Since I was a kid I have been coming to this Island, my dad has lived here since the sixties, and it has always been a home away from home for me. When I graduated highschool my dad pulled me aside and asked what I wanted out of my future. Being a heavy partier, and child of the sixties, he has damaged his liver enough, to make him quite aware of his own mortality.
Being my dads only living relative, he informed me that one day, his empire would be mine. When I say empire I mean 3 properties, with more than three hundred rustbucket cars, a few boats, and handful of motorcycles, and other treasures we have yet to discover.
In 2009 my dad proposed to me I build a cabin on one of the properties, he wanted me to become familiar with construction, and start connecting with the island. Though I was living in halifax at the time, I came west for the summer, and me and my friend Derek started work.
We were on island for about ten days. We went around the property (henceforth refferred to as the corner lot) and found a place we though would be good for a cabin. I would like to say we chose the spot for any logical reason, but it was simply the spot from which you could only see 6 or 7 rusty cars. During that first ten days we cleared some land, built the frame of the cabin, and put a roof on. To clarify what I mean by roof, there was a solid wooden roof, but no shingles yet. We got a couple free tarps from the lumberyard. The cabin itself was made from a mixture of wood that my dad had salvaged from a torn down house, and wood we milled on his backyard saw mill. The windows and door came from the wreckage of the shack my dad had lived in when he moved here in the sixties. Combining free materials, with absolutely no knowledge on how to build a cabin, we did a pretty damned good job. After my short visit, I was on my way back to halifax.
That winter in halfiax my heart was split in two. There are people can live in two places at once. I am not one of those people. After much consideration, I packed my bags and decided the west coast was the place for me.
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| Summer 2010 |
During Summer 2010 I lived in my hometown of Langley. That summer my friends Thom and TayTay joined me on a trip over. We started on the outside siding of the cabin, but work was slow because I had fallen off my bike while riding downhill with no hands. There was a point where Thom got mad at me because I was on a ladder putting up siding, and as he passed up pieces, I was driping blood on him. The style of siding we chose is called Board and Batton. It is a series of boards nailed on vertically, side by side, then another layer of thinner boards on top, to cover the joints. Our couple bloody days on island did not get us far. But we got the layer of boards and a few of the battons on.
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| Summer 2010 |
After a winter in Langley I decided it was time to make the move. in April 2011 My ex partner Kristi and I moved here. We stayed in a spare room at my dads house. By june we had put most of the Battons up,and it was warm enough to move into for the summer. The cabin was by no means finished. It was a mostly a shell, the roof was still tarps, and there was no furniture, or anything really. essentially it was a 14 foot tall wooden tent. But that was good enough for us.
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| Summer 2011, Living in the almost finished cabin |
That July two of my close friends came and joined us. Thom, who had helped the summer before, and Jackson, a kid who moved to victoria from Ottawa a year earlier. They each moved into run down trailers my dad had on the property. Later in the summer a friend of ours gave us a motorhome she had in her yard. It was much bigger, and significantly nicer than Jackson's trailer, so he upgraded, and his old trailer became a craft space for Kristi. Thom's trailer had some mold problems, so he put a tarp over it, and ripped out some of the rotten wood.
By fall is was getting to cold and dark to live with no electricity or heat, so we moved into a rental cabin on my dad's middle property "Lafalot". Lafalot is a project of it's own, it seems every punk and weirdo on the island has lived their at some point. There is garbage everywhere, and a giant anarchist circle-A painted on the ceiling. We spent the winter in Lafalot, not accomplishing much, and that brings us to Spring 2012, and the start of this blog!
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| Lafalot, Fall 2011 |
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