottom of an old hollow arbutus tree.
 

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#22 · (Edited)
Remember when I said there are no services here? I meant it. This island brings a whole new meaning to the term DIY.
The one thing that the original developer did put in back in the '60's, was a series of water wells. Some are OK, others not so much.
There is a well about 200 yards away from us which we did use for several years.
Many years ago, I understand in 1975, there was a huge storm here. Just behind the well was a massive Western Red Cedar tree. It got blown over in the storm and broke the well casing some 20' down. Ever since then, the well has been silting in. As a result of this the well depth has declined from just over 120' to about 90'. Plus, there is an ever present very fine pink colored silt in the water. We noticed that our water filters were not lasting at all.
All this prompted me to build twin water tanks to collect rainwater. Best thing I ever did!
The tanks look just like a small building, which in reality it is. 10' by 20' with a dividing wall in the centre. The walls are built up of 2 x 4's, cut on the mill. We have very heavy duty potable liners in each side.
The two tank idea was just in case something happened to one side, either contamination or a leak. That way, there was still a reasonable chance of having a good water supply. Each side holds 3,000 imperial gallons, or about 3,600 US gallons.
I am in the process of installing a separate 1,500 gallon tank for the exclusive use of a fire pump.
 

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#24 ·
When we originally came here in '96, the land was totally undeveloped.
There were several large Douglas firs, all just over 200 years old. They were about 32" in diameter at chest height. I thought this would be a great source of lumber, since we were going to have to clear some of the lot for building.
Unfortunately, almost all the firs on the island, particularly the big ones, are suffering from root rot. And these were no exception.
Not being able to use them for structural purposes, I chainsawed off a big chunk from one of them, and my wife and I collaborated on this sign in front of our house. She is the artist, I just do the wood carving.
 

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#25 ·
Pokerdonkey:
I don't know if this might assist in any way, but up here they have massive great self-dumping log barges. I believe they are flat bottomed, and tip over to one side to discharge the load. What you are making looks like a much more complicated version.
We were over in Ladysmith harbor several years ago, and one of the barges was trying to dump the load, but got stuck half way through the process. The logs just didn't want to fall into the water. It took them a couple of days with several tug boats pulling in opposite directions to get the logs off. It may be easier to make a smaller version of this sort of thing. I imagine if you were to go on the web you could get information about this.
And I'm not certain about this, but I seem to recall another type of self dumping barge which opened up in the middle on two pivots. I believe this type was used for rocks and the like, much as you will do.
When the tunnel was built here under the Annacis slough about 50 years ago, they used this sort of barge to cover the underwater sections of roadway. If you don't put lots of weight on the tunnel sections, they actually want to float!
The old tugboat used for the job was named the "Fearless". Built in 1898 in New Westminster. It very nearly got burned up in the great fire which destroyed a huge part of the waterfront then.
How do I know all this? I bought the tug from the fellow who dumped all the rock on the tunnel. It had no engine by then, and I converted it to a liveaboard.
 
#26 ·
Speaking of the model, that is a great way to see what works and what doesn't. I think I used about 1/2" to the foot. Big enough to see what things look like, not too big that it gets unwieldly. Actually, I am very surprised it has survived this long. When I first made it, we took it outside and set it on the ground, facing the way it would be when built. I took several pictures - the old film type - as the sun went round during the day. This way, I could check in advance whether or not I had the roof overhangs correctly calculated.
As it turned out, the passive solar ideas work beautifully. The sun pours in during the wintertime, well, when there is any sun that is, and is kept out in the summer when it is much higher.
 
#27 ·
When we first came here, I had to throw up our small cabin (18' x 24') as quickly as possible. Before we could do that we had to do some land clearing, as this was virgin forest. Worst of all there was a terrific amount of tough vines everywhere. Strong enough to trip you over if you got your foot under one.
We got the roof on the cabin in a month.
In the picture you can see the greenhouse which was added a short time later, and the generator shed on the right.
 

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