What I did On my Summer Vacation (and Spring and Fall)

As some of our friends may know, Bridget and I purchased about 2.5 acres on the Miramichi river several years ago from our good friends, the Swazeys. From the air, the plot looked something like this prior to any construction (don't forget you can click on a pic for the larger version):

We planned on building our camp about the same time as that photo was taken, when we were all younger and stronger, but things like a pandemic and a closed border kind of got in the way. That's the bad news; the good news is that we completely changed the camp's floor plan and "look". We really have something we both like now:

I went up to to Boiestown in late March for a few days...a snowy few days...just to check on things and take care of a little business:

Things were fine in the trailer - except for the mice. I really don't like mice:

I had to run back to Vermont to finish this redwood rod rack for a very nice fellow before we could get down to business up in NB building the camp:

Back up for the duration in late April. Brodie happily came along this time, and surveyed his domain:

Here's the river on April 24, 2023 (it never froze in front of our place in the winter of 22-23):

I forgot to take pics of the process, but Vin used his Kubota to move the trailer over to the side of the building site so work could commence. Where the trailer once stood:

Did I mention that it was Spring salmon season? Yeah, no, I didn't go. And this is as close as you'll get to seeing a pic of an Atlantic salmon in this blog post, lol.

Brodie developed, as you will see throughout this post, an affinity for mud puddles. And as my friend Brian Cuming said, it wasn't hard to get a pic of a wet dog in 2023!

First step in all this was laying out the perimeter lines of the camp. We wanted it oriented just right so it would sit square to the river. We want to enjoy the view from that forty foot porch!

A local equipment operator has a gravel pit right in his back yard, less than a mile from our site, so buying and leveling the gravel to smooth the site was pretty economical. This is very early May.

That's the good news. The bad news is I had to rake all those big rocks out by hand. And that pad was about 50'x60'. Brodie thought it was funny.

He made a rather dour supervisor however:

The river in front of us on May 5:

The site for our camp was quarried for its excellent gravel many years ago for the nearby rail bed. It was replaced over the years by every kind of fill you can imagine: tree stumps, boulders, railroad ties - you name it, its likely in there. What that meant was we couldn't build on a pad, and we'd have to dig to China if we wanted a traditional concrete wall foundation. It also meant we had to buy a little more land from the Swazey's where there was good gravel for a septic system. We put that in back in 2019:

We put the well and temporary power in that year as well:

A little sidebar to all this concerning bureaucracy: I just realized I never did a blog post about building a shed to house my tools while we built the camp. Well, long story as short as I'm able, I wanted to do it by the book, and get a permit to build it. Made an appointment to get it approved by the building inspection people...had all my ducks in a a row...site plan, shed plans, deed to the land, you name it. Well, the young fellow sat at his computer and finally declared, "that's an accessory building." I said fine, whatever you want to call it, just need the permit. He replied, "You don't understand. It is an accessory building, so it has to have a main building in place that it can be an accessory to, so we can't give you a permit to build it." Normally, I keep my rather hot temper in check, but I went blind with that response, threw all the paperwork at him and stormed out. Fortunately, the mayor of the Rural Community of Upper Miramichi (official title) is a man of good common sense. He said, "Just build it." So I did. Would that the story of bureaucracy ends there...but it does not. When we went to get a permit for the temporary power, the electrical superpowers said, "Nope, you'll just put it up and live in your shed." Seriously, that's what they said. I explained about how many New Brunswick boards of directors I was on, how many thousands of dollars I have helped raise for museums and conservatin in the area, and did they seriously think we would live in a 12x16 shed. It taxed their brains mightily to come to the conclusion that we likely would not live in the shed and in fact probably would use it to store tools, so they granted the permit. I'm really happy to report that the folks governing the Upper Miramichi community have got their heads screwed right on straight, permit-wise. They put in place their own building inspection unit, hired a good and competent building inspector and made the whole process of getting a building permit in that community virtually painless. But not the electrical guys, oh no sir. We had the whole camp dried in and wanted to get rid of the aging temporary service and 100 foot extension cords. We wanted to put the permanent service into the camp....oh no..."if we let you hire a licensed electrician to do that, then next year you'll just wire the whole place yourself, and we can't have that, now can we?" Man, I hate bureaucrats. Enough whining. To circumvent the problems with the fill on the site, we went with helical piers (aka screw piles). They use a mini-excavator with a screw thingy attached to drill steel pipes (oversimplification right there) down to a point where a certain resistance pressure attained. Then everything is leveled with screw-on "saddles".

I used my decades-old transit with an honest-to-goodness leveling bubble (no lasers for GT!) to get all the saddles at the same height:

The problem at this point was how to get those 800 pound, 40 foot long beams up on to the saddles. Visions of cranes and tractors and chains and pulleys danced in my head. Or the brother of the guy that owns the screw pile company could just stop by and lift them into place by himself. Which he did. OMG, he is a big man.

Our first big lumber package arrived May 10. Wanna see what seventeen thousand dollars worth of lumber looks like?

May 18: the river is calming down, and fiddleheads are popping up:

and its time to start setting floor joists!

Two days later (5/20) things are starting to move along. You have to remember I'm working alone and I'm no speed demon.

May 21, the cherries and apples are blooming beautifully, and Brodie is in a mud puddle.

I have no earthly idea why I took a selfie that day, but I did. Perhaps some sort of misguided self-affirmation. Dunno. But everyone should take one ONCE in their lifetime, I suppose.

Brodie figured all was right with the world that day (it wasn't raining) and the river was looking good.

Occasionally I had the good fortune to be supervised by my close friend of 25 years, Vin, who turned 90 in July.

Now in mid-December, I miss those late May evenings by the fire...lots of daylight left at 7pm!

Floor joists just about done. What you can barely see, and I didn't have the presence of mind to try and take a photo of in process, is all the sheets of 4'x8'x7/16" OSB nailed up underneath all those joists. That was an excruciating process, I'll tell you, but I got it done. Laying on your back nailing that stuff up at 73 years of age is not, as we used to say on the racing team, the hot set-up.

A load o' insulation:

I did that to keep the mice out of the R-40 floor insulation that is required by code up there for a plan like ours:

That last photo was taken on May 31. This was the temperature that day. For once it wasn't raining. We baked instead:

Brodie said, "let me into that air conditioned trailer!!"

I took a break from working a couple days later and did the auction for the Miramichi Salmon Association's "IceBreaker" fundraising dinner. It was a great time with an enthusiastic, fun crowd to work with:

Early June and all that rain is really making things lush and green!

Rain, rain, go away (6/6):

I'm surprised algae didn't start growing on Brodie (like a 3-toed sloth) he was so constantly soaking wet (which he could care less about):

Six grand worth of trusses arrived first week of June. They arrived WAY ahead of schedule (hard to put trusses up on walls that don't exist yet). They just had to sit around in the rain for quite awhile.

Lush weeds, wet dog, smokey campfires. Story of the summer.

Used about a mile of 6mil poly trying to protect the underlayment and insulation from the rain. Only mildly successful.

Mid-June and Vin and I got the first section of wall up. It's the rough opening for a 12-foot slider that'll go in there:

It'll be a pretty cool view from inside looking out through all that glass:

Mostly working alone, I find that I can lift twelve or sixteen foot wall sections by myself. Reguires an extra 2x6 stud here and there but that's what it takes. No biggie.

Sorta dry Supervisor:

And took a day off mid-June to do an auction for the Woodmen's Museum. Another jovial group!

With our walls all up, I wanted to get started on our deck with this load of lumber (BTW, Canadian pressure treated lumber is WAY better than any I've ever purchased in the states!)

I like the look of "picture framed" deck corners, so that's what I always make:

Eventually, the deck will be screened in. Bridget had the excellent idea of laying screen on the joists before putting deck boards down. Perfect. I would likely have just laid in the mud and tried to staple it up from underneath.

A hopeless case:

We hired out the entire roof system: trusses, sheathing and metal. The group we hired did a fine, if not necessarily on time, job.

I really enjoyed making the mortises on the porch posts that carry the beam across the front of the porch roof. Six by six white cedar from a local sawmill down river about 20 miles.

Siding (board and batten) and trim are hemlock. Comes from a mill an hour away. Should have taken a pic with the delivery man; 80 years old and the company founder! However, it was raining cats and dogs, so we skipped the photo op.

Some of it was wonderfully slow grown stuff, which makes for a particularly strong, straight board. Those annual rings are 1/16" at best.

The trim is thick stock (1 3/4") so that it stands proud of the board and batten siding. But I didn't want to nail the siding just into the 7/16" OSB sheathing, so I wrapped the entire camp, every 16" vertically, with 1"x4" spruce to give me something to nail the siding into. Since we had the space between the strapping, I filled it with one inch foam board insulation. Gives us an extra R5 in insulation.

BTW, the windows and that twelve foot slider are Anderson 400 series units. We brought them up from the states. Even with the tariff at the border, we saved about 14K over buying them up there. Speaking of the twelve foot slider, that was fun project, for the most part. First you make sure you don't have any helpers (I'm serious) so that you can take your time and read the instructions and get the frame put together and installed (comes in pieces) - make sure to do it on a cold, snowy day with no heat:

Then find a strong local kid that will take 20 bucks an hour to do the heavy lifting (putting the doors in place...heavy suckers):

Last but not least to get things buttoned up for the winter is the pine porch ceiling (note to self - buy enough lumber to finish the job):

All told, looking pretty good.

The night before heading home to Vermont. They were good seasons.

Cheers, Gary