Driving on our half-mile cow trail of a driveway, we started developing our land as a gathering place on a lake in Erskine, Minn. Our first building was called Kamp Kitchen. It started as an outdoor screened area to cook and to keep the bugs off. It came together little by little from recycled materials, which began arriving after we told friends and relatives we wanted to build an outdoor cooking area.
My cousin contributed five white, vinyl-clad patio doors. My father-in-law and I took siding off his farm's ice house and chicken coop.
The steel on the roof is sheeting from my husband Jack's pole barn-building business. The porch supports for the roof are tree trunks of iron wood from the surrounding woodland.
My husband also is a carpenter, and had leftover cedar boards for interior walls. More sheeting surrounds Grandma's wood stove for cooking.
We received tin kitchen cabinets. My cousin wanted them out of her basement laundry room. The upper cupboards are made of cedar, more material from a previous project.
With some creativity and resourcefulness, we spent $1,000 for the foundation and floor boards. All other materials and furnishings are recycled or repurposed in what now is called The Cabin.
Grandma's old ice box now is a storage cabinet — and a conversation piece.
Jack moved a 100-year-old trunk from a barn that was in ruin, and it now sits on the porch holding birch bark and kindling to start the cook stove. There also are deer horns from past hunts and a horse harness used on the land in the 1940s and '50s.
