Saving Grandma's Cabin
Candy's hair-brained idea to keep her family history intact.
By: Candy Moulton 02/01/2008
The Wham!?Oh! Project Begins
A century after Grandma first saw it, her cabin was mine, but there was still the double-daunting task at hand. We had to first move it from its original location to our property, a mile and a half to the southeast. Then we had to restore it. Steve and I couldn't do all of that alone, so we did the only thing possible: I called my sister and told her I had a project and needed some help with it.
She told our cousin Roxie, with whom we had grown up at the ranch, "Guess what my sister's hair-brained idea is this time?"
In spite of her name-calling, I'll be forever grateful that she and her husband Bill were there with us as Steve and I began the not-too-inconsiderable job of preparing the cabin for the move. We've done other work together: building or renovating houses, their mountain cabin, shops for Steve and Bill. We jokingly call our joint enterprise WAMO Construction (the name is formed from the first two letters of our last names: Walters and Moulton). It could just as easily be from our style of doing work: Wham! Oh!
While Steve and Bill dug out the corners and began jacking up Grandma's cabin, Penny and I started shoveling old straw and dirt and removing broken roof logs from the interior. The guys used chains, cables and straps to hold the logs of the walls tightly together as inch-by-inch we raised the cabin out of the dirt. Dad was there, helping Penny and I shovel, and assisting Steve and Bill with their work. Every weekend and many evenings in September 2003, we prepared for "The Move."
Finally the cabin was ready to be loaded onto an equipment trailer that my nephew Brad borrowed from his boss, Joe Glode of Shively Hardware North in Saratoga. The big day was to be October 11, 2003, and my family will never let me live down the fact that I was not present. I had a prior commitment in Texas, so when they loaded Grandma's cabin onto the trailer, hauled it to our place and set it down on the foundation Steve and I had prepared, I missed all of the action.
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