After having spent so much time doing all the framework sort of stuff, I wanted to get some of the interior looking a little more inviting, so I tasked my friend Allan to find some pallets for me to tear apart to use as interior wall covering. He came through in a big way with several great pallets to use. I started with the entry right next to the door, using pallet boards cut to 48" to match the studs, hooks from our Heckman Suite spare room (Becky kept hitting her head on them coming out of the playroom under the stairs and suggest I take them out), and Ollie's Bear Teeth Cabin rules sheet.
On the exterior, we added some Grandma-found metal signs, as well as a bell I had for a while and a cage light from Dan Faires' appearance at the Home & Garden Show years ago. The light isn't actually plugged into anything, since there's no power out here yet. I look forward to doing some sort of solar power system in the future.
After that, I continued to add pallet boards to the interior wall. I also had 4 canvas prints made, each 24" x 24", that depict places we've been on vacation as a family - Smoky Mountains, Mackinac Island, Brockway Mountain and Eagle River Falls both in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I also plan to do shelves in that last 24" section above the bed.
I wanted to finally make the lookout safe for the kiddos next, but since I didn't have the right materials to just cobble it together like I have for most of this, I bought new. I went to Home Depot and bought a treated 4x4 post, a treated 2x4 and some decking boards. I jigsawed out holes in the deck for the posts and 2x4's to slide through and screwed them to the deck frame. The three 2x4s are straddling the center support, so the outsides are 5.5" longer than the center 2x4, which creates kind of a sleeve to go over the support below it.
I then added some pallet supports to the side of the cabin to attach the deck rails to, and then mitered the deck boards and secured them to the posts. whatever was going to go in those open holes was a mystery. Then I remembered that I'd taken my boss's weight machine at some point, scrapped the metal but kept the cabling and brackets. Seemed like I could use that along with some eye hole screws to create a cable rail. I was very right. I drilled holes in the center post, added eye hole screws to the outside posts, and strung the cable through. Here it is in progress, I still haven't actually completed it.
Now, in this picture you see a door - that's because when I realized I had the cabling, I realized I ALSO had all the plastic pulleys and brackets, as well as an old barn door railing that I got from a friend of mine. The railing was... you guessed it, the exact width of the cabin - 6'. That sort of thing seems to happen a lot to me, and it doesn't help my hoarding tendencies. The pulley wheels also fit exactly on the railing, so I grabbed our old front door, that we had let fall to the ground in a storm once after we'd replaced it, and the glass shattered out of it. I cut it to the right height, attached the pulley wheels, put it on the railing, and it worked perfectly as a sliding door.
I still have to figure out how to make it weatherproof on the sides, but I at least added screen where the glass used to be.
Lastly, I thought the ladder that was in place, with round rungs, was much too dangerous for kids to be going up and down, so I found this old wooden ladder with actual steps on it on Repocast, and added that instead. I'm considering, as a result, ditching the hatch and just building a proper rail around it with a gate instead of cutting the top of the ladder off. I haven't decided yet.
I'm sure you can tell by now that this is a seemingly never ending project, since I'm just making it up as I go along, but that's part of the fun!
