Our Corner of the Woods: How It All Began
Welcome to Guten Cabin! As you might have gathered, we are big fans of Leavenworth and log cabins. The aim of this blog will be to cover any and everything related to those two subjects. So, to start out, here is the backstory of how we found and came to own Guten Cabin.
Paul Chalk Log Cabin Painting
The dream of a log cabin for me goes back to a snowy mountain cabin painting that hung in the house I grew up in. Generally speaking, I wasn’t an admirer of wall art (especially my parents’), but I could imagine myself snug inside that cabin in the quiet of winter.
From time to time, my dad would talk of finding a mountain cabin for the family. When I was in college, my parents purchased acreage above Cle Elum Lake in Roslyn, Washington. There were distant plans discussed to build a vacation home but eventually that dream faded. The ocean was calling and they sold the Roslyn property and later bought a vacation cottage in Seaview, Washington.
Seaview is wonderful and that cottage, Captain’s Haven, is still in the family. We love spending time there. (Coincidently, Captain’s Haven is named after a different painting that hung in my childhood home.) For me, however, the mountain cabin was still the ultimate getaway.
In December 2005, I rented a cabin I found on Craigslist and surprised my then-girlfriend Adrianne with a weekend away (this was before sites such as HomeAway, VRBO and Airbnb were commonplace). It was a small cabin with one bedroom. The only source of heat was a wood-burning stove. The kitchen was under remodel and had very limited usability. While it wouldn’t work great for our family today, for just us for a two-night stay it was perfect. We went for a sleigh ride and dinner at Mountain Springs Lodge where I proposed and she said yes.
A few years later, I came across a group call the Log Home Builders Association. They teach a weekend course that provides everything you need to know to build a log cabin of your own. I figured this was the path to cabin life. I enrolled and spent two days in Gold Bar, Washington learning the advantages of butt-and-pass style cabins, tools such as log dogs and spuds, how to acquire free logs, and how to put those logs together to build a cabin of you own. It was a great course and there are lots of students that go on to build really great, sturdy cabins.
I came back inspired but with a growing family and a demanding business, time was a scarcity. Before kids, it was easy to envision kiddos picnicking and playing in the woods while I constructed our dream cabin. Sometime after our second son arrived I realized that idea was nuts and not going to happen any time soon. I still plan to put my coursework with the LHBA to use but instead of building a cabin, I’d like to construct a log-built outbuilding that can be used as a playhouse, shop, or snow-mobile storage.
With our busy life and young family, I decided instead of building; buying was the way to go and the search began. An issue of Sunset magazine had an article called Cabin Fever where writer Leigh Newman visits Dick Proenneke’s log cabin in remote Alaska and lives as he did for a few days: simple, quiet, and connected with nature. As you can imagine, I was a fan of Dick Proenneke and his documentary Alone In The Wilderness. Leigh’s article re-sparked my interest at just the right time.
Craigslist came through again and I found the listing for a log cabin a half hour outside of Leavenworth and in our price range! It listed on a Thursday. I saw the listing a day after on Friday evening. Saturday morning I called the listing agent, Steve Craig of Lake Wenatchee Properties, and he said two offers were already expected. I was bummed. A month or so later, it listed again. I spoke to Steve and found out the first offer got deterred by the amount of work needed and the back-up offer found a different property. That Saturday, we packed the kids, dog, and my wife (pregnant with our third child) into the car with our pre-approval letter in hand. A few weeks later, the cabin was ours.
We were not partial to the original name, Camp Leavenwerk. It had a little too much of a ‘work camp’ vibe. Our then-six-year-old son’s name ideas were Dead Wolf Cabin and Stupid Cabin (after he slipped on an ice patch). Neither of these seemed inviting. Our first guests to join us after the big remodel was the Morris family. Dan is among my closest friends and an excellent namer of things. He came up with Guten Cabin and it fit. It’s truly a good cabin.
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Next week, I am excited to go up with my father-in-law, Doug of Doug Bennett Landscaping, to repair and re-grade the driveway. I should have plenty of project pictures and updates to share.
*Guten Cabin Sketch was provided by artist, friend and guest Andrew Lund.
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