Alternating stairs

When building a cabin where room is always a premium the problem of stair placement always arises. I took a look on the Internet to see how other small structures accommodated this issue and found a unique design. Some call it the Jefferson staircase, Thomas Jefferson was one of the first to design such stairs.

You can see that with a steep stair you either have to have narrow steps or what you can do is notch out each alternating step to make room for your shin. This allows the same depth of stair. You have to be coordinated and always use the same foot when going up and down the stairs. It feels kind of awkward at first but you get used to it.

Heimey, where's the flood?

Getting water to the cabin was an interesting proposition. We initially were going to use a storage system and fill it with a garden hose. We knew that water was only 12-14 feet from the surface so instead we switched gears and decided to use a well point instead. A well point is simply a perforated pipe with screen that is attached to sections of pipe that is blasted into the ground until it hits water.

We started by using a sledge with mashed the pipe threads. We then switched to a post pounder which worked awesome but was exhausting work. After about 2 hours, I dropped a string and weight down the pipe and voila, water.

Now how do we get the water up the pipe into the house?


I hooked my old hand pump on the well but it was unable to draw the water all the way up the pipe. We may need to transition down to 1" PVC pipe.

Insulating the floor

Here's what the floor looked like on October 10th.

The problem is that we have been looking at the floor as if it has been finished. We needed to add insulation and fit it together a little tighter. I had to move all the stuff out of the living room and then I worked around the walls. Again, like all my projects counter normal.