Thoughts of Christmas in northern Minnesota bring a lot of things to mind; snow filled woods, hot cocoa, sledding and plenty of cold and snow. This was not the case this year at the weekend homestead's tiny cabin. What I was not prepared for was several days of heavy rain.
I had to leave the tiny cabin vacant for awhile as I was working a side job trapping nuisance beaver and planned to join my kids at the river house while they were on break from college.
I had placed a tarp over the roof of the shed to bunkhouse build before I left ,but admittedly rain was not even on my radar. I foolishly did not fasten it very securely and now will pay the price.
I made an emergency unplanned trip back to the off grid cabin tiny cabin to find my tarp blown off the roof and standing water soaking into all the OSB and subfloor that we had recently installed. Anywhere else, I would have wet vacuumed the standing water, put a couple of heaters and fans in the building and hoped for the best. But being off grid comes with it's own set of challenges. It's never as easy as it is when unlimited resources are at your disposal. Sometime there is a cost for not having an electric bill.
My mission over the next couple of days was to at least get the roof completed enough to provide some level of protection from the elements. As usual the weather was working against me and temps plummeted from 35 degrees to 5 degrees overnight. The good is that all the water is now frozen and not soaking in further. The bad news is that the extent of the damage is yet to be determined. I think that once it thaws, I will see swelling and possibly some delamination on the OSB.
Not the Christmas gift I was expecting. Unfortunately, there are no returns on this one...........
3 янв 2024
