I didn’t expect to have a cabin update so soon after telling you that we weren’t going to be able to do much work on the cabin this year, but here we are!

It’s been almost eight months since I’ve updated you on our progress with the cabin. So, I thought I’d show you what we got done this spring.

Since February, we’ve been focused on outdoor projects.

If you’ve been following our cabin progress, you might recall that I’ve been collecting free doors for a secret project (to be revealed at a later date). We’ve rescued quite a few doors from curb piles, but this project is going to take a lot of doors, so I also asked friends and family to keep an eye out for us. That paid off last week. My sister-in-law called to say her friends had some doors they wanted to get rid of. So, I called them up, and we went over to pick them up. That trip netted three doors. Awesome!

We just got back from a couple days at our cabin, and I’m excited to report that we finally have an herb garden! That had been on my to-do list for way too long. My friend, Jo, finally got the ball rolling. On our first night up there, she gave me a bunch of herbs for my birthday. Mostly stuff that she had dug out of her own garden, with a couple store-bought plants sprinkled in. My kind of gift.

So, today we set out to get everything planted. I knew I wanted to do a raised bed, but we didn’t have any lumber on hand to build one. We considered driving to town for some boards, but that would have taken over an hour round trip, so we decided to get creative with what we had instead, and soon my husband returned with a cast iron bed and a plan.

A terrific paint sale triggered another round of work at the cabin. Lowes had their half-pint paint samples on sale for $.99 each (with no limit) a few weeks back, and it didn’t take a frugal girl like me long to figure out that if I got four half-pints, I’d have a quart of paint for $3.96, rather than the $30 something that they sell their quarts for. So, I headed over, and picked up enough paint to redo my latest round of curb finds and yard sale scores.

I bought this vintage folding camp chair at a yard sale a year or so back (I think I paid all of $1 for it). It wasn’t ripped at the time, but it tore shortly after we started using it. I guess it had dry-rotted.

Since the frame was still in good shape, I decided to make a new seat for it.

It’s been a while since I’ve given you an update on our cabin, so let me take you through what we’ve done this winter.

Remember this vintage kitchen cabinet that we rescued from a curb pile?

We started working on our weekend homestead just over a year ago, so I thought it would be fun to take a look at at what we’ve gotten done, as well as what we hope to accomplish next.

Remember this hideous before picture? Yeah, you might say the cabin was a bit of a fixer-upper. There wasn’t a back wall; some of the roofing tin had been stolen; and all of the windows had been busted out. But this cabin had one major selling point: it was free. Yep, it was in such bad shape, it was thrown in with the purchase of the land. That was enough to get us to take a closer look at the cabin, and, it turns out, it was actually really well built. So, we came up with a plan to fix it up, and we got to work.