The imaginary year is 2021. This is the story of the log cabin I bought in 2019 for the sum of $12000.00.
The property was in a town called Nakina, Ontario which is about as far as you can travel on an actual road before you then have to fly in by plane. Nakina is about a half hour drive north of Geraldton off the Trans-Canada highway, northern route. My friend Ken Williams lives in Smooth Rock Falls, a mere four-and-a-half hour drive to the east of Geraldton. To drive there from Hamilton is a two day trip.
Nakina is surrounded by great fishing and hunting. It was originally founded as a support for the railway, but now that purpose has subsided. The town is now surviving as a hub for hunting and fishing tourism, with the Nakina airport being used by local pilots. You can fly in from Thunder Bay.
This log cabin was built around 1923 by a Finnish guy. Since then it has stood the test of time. There is no sewer or water hookup and the interior is unfinished. So back in 2019 I looked into the registry and found that the owner was a local outfitter and that he had paid $1500 for it in 2017. Basically he had done nothing to the property and I suppose he was using it to accommodate customers while they were waiting to fly in to one of his nearby fishing camps, or he was planning to fix it up for that purposes.
Asking price was $15000. The lot size in town was about 50 ft by 150 ft. Again, no hydro or water hookups were in place and the cabin was being sold "as is." I took the opportunity to figure out how to do a title search and discovered that there is a provincial tool called Teranet which is the public registry for all properties in the province. A few years ago the government digitized all property records. As it turned out, the owner had paid only $1500 for the title to the property in 2017. I figured I had nothing to lose so I put in my offer of $9950. After a bit of back and forth we settled on $12000.
I had thought long and hard about the options. There was absolutely no practical reason for me to leave it there and fix it up or flip it. The cost of adding water and sewer and hydro connections and upgrading the building with insulation etc. made no sense.
For me the exciting piece was to save and move the cabin shell as an authentic restoration project. The cabin would be disassembled, moved to an ideal location at some future date and then rebuilt on a proper foundation with services and insulation so that it can become a year-round dwelling, or at the very least a seasonal cottage with basic comforts of water and sewer and hydro.
When the deal closed my plan was in place. For the first winter I made sure that the roof repairs were made to keep the interior dry. In the spring of 2020 I arranged to get a shipping container delivered to the site and then I went up in July for a couple of weeks. A friend and I disassembled the cabin and tagged every log so that it could be put back together. We put the entire structure in storage in the shipping container and left it there in Nakina on the property for the winter of 2020.
I've been keeping an eye out for a suitable location on which to rebuild the cabin. My goal is to have the cabin rebuilt by its 100th anniversary in 2023.
[Update July 2019: The cabin idea was never completed. I had originally thought it would be cool to rebuild the cabin on a half-acre lot in Temiskaming that I had purchased. Brenda thought it to be a waste of money, and that whatever gets built on that property should be something new. She (correctly) saw this as an old, decrepit cabin that actually has no historic value, especially if moved off site.]
