Cabin Feasibility

She Who Puts Up With Me and I have long had a dream of building a cabin on our property at Bogus Lake. We’d like a place where we can comfortably vacation for a week or two at a time and enjoy the natural beauty of the area. But our dreams have differed a little, in that She is perfectly happy spending a week in a tent, but I want (at a minimum) hot showers and toilets that flush.

And that’s where things stood for about the first quarter-century of our relationship. The problem is that hot showers and flushing toilets require power, and power is difficult and expensive in the middle of the north woods. We could either extend the power line almost a mile through the national forest and across the neighbor’s property, or we could use a generator with all the attendant noise pollution and hassles with fuel management.

A couple years ago we decided to take another look. With the recent rapid decline in the cost of both solar panels and battery banks, we hired a Duluth architect, Carly Coulson, to do a feasibility study of an off-grid cabin on our property. Carly specializes in sustainable architecture, and in particular a technique called Passivhaus to design buildings which effectively heat and cool themselves using careful management of windows, shading, and ventilation. For an off-grid solar-powered cabin in Northern Minnesota, reducing or eliminating the need for active heating in the winter would be key to a cost-effective design.

Shifting Mission

In January we got the results of the feasibility study: It is, in fact, possible to build a modern cabin in the woods. Solar panels and batteries can do the job for a lot less money than bringing in a power line (to say nothing of the damage of clearing a right-of-way through the forest), and with interest rates at record lows these days the project will be a lot more affordable than we expected.

Concept design of a possible cabin. This is probably not what our future cabin will look like, but an analysis of this design showed that it is possible to power and heat a year-round cabin on our site using nothing but the sun.

After getting the report we made the decision to move on to the next stage, actually designing a cabin and beginning some preparatory work.

Then COVID hit, and we both got moved to indefinite work-from-home. This made us rethink the mission of our Cabin Up North a little. Now that we’ve proven that work-from-home can work, She and I both expect that when the pandemic is over work-from-home will be much more acceptable as a general working option. And if you can work from home, why not work from your cabin in the woods?

Of course this will require a solid Internet connection, and Internet is one of the harder things to bring to our property. We are generally out of range of mobile phone service, and satellite Internet is crazy expensive. Our best option may be to pull a fiber in from about a mile away; that’s the same distance as the nearest power line, but burying a fiber optic cable is much cheaper and less disruptive to the environment than a power line.

We’ve also been severely missing our friends this past year, and that’s been making us think that we will probably want to have a lot more company in our cabin than we were originally thinking. That means houseguests, which means bedrooms and bathrooms. Now that our children are moving out and (we hope) starting families of their own, we also want to be able to accommodate future family gatherings. This is starting to look less like a “cabin” and more like a family-size modern home that happens to be in the middle of the woods.

Our goal is to build this cabin sometime around 2023, a year chosen because that’s when the last of our kids should (we hope) be done with college. Right now we are in the early design stage, helping us define the mission so she can give us some options to help balance cost with things we might want to have. We’re also doing some preliminary site work: this fall we extended the road to the future cabin site and demolished a couple of old structures which were slowly collapsing.

That still sounds like a long time in the future. But given how long we’ve been thinking about this, it’s starting to feel very real.