Cabin Living Room Remodel - Phase 1

From country cottage to modern cabin

Before and after:

We purchased a cabin a couple years ago that sits on 10 acres of forest, butted up to State land. It also sits on part of the Au Sable River, so we can launch our kayaks and tubes right from the backyard. We quickly realized we wanted to turn an unused room in the big pole barn into a bunkhouse with extra sleeping for guests, which we wrote about here.

We bought the cabin furnished, including even linens, kitchen utensils and small appliances, and some tools in the barn. That helped us slowly ease into updating and making improvements, while not having to invest a ton up front.

The furnishings were just fine for awhile and the place had more of a country cottage feels. But we knew we wanted a more modern cabin feeling, with pine, real wood grain, and dark accents.

We knew we were going to have to get creative to make it work because the cabin was actually built on posts and used to be a pole barn itself (curiouser and curiouser, this one!)

Ripping out the floating faux wood floor was the first step. Here’s a pic of what it looked like after I had redecorated a bit, but you can see the floors we originally had.

We were also eager to get rid of that closet that left an awkward space between it and the ceiling. We decided reframe the closet to make room for extra seating and run it all the way to the 10 ft high ceiling.

Bye underlayment and click-lock flooring. Here’s the first cameo from our dogs Sylvie and Thor. They’re always crashing my pics.

Covering up popcorn ceilings with pine planks

This is….fine. Where’s OSHA, or as my father-in-law calls it “oh shit”?
We rented some scaffolding from the local Home Depot because I’m scared of heights. This seemed more stable and less scary than a ladder and was cheap to rent. I definitely didn’t go out on that little sidecar-bridge of death over on the left, but Nick did. Bless him.
We wanted to use white stain on the ceiling planks again, like we did on the bunkhouse project, so I used the same process. The stain makes a pretty big difference on the bare wood, but the grain and knots still show through.
Once again, we got all our paneling from The Woodworker’s Shoppe not too far from us. It’s a great shop with really nice, helpful people and good prices. Win-win!

Feels so good to cover up some of that old popcorn ceiling/spiderweb collector.
This ended up being much easier than expected, because the ceilings were actually textured plywood and not drywall at all. That allowed us to be able to shoot the wood directly to the ceiling without needing any further supports.

Prepping the walls for paneling

The bead board was flush enough to the drywall that we decided we could just install pine planks over it, which saved us a bunch of time.

We suspected that there were some insulation gaps between the original exterior wall and this living room addition. We knew the living room and front bedroom was a later addition because it was 2 feet lower than the rest of the house. The cool thing about this is the living room is a full 10 feet tall, so while it’s not a huge room, it feels pretty large, especially compared to the rest of the cabin.

After removing the bead board from that wall, we discovered that they hadn’t insulated that space under the original home. You can see the posts and gap in the pic below.

So we insulated in that gap and closed everything back up tight before installing planks.
Next, we had to close in some of that window between the kitchen and the living room. Please enjoy our fluorescent light with wood framing and popcorn ceilings in the kitchen.

Though it seems odd to partially cover up some of the window that’s between our kitchen and living room, we needed to for the second phase of the renovation…library bookshelves! We’ll cover that project in the next post.

As you might have guessed, this window was the original front window of the house. We actually like the pass through because you can talk to people in the living room while cooking in the kitchen.
Time for wall planks!
We found a special on some pine that our local dealer called “Blue,” which just means it has grey/blue streaking in it due to a drying process. Some places call this beetle kill and I’m not entirely sure what the difference is, if I’m honest. We liked that it added some interest to the planks and it ended up being more affordable than their typical finished pine planks.

Woodstove surround

We decided to keep the original stone underneath the stove and just do a stone surround behind it. Opting to run it all the way to the ceiling, we framed it in with some pine trim we made from scrap planks.

We chose a basic slate-look tile in a charcoal shade from Home Depot. We looked at stone siding as an option, but the cost difference was pretty extreme, so we decided to go with a basic option that wouldn’t compete with all the detail in the pine planks.

Flooring time!

We decided not to use pine for the floors because they’re so soft that they tend not to hold up well to dog talons and a lot of foot traffic. We put them in our bunkhouse and decided while they’re just fine for a spot like that, which is only used as a gym and office by us for the most part, we’d need something that could take a beating in the main cabin.

I also wanted a wide plank engineered hardwood option that looks a bit more modern in my mind anyway. Here’s the one we chose, from Home Depot. I like it because it seems like it can handle dogs, snow, rain, etc. at least to some extent. We’ve installed real wood floors on other projects and Nick is eager to use real wood again in the future, so we may in some other rooms in the cabin in the future.

Prepping the floor

Since this was cement underneath and we wanted to install nail-down wood flooring, we had some prep work to do.

First, we had to lay 1x1 slats on top of the cement with a ramshot gun.
The important thing here was we had to adjust the width of some of our strips to even out the floor. The end of the room toward the far window and wood stove in the picture below was quite a bit lower than the rest of the floor.
It looked like someone wanted to extend this room when they closed it in (presumably, it was a front porch before). So they must have poured an additional pad next to the foundation to “tie it in.”
Then, we framed in an entryway in front of the front door, which we knew we wanted to tile.
Then we nailed down plywood to those wood strips so we had a nice even, solid surface under our flooring.

Entryway tile

To prep this area, we needed to pour a self-leveling floor compound to be shore it up.

Then we installed a barrier to accommodate any shifting in the floor that could potentially cause the tiles to pop in the future.

The rest was pretty straightforward. Tying back to the charcoal and black shade, we chose a black picket-shaped tile for the entryway and closet. We chose a dark charcoal grout for the tile.

Laying the wood flooring

The end result is a nice mix of shades that we think work well together. New front door to come, but that’s a warmer weather project for when we reseal the log siding.
You’ll notice we needed a transition between that entryway and the flooring because there wasn’t really a good way to make them level. There are pros and cons to this:
One good thing is that this little lip helps collect all the pine needles, sand, and dirt in the entryway, so the rest of the floors don’t end up covered in nature.
Downside, it’s a little bit of a trip hazard and doesn’t look perfect. But being able to open your front door is important, amirite?
Closet
We had some leftover stained pine from our bunkhouse project, which we used to line the closet.

We added some shelves to the closet to store winter gear, coolers (during the off-season), and everything else. Since the closet is so tall, we may add more in the future.

The little box was something that was left at the cabin by the previous owners and I just painted it. It’s great for things like extra dog leashes, ice skates, ski gear, etc. And then a boot rack for…would you guess….more gear?

We opted for a barn door hardware option and bifold doors because we don’t love the standard track-based closet door. That left us with enough room for a few hooks for hoodies and jackets to the left of the closet.

We originally bought a standard pine bifold closet door, but the amount we need to trim off the top or bottom to make it fit well just didn’t work because those cheap doors are hollow inside.

Instead, Nick ended up making these amazing doors from leftover pine. We ended up painting them after with Behr Cracked Pepper paint to tie into the charcoal tile and our future library shelves, which we knew we wanted in that color.

Looking back, I still debate whether this was the right choice because the doors were just stunning unpainted. I like the finished look, but it didn’t feel great covering these up, I’ll admit.

I decided to use this same paint on the bedroom door just off the living room to tie it all together.

I’ll share final photos with the closet door, window shades, decor and everything else in our phase 2 post….when we build A LIBRARY!!

What we learned

We’ve gotta stop buying weirdo properties like cabins that used to be pole barns
Dogs hate ramshot guns
There are different types of tile spacers. We had a bunch from past projects and I was trying to lay those smaller picket tiles, but the spacers kept lifting them up. Turns out, I was using large format spacers. It really messed us up in a few spots and we had to re-lay a few tiles. The rest we had done with the proper spacers.