Living up in the mountains, we always find ways to adapt, take water for instance. When we first moved to our cabin the only water was from one faucet outside. We traced the source and discovered that the earlier folks had tapped into a spring a 1/2 mile up the hill. Later we built a dam up there, widened all the water lines, and plumbed it into the house. This worked great for many years, until the drought started. If I said it didn’t turn out to be a nightmare, I’d be lying. We found ourselves always having to find ways to keep our water supply efficient and working. It definitely took the joy out of living in the mountains; something that we had dreamed about for many years. If you look for any log cabins for sale now, I’m positive that you won’t have to go to this amount of trouble just to get water. Have you seen them? Some of them are beautiful, and they probably portray the ideal cabin living experience; something that we longed to have. But we made it work as best we could, even during the drought. If you’re worried about space, you don’t need to! The cabins are pretty big but if you have friends and relatives visiting regularly, you can always build a prefab cabin for them to stay in. For those wondering ‘what is a prefab cabin?” it’s basically a separate cabin that can be used for whatever you like. We haven’t built one yet but it’s definitely something that we’re considering.
Scrimping and saving we bought water storage tanks one every year. With storing water comes problems, which required adding chlorine. We didn’t want to do that, we wanted to keep the water fresh, So Bill devised a system where water would flow from one tank to the next constantly keeping it fresh. Once the water flows out of the last tank we designed a little water fall and a man-made creek for the extra water to flow down hill and back to the creek below in the canyon. Later we added a pond for fire protection. Still allowing extra water to flow back into the creek below, it’s a contributor to the upper Butte Creek.
I added my touches, plants, trees, bridges, and created this beautiful little creek flowing through our yard. Such a pleasure to see in the mornings that I had to share!
Oh you may be wondering what the buildings are, on the left is our herb processing and drying room for our body care products, between buildings is our access to the herb garden. The building before me is our garage that we built too with a game/sewing/crafts/train layout room upstairs and a nice viewing deck and below is where we keep all our garden tools, etc. All made with mostly recycled materials. After a while, I know that the garage may waste away or become more of a hindrance than a help, we are keeping an eye on it of course, and are looking at affordable sheds in the meantime, so we can make sure that there isn’t a disruption to our business. I’d quite like to get a big shed installed in the garden. The garage we have at the minute is packed full to the brim so a shed with more space would be fantastic. I’ve seen some amazing sheds on a website similar to DuraStor Structures but I haven’t bought one yet. As I said, we’re keeping our eyes peeled!
Not too bad for just two people, huh? ~Darcy Stoddard
