Nature's Art.........

The Dobson team has yet another project in the works. It seems the projects are ongoing with us, but we enjoy the fruits of our labor.

We've been building a log cabin on a remote lake in Alaska for the past several years, and are now working on the finishing touches. We've been sleeping in the loft without a railing for quite some time, and decided we better put safety first, in the event one of us should happen to take off in our sleep one night. It would be a mighty rude awakening to step off the loft to the living room below.

Last summer we collected black spruce logs and twigs, then peeled them so they would be dry and ready to use this year. We put our nephews to work on this project while they were visiting from Pennsylvania! If anyone wants to visit us at the cabin, they can be guaranteed they'll be put to work!With no professional knowledge of what we were doing, we started our project. It helps to have an engineer husband, who enjoys figuring how all this stuff is going to fit together! It was my job to figure out the positioning of the logs and twigs, so I liked that!

Warren cut notches in the logs and placed them into the side board with lag bolts. He then cut the pegs on the cross posts with a hole saw and hand saw. I roughed up the ends with a chisel, then we used a belt sander to even them out a bit. This is what you call winging it or trial and error! The next step was to decide on placement of the shaped wood. Much like designing a quilt, we moved pieces around until we were satisfied with look. Rather than taper the posts down, we wanted to do something a bit different in the small area to the left, so opted to use a very curved piece of wood for the main rail.
With a coat of stain on all the pieces, we now have a finished railing on one side of the loft! Next trip to the cabin we'll work on the other side.
To be continued...........