Kitchen & cook stove

The kitchen is finished and this project went well.

Most of the logs in the wall of the kitchen are 15” wide so
the walls went up pretty fast. These logs came from Scott Stancell’s place in
Eastatoe.

The boards in the floor average 10” wide and came from my
Aunt Kathy and Uncle Larry Young’s land which was on my Grandma and Grandpa Whitmire’s
farm.  The kitchen cabinet was also built
from these boards.

I have a wood cook stove in the kitchen and I’m looking
forward to cooking meals on it.  I have
just completed the rock chimney and flue for it.  I sawed a hole in a log to install an 8”
thimble. After installing the stove pipe through it I began
building a chimney on the outside of the cabin, going around the thimble. I
checked the stove top and the oven out to see if it would draw and it worked
well. It took about 2 weeks in my spare time to complete the chimney. I also,
put a fire resistant panel on the inside of the cabin between the stove and the
log wall. It was finished on a Thursday.

The very next day, about 2 hours before my regular Friday
night picking session, I decided to test it again to make sure that it would
draw smoke like it was supposed to. I had checked the stove a few days earlier
to make sure it was safe to light. I put paper and kindling in the firebox and
lit it with a match. The stove started smoking and immediately filled the
kitchen with smoke. But, after a few seconds, it suddenly started drawing like
it was supposed to. Then I heard scratching inside the ash box. I thought maybe
a rat had gotten into the stove and built a nest, I assumed that it burned the
nest out of the pipe started drawing correctly. I left the stove alone and
decided I needed to clear the smoke out of the cabin and clean up before people
started arriving. The next day I went to the cabin, carefully opening the door
to look in the ash box.  I knew the mouse
would be dead but I was moving slowly and carefully just in case. I started removing
the ash pan very slowly. What I saw appeared at first to be a big rat in the
ashes but as I pulled the pan out a little further, I could see brown feathers
and knew it was a bird, my first thought then was that it was a hawk. I removed
the ash pan and took it outside to empty and that is when I could tell that it
was not a rat or hawk but a screech owl!! While I was building the chimney
around the thimble the owl must have seen the hole through the logs and
thinking it was a hollow tree, entered down the stove pipe into the firebox of
the stove and was unable to escape.  I
regret that it died this way. It had apparently been there only a couple of
days because I had checked out the top of the stove a few days earlier.  I shudder to think what would have happened
if it had come out while I was checking out the stove!  I’ve had several fires in the stove since,
seasoned some pans in the oven, and cooked on the top burners so I am sure that
the stove it now free of obstructions, safe and in fine working order.

--written by Joe Whitmire Dec 2010

loft bedroom

These are views from the loft bedroom.

Joe's Birthday Surprise Party - Sept 18, 2009 ----written by Joe Whitmire on September 19, 2009

Last night I got a great surprise – a Surprise Birthday Party at the Friday night jamming session with around 60-70 people present. We, especially me, had a great time! People brought food, drinks, birthday cards, and gifts. I still can’t believe it. My cousin, Fred Whitmire, went fishing to catch me some trout and gave me 5 really nice ones for my birthday. Among the gifts I received are some that you may see displayed in the cabin: a framed picture of the Chapman Bridge which was destroyed about 20 years ago, was given to me by Lewis Pace. You can see this picture displayed at the top of the stairs on the second floor of my cabin. And, Tabitha ordered me a bathroom set for my cabin that is too cute to use but you may see it displayed from time to time – the cowboy hat is the tank top cover, the body of the western sheriff with its star is the commode seat cover and the boots are the rug. I received several other gifts and many of the cards contained money. Thank you all for the gifts, your friendship, and for helping me to celebrate my 58th year!!

When I was a young man, an elderly man told me, “You can tell a man’s wealth not by his money but by how many friends he has”. I am definitely blessed! I have many friends – more than we could get into the cabin. I thank God for all of them!

My daughters, Tracy and Amy, put this together. Two of my three sons, Jerry and Adam (and Adam’s wife Tabitha) were also able to attend. My third son, Joey, lives in Georgia and was unable to get off work to be there. Tracy came up from Columbia and spent the night with Amy to be there. There were also 4 of my 11 grandchildren there – Tia, Levi, Jonathan and Caitlyn, my parents, Claude and Mildred, two of my brothers, Jimmy and Donnie, and my nephew, Douglas, were also present as well as some of my cousins. Amy made invitations that her friend, Cleon, secretly gave out at the cabin a couple weeks prior to the event. My mother and Ruby Reid also helped get the word out, all around me without me knowing it. They all helped make arrangements for everything. For this many people to keep this from me is amazing.

I’ve been reading and laughing at cards all morning.

I had a great time!! Thank you all for everything!!

Joe

BBQ on May 12, 2007

BBQ Chicken at the Cabin on May 12, 2007



Jimmy and Bonnie Lark stayed at the cabin Friday night and we hickory smoked 2 hams and barbequed chicken. When I picked up the hams and chicken the portions were much larger than expected so the meats took over an hour longer than expected. Some people got hungry and left but not before hearing quite a bit of good music. The Earl Reeves family was visiting from Montana so they were able to come to the BBQ. They all sang or played instruments. Also, we had Cecil Reid, Bill Gordon, Oscar Anderson, Lewis Pace, and their group “Royal Blue”, Carman and Faye Cassell, Higher Ground, and several children sang. Mr. James Stephens (my sister’s father-in-law) did a great job of singing Jimmy Martin’s “All Around the Water Tank Waiting on a Train”. This was a special treat since he has Alzheimer’s.



Looking back through the photos of the BBQ, I see people that were here that have already passed on. There were about 100 people at the BBQ.



Now that we have a kitchen built onto the cabin, we hope to have more get-togethers as soon as the economy picks up.





--written by Joe Whitmire

Jamming at the Cabin September 4, 2009

Just a typical Friday night jamming at Joe's Cabin. These photos were taken on September 4, 2009.

Joe's cabin now has a kitchen.

August 22, 2009 – Joe writes about his new kitchen:

It’s now August 22, 2009 and my kitchen is almost complete. The logs in my kitchen walls are all over 20” wide with 6 logs in each wall so the kitchen went up fast. Overhead, I put exposed pine poles overlapped with white pine boards.

The boards that I put in the floor came from my Grandpa and Grandma Whitmire’s farm. I stained the boards made from these logs, in natural pine and they turned out beautifully. They were given to me by Kat and Larry Young. Kat and Larry will never know what it means to me to have these logs from where I grew up. I just finished the kitchen cabinets, which are also made from lumber taken from these logs. The cabinets turned out very well but I’m not a builder, so they’re nothing like the cabinets that my dad or my brother, Jimmy builds. Kat and Larry also gave me an antique sheaf robe. Thank you so much, Kat and Larry Young, for your contributions to my cabin!

I had an old porcelain single sink and a hand pump that I was going to install, but when a friend gave me a stainless steel double sink I decided that it was more practical to install since we plan to use the kitchen, so I installed the newer sink with Moen faucets instead of going original. I bought an old wood cook stove and got an antique pie safe from my friend, Barry Bolding. They both look really good and bring back some authenticity to the kitchen. Barry also lent me a ‘draw knife’ which is used to take bark off logs and to plane wood. He also gave me the table saw. And, my dad, Claude Whitmire, gave me saws that he had used when he built cabinets. Without these tools the cabin would probably not be here today.

My brother, Steve Whitmire gave me a wooden table. I stripped and sanded it, then went over it with linseed oil which brought out the color of the wood. It is really beautiful! After I sanded this table and rubbed in the linseed oil with cloth rags I laid the rags on top of some old paint cans in the basement against the bathroom wall and went home. When I returned to put another coat of linseed oil on the table, I found that the rags had caught on fire! The fire melted the plastic lids on the paint cans, and burned a place on the plywood on the outside of the bathroom wall. My heart almost stopped when I realized how close I came to burning the cabin to the ground – because I did not realize how combustible these rags were. Every time I see the burned spot on the wall I thank the Lord for putting out this fire. That’s the only possible explanation. Thank you Lord! I built bench-chairs for each side of the table. Each bench-chair seats two people.

Chester and Nancy Sutherland of Dacusville gave me some wooden bowls that they made out of some logs that I took to them. Now I’m building a small cabinet to display these beautiful bowls.

Two other great friends, Nick and Evelyn Burr, gave me the refrigerator that’s in the kitchen. We use the kitchen each week at our jam sessions. Many participants bring food, cakes, etc. which we all enjoy! A big thank you to everyone that has helped and participated in the building and furnishing of my cabin!

--Joe

Joe's Cabin

The Story of Joe’s Cabin
I’d always wanted to own a log house that I had built myself. At one time I had a list of 15 old log houses. I wanted to buy one, disassemble it and move it to my property and reassemble it. One house on my list was built by Cherokee Indians. A freed slave married an Indian girl and her tribe helped them build the log cabin. I couldn’t get the $1,500.00 to buy this cabin, but a friend of mine bought it and his daughter lives in it now. One log building that I tried to buy was built by my Grandma Whitmire’s daddy (my great grandpa). It was a hewed-out log barn but the owners wouldn’t sell it to me. I let all these log cabins go because I either couldn’t afford them, someone else had bought them, or they were torn down or burnt before I could contact the owners.

For a while I just kinda put this dream on a back burner, then one day Ralph Perry called me to unload a load of logs for a cabin he was building. This started a friendship with him and I’ve asked him a lot of questions about cabins he has built through the years. He told me how he would go to a sawmill, pick out logs, and saw them to 6” wide to build a cabin. Well, I got good logs off some of my land clearing jobs so I started saving these logs. I figured it would take about 50 of these logs to build a cabin.

I was going to hew out my logs by using a chain saw and ax. I thought if great-grandpa could hew out logs with a broad ax that I could do it with a chain saw. I had a jig built that bolted to the saw bar that would allow you to saw a log to 6 inches wide. Then I would take an ax to hew and shape the log. Well, I did eleven logs this way. It took me a long time and I thought I was going to die from all this hard work!! I figured these old timers were tougher than me so I gave up on this idea but I put the eleven logs that I’d hewed into my cabin walls.

I found a guy, Mickey Swingler, who had a portable sawmill so I hired him to bring it to my land to saw the logs. We were able to saw logs 6” wide with this sawmill. I also got some nice 1” boards, 20” wide which I used in the floor and the roof. We started sawing the first logs August 21, 2004. I stacked them and let them dry about 8 months before starting the cabin. It took over 2 years to get the cabin ‘in the dry’ so the logs were pretty cured and looking aged by then.

I decided to build a full basement under the cabin so that I would have a workshop. I built the basement 20’x24’. I started notching the logs saddle-cut style, and putting them in place by using a pry bar, my back, and my arms. By the time I had the logs waist-high my strength for manual labor was almost gone. Besides being tired, my bobcat wouldn’t reach over the basement to place logs on the cabin floor. I was doing all this alone and I was getting discouraged and ready to quit. But, again I ran into my friend, Ralph Perry, that I mentioned earlier and told him my problems. One day Ralph and his son, Scotty, showed up at my property with a boom truck and a home-made lift that he had built himself. They stacked 25 logs on the cabin floor with the boom truck. Several days later I notched the logs and put them onto the lift, winched to the height needed and rolled the log into place with a winch-down motion to set each log.

I was praising the Lord. This helped so much laborwise that it was as if I had two people helping. There were times before I had this lift that I would work all day and maybe only have two or three logs in place. The lift made work easier though it was still the hardest work I have ever done in my life! I was starting to make a showing -- it was looking like a cabin. I would lay in bed at night with back, arm, and leg cramps so bad I would almost cry but everything I was doing made it look more and more like a log cabin.

When I needed more logs sawed I hired Red Davis. He brought a band saw and we sawed 25 more 6” wide logs to finish the cabin. The walls slowly made it to 8ft – 9ft – 10ft – I wanted to go two logs higher but the lift was starting to sway so much that I was afraid it would fall and I would get hurt since I was still working alone, so I stopped two logs lower than I wanted. I had one log left when the walls were complete so I made two benches out of it.

Finally, on October 29, 2005 I had cut poles for the roof and my brother, Donnie, helped me set the poles and put boards on the roof. I was so excited! I really did think at night, while cramping, that it would kill me before I saw the roof complete.

Then time to start chinking: I put ¼“ rabbit wire on the outside between the logs to hold the insulation on the inside. Since cement shrinks when dry it would have fallen out without the rabbit wire. I hired Waymon Gillespie to install the insulation. Cementing was a very slow process so I hired Benjamin Moses (Carol’s nephew) and Bobby Cox to help. Later, I hired Tim Anderson and his crew of masons to do most of the chinking. Tim’s uncle Gary Dale Anderson and crew laid the block for the basement.

After the cabin was almost complete I decided to try to build some furniture so my helper, Tommy James, and I built a log bed to put in the loft bedroom of the cabin.

On April 1, 2006 I decided to have an Appreciation Fish Fry Dinner for friends and family to dedicate the cabin to the Lord. The Rev. Richard Burgess lead the dedication service, Bobby Trotter and Roger Breazeale came and cooked the fish and over 100 people came. Robert Perry, Ralph’s brother, brought his “1935 Dodge Brothers Truck”. We had 3 or 4 bluegrass groups to sing and everyone seemed to have a great time! Every Friday night for the last 2½ years there has been a jamming at my cabin. People from everywhere bring guitars, banjoes, fiddles, etc. and we jam and have a great time!

As of now, almost 3 years after our first dinner, I’m building a kitchen onto the cabin. I have the 8’ log walls finished and the poles cut for the roof. Tommy James is helping me with this project. I am also putting rock on the outside of the basement and the underpinning under the new kitchen.

Doug Cassell sawed some logs for the kitchen and I bought a band saw sawmill and I’ve sawed some of the logs myself. The Lord has really blessed. I never knew, how many friends and family would come by the cabin and how much enjoyment we would have meeting here.

---Joe