Loads of home and cabin goods shopping on a Monday

Yay Monday!  It looks like there will be a lot more home stuff in my Shopping Monday posts in the next little while.  The past few weeks we’ve spent a lot of time up in Snoqualmie Pass about an hour from Seattle, Washington, where we’re starting to build our dream cabin and it looks like we’re actually starting to build.

My friends have asked me why we’re building a cabin and I think at first we didn’t even really know.  The hubby and I have been looking for a project to start together for a long time and since the kids are starting school in September we knew we wouldn’t just be able to pick up travel like we used to.  We wanted something that would keep our sense of adventure and help us preserve the things we cherish about traveling together as a family.  The Snoqualmie Pass area is a place we’ve loved to camp, hike, ski and explore and when we saw all the neat things going on with the PassLife development it seemed like a community we’d love to be a part of too.

Over the past few months since we first found our site we’ve met with our architect and he’s come up with an amazing cabin design.  I had a whole bunch of ideas pinned to my cabin pinterest board and he was able to incorporate some of my favorites into our cabin.  I’m especially excited about the fireplace on the deck and the big windows.

We’ve learned about snow-shedding versus ‘flat’ roofs that hold snow and we’re really stoked about the engineering on our cabin that is designed to hold the snow and insulate our cabin in the big snows the Pass is known for.  It’s definitely going to be interesting to see how our place looks like this winter.

And we’ve been getting to know the area each time we visit our cabin site.  We’re looking forward to DruBru (a supercool-looking brewery being built RIGHT NOW!) and we’ve really enjoyed ice cream, coffee and pizza at Red Mountain coffee.  We’re hoping to try Webb’s one of these days and even just bringing up picnics from Seattle or stops in North Bend or Issaquah have added new food finds to our repertoire.  I’m always excited to see what we’ll find next.

Right now we’re starting to look at neat touches we’d like in our place and this is the fun part of building anything.  We get to pick everything out from the floors to the toilet paper holders and the types of wiring we’re using.  I’ve learned about different kinds of woods and how houses are heated, but I’ll spare you those details until later.  The fun stuff is finding things we really get to see, like the big fan we’ll need to keep the air moving around, maybe something like this haiku one from Bigassfans.

And we need lots of lighting and I’m not yet sure about what kind of lighting will match this place. There are just too many lights to choose from and it’s so easy to blow my whole lighting budget on just one fabulous lamp!

I also didn’t realize we need cabinets for everywhere.  I love sleek and easy styles and something like these Ikea ones would even be great.  I actually really like this sink a lot.

So I’m filing these ideas away for when I need them because upfront research is good and I have a great team working on this place and we’re trying to keep the costs down.  Oh. My. Goodness.  That’s the hardest part about building!  I’m hoping to get some inspiration from WillsCasa, two lovely bloggers I met a while ago at Alt Summit who were building their own house.  And of course Sunset magazine.  I also just found this blog about a couple who makes big uses out of really tiny spaces and it’s just so smart to intentionally think about the space that we’re building and actually think about how we’re really going to use it.

So, if you hear about any fabulous bakeries between Seattle and Snoqualmie Pass please send them my way or if you’re building something somewhere I would love to talk process with you (because it’s so much easier when we learn together!).  I have decided that my cabin will have some “Denmark style” (I’ve been in LOVE with all things Copenhagen since we traveled there this spring) and I hope to include some other ideas from our travels into our space as well.

So happy Shopping Monday and I hope you’re finding some fun fabulous finds wherever you are today!

(PS. if you want to keep up with our cabin building, I’m filing everything cabin related  in the Categories section under the “Building a Cabin in the Woods” tab)

Terumi

Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys.  She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live.  She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)