With the cabin building footings in place, it was time to start building the cabin. Fortunately the cabin plans came with a materials list.  Unfortunately we had made enough changes to the plans. We now needed to go through them again and come up with our own list for cabin building material.

Once we compiled the cabin building material list, we started calling around looking for the best price. Home Depot allows you to pick through the lumber so there is less waste. However with the quantity required, picking through that much lumber would take forever, this was not going to happen. We settled on using Nelson Lumber. Nelson Lumber gave us contractor pricing and they were a lot cheaper than the consumer hardware store.

We ordered the building material, then rented a trailer from Beothuck Trailers large enough to make one trip, or so we thought.

We headed to Nelson Lumber on a Friday afternoon. The yard worker used a very large fork lift to stack this huge pile of lumber on the trailer. Looking at the amount the trailer sagged, I wasn’t sure our little truck could pull it. The had to load the lumber closer to the back of the trailer. This reduced the sag as the tongue weight was too much for our little truck. Then the yard worker said he would go get the rest. There’s more?! Turns out that he had only loaded about half of the order.

Picking up the Cabin Building Material

It was close to closing time for the lumber yard when we got the first load secured. A round trip to and from the cabin would be 3hrs plus unloading time. We knew then that we would not have enough time to pickup the second load. If we waited until Monday, we would need to rent the trailer for another day plus take the day off work. Fortunately for us, that Saturday was inventory day at Nelson Lumber. They agreed to allow me to pick up the second load on Saturday. They aren’t actually open on weekends, it was great of them to allow this.

As the road is pretty flat out to the cabin we had no issues pulling the trailer. Still we had to leave lots of space for braking, all that weight really pushed the truck.

When we arrived at the property it took quite some time to unload, no fork lift here. We staked the lumber piece by piece.

Next morning, bright and early, I headed back to Nelson Lumber for the second load. This load was not quite as large as the first, but there was no way we could have done it in one load.

Being a Canadian I stopped on the way at Tim Horton’s for a dozen donuts and a large double double.