The Soul of the Cabin (And why we didn’t paint the wall)

Demolition is easy. Preservation is hard.

We didn’t buy this former camp cabin with the intention of erasing its history. Once we decided we needed to knock down the house, it would have been faster to let everything go with the demo, but we felt a responsibility to the cabin—and to the earth.

We removed everything that could be reused (but wasn’t original to the cabin) and donated it to the ReStore. However, there were a few specific pieces that we wanted to salvage so we could include them in the new house.

The Floor That Became a Wall 

The wood flooring upstairs was rough, but it was solid. We pulled up as many boards as we could (while still leaving enough to walk on!), pounded out the nails, and hauled them to a friend’s storage unit.

It took a lot of physical labor and power washing, but we had a plan: I fully intended to paint the wood white for a clean, fresh “airy cottage” look.

But as we nailed it to the wall in the new house, something happened.

The colors, the imperfections, the gorgeous knots in this 1920s wood… it was too pretty to paint. The wood had a story. Covering it up felt wrong. So we left it natural (and the bonus is that it saved us a nice chunk of change because we didn’t have to buy wood or drywall for our feature wall!).

If you want to read about how we removed the old flooring, read this blog post.

The Signatures We Couldn’t Save 

But we couldn’t save everything. The hardest loss was the ceiling.

When we pulled down the musty, cheap paneling upstairs, we realized that decades of campers had signed their names on the wood. It was a guestbook built right into the house. They say “if these walls could talk”- these walls did just that.

We wanted to save them. But the roofing nails poked right through the wood and the shingles were stuck on.

We managed to save a few strips, but the rest we captured with our cameras. We plan to display the photos in the new house and start a new signature wall to continue preserving the cabin’s stories.

It’s a reminder that while we are “Switching Geers” on the structure, we are also trying to honor the history. Even the design of the new house is focused on keeping the spirit of the original camp cabin.