How To Furnish A Survival Cabin

Building a cabin on a shoestring budget is covered in that Hub...but what about the interior? A basic shell comes first, obviously, but few humans are going to be indefinitely content with living inside a basic wooden box.

There are probably as many ways of meeting the challenge as there are people on the planet, but here are a few examples we found to be of value during our remote living adventure (circa 1999-2002) near Craig, Montana. These are shared not as "the" way to do it, but simply to hopefully trigger the reader's own innovative thought process.

1. Don't forget the dump. Many a county landfill is closed to public rummaging, but our area included not one but two huge trash dropoff containers that were not supervised in any way. Area residents were welcome to scavenge for useful items, and many of us did just that. In our case, a couple of precious finds included:

--A five foot length of one inch iron pipe that became our "closet" for hanging clothes after it was suspended horizontally from two rafters with sturdy nails and a bit of wire.

--A beautiful, three foot piece of laminated counter top (imitation wood) that became a great place for a microwave and toaster oven to spend their time.

2. Donations from friends. No, we did not go around begging. But one day a neighbor and close friend dropped off some used lumber he had salvaged from a job site where he was working. The boards and planks were old and gray with red paint almost completely flaked off from years of hard weather. It had been someone's old deck, and our friend brought it to us rather than see it get thrown away.

The first thing this wood did was get me to stop sleeping on the floor. My disabled wife slept on a small couch that suited her well, but I was still lying down on a couple of camping pads. So a number of the "new" bits of lumber were enlisted in the construction of a crude but sturdy table. I still used the camping pads as a mattress, but getting up was no longer a problem, and we also gained nearly twenty square feet of storage room under the table/bed as well. A coat of paint, and no one could tell the age of the materials.

What remained was pressed into service as a low but more than welcome workbench which remained outside and unpainted. In the bench's case, appearance was nothing and function was all. Now I had a place to use as a sawhorse when cutting other boards with a handsaw or--after we purchased a small gasoline powered generator for electricity--a Skilsaw.

3. Yard sales. Most readers undoubtedly already know about these. Treasures do abound. For instance, we picked up (for not much money) a great, attractive, round faced clock with a floral design around the edge. We use that clock to this day. At another sale, a carpet scrap surfaced that served as a runner which extended from just inside our cabin's front door to the stovetop-on-legs at the other end of the residence.

4. Use what you have on hand. For a time, we had a lot of stuff in storage. Most of it would not fit in our tiny mountain cabin (196 square feet), so we needed to either get rid of it or find a use for it.

To ease my wife's aches and pains, we had formerly slept on matching super single waterbeds. They weren't practical in the cabin...except...we did find an important use for the wooden planks making up the waterbed bases: They served as thick skirting around the cabin, preventing cold and wind (and cold wind) from circulating beneath the floor.

Our family received a great deal of valuable training on the Montana ranch where we grew up. This "trickled down" from our parents--our father, for example, grew up during the Great Depression...which doubtless had much to do with the fact that he was not big on throwing things away but preferred to find uses for them.

With a background like he had, Dad's allowing my small construction projects makes sense: I was learning skills that might well stand me in good stead throughout life. Besides, when I built a playhouse out of nothing but old scrap lumber, using rusty old nails and a couple of equally rusty hinges, plus shingling the entire roof to a rainproof state using rusted, flattened tin cans as shingles, he got some practical use out of it in the end.

After the playhouse had stood idle for a few months, he announced that he was appropriating the small structure for use as a storage spot for fifty pound salt blocks (used to provide salt licks for our cattle). It served in that capacity for many years thereafter without leaking even once. And I'd purchased nothing to make it happen. When it comes to beneficial salvage, clutter is king!

Of course, it was also an early Life Lesson in understanding that nature abhors a vacuum. Vacant land? There will be squatters. Vacant playhouse? Salt blocks will move in.

Getting back to how to furnish a cabin, we now come to:

5. Don't forget Mother Nature. Some remote cabins have been entirely furnished with furniture made from wood harvested on the resident's own property. We did not go that far, in part because our dwelling was so tiny that folding chairs were the only kind that made sense in our particular situation. However, for an earlier home, I had once built a firewood box comprised entirely of two-inch mini-logs cut on our own ten acres. Every little project counts.

6. The shopping newspapers. These are everywhere and go by different names. Yours might be Penny Saver, Thrifty Nickel, or something else entirely, but the newspapers are free to take and read. Many of them are overwhelmingly made up of car ads, but there are still other goodies to be had. While we did not do much for the cabin from this source, it is where I found my current job in 2006. We did pick up a tiny toaster oven for practically nothing.

We've all heard the saying that, "The only limit is your imagination". While true enough, that is definitely too limiting! All we really need to do is keep our eyes (and ears) open. When I first happened to notice that four burner stovetop lying in a pile of junk at our friend's place, my first thought was, would that work? At that time, we were cooking outside on a tiny Coleman camp stove. This could be a definite improvement. I asked the owner about it, and he lit right up.

"Sure! That's just junk to me, but switch the jets in it, and...."

That didn't take a lot of imagination; all it required was noticing stuff before tripping over it.

6. Ask your local store what they might have lying around. Since we needed propane for cooking and heating, we became acquainted with a great guy who owned a propane supply place. He sold propane appliances at his storefront, and one day it occurred to me to ask,

"Do you ever get any used appliances on trade-in? We need a wall mount furnace and a refrigerator both...."

It turned out that he did indeed have both, sitting out back, collecting dust and rust, destined for the appliance graveyard sooner or later. The furnace cost us $25, the refrigerator $75. Two years later, being in a somewhat better financial situation, we replaced the (exhausted) furnace with a brand new one and also bought a much larger new refrigerator as an addition to, not a replacement of, the old one...which was still doing its job when we left the mountain.

7. Use the super-bargain version of an indoor toilet. A true survival cabin is not all that likely to allow for indoor plumbing, and often a trip to the outhouse is a daunting idea. It may be forty below zero out there, or dark, with rattlesnakes to step on or bears to encounter. Never mind the black widow spiders hanging out under the toilet seat.

Our solution was simple: A five gallon plastic bucket from the hardware store (or Wal-Mart) served as the base. In the bottom, to hold down odor and keep things sanitary overnight, we used a variety of products, but most often Pine-Sol. Not the name brand, actually, but a generic version (cheaper) with a higher percentage of active ingredients in it. Some of that plus plain old water filling the bucket to a depth of several inches, and we were good to go. So to speak.

You need a seat for a topper, of course, and a standard toilet seat used to "snap fit" right on top of the pail. Many of the current sizes no longer fit right, but a bit of searching is well worth the effort.

Carrying a lightly loaded pail to dump down the outhouse hole once or twice a day is definitely less unpleasant than trotting out there every time Mother Nature calls. And yes, I've mentioned this "toilet trick" in other Hubs, but we believe it does bear repeating!

In summary, a bit of doggerel:

Just scrounge around and scrounge around

And be amazed at what you've found

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32