Dovetail Style Eco Cabin at White Eagle

This past week the Lantry family and friends joined forces in Grand Marais at the North House Folk School to build a new cabin for White Eagle. In 5 days with the help of 10 amazing people this dovetail style trapper's cabin was built, assembled and disassembled.  It will be reassembled on the resort property starting in April 2014. Inspired by the tiny house movement, the finished cabin will be less than 200 square feet. This structure will be White Eagle's first eco cabin and will function off grid. It will be build using earth friendly and local building materials whenever possible. The building site is planned to go on the high north side of the property overlooking Lake Vermilion. A big thanks to our inspiring instructor Lonnie Dupre, our hosts Jay and Rose at Art House B and B, the folks at Northhouse Folk School, and to our friends Joel and Stacylynn for introducing us to the school!

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Day One:
It all started with this pile of 4x8 white pine timbers.

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Our goal was to fashion the timbers into dovetail joints like this.

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Handy man and instructor Lonnie Dupre set us up with these templates and showed us the beginning steps of dovetail construction.

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We started tracing the templates onto the logs and then we had to cut the dovetail notches and chamfer (cut off) the edges of the timbers with scarf slicks.

We used a variety of tools to cut the notches...

 circular saws...

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hand saws…

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chain saws… 

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Tom hard at work scarf slicking

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Completed timbers

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Stephanie and Anne using draw knifes that also work for chamfering timbers.

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Day Two: We finished cutting the notches and chamfering the logs.

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It was nice to have so many helping hands!

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By the end of day two we had almost all of our timbers chamfered and notched.

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Mom and Dad had fun scarf slicking too!

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Day Three and Four: We started building our structure and crafting the roof.

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Fine tuning notches for a perfect fit

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Layer by layer the structure grew.

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The lower timbers were easy to place.

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As it got taller the timbers seemed a lot heavier.

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While the walls were going up outside, the roof was constructed inside. This is a traditional gable end roof system in which timbers were staked and cut to the desired roof angle.

Gable ends being placed.

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By the end of day four the structure was quite tall and the roof system was ready for the top of the walls.

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Day Five: We started assembling the perlings and gable ends; however, the temperature dropped considerably and the wind was coming off the lake with 20mph gusts. Although far from finished, we decided to call it finished…until next spring!

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Many thanks to the whole crew!
Tom, Mike and Barb Wilson, Lonnie, Mike and Bonnie, (Dad and Mom) Anne, Alan and weekend warriors Stephanie, Ranae and Stephen (not pictured). 

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The timbers will soon be on their way to White Eagle where they will be stored until April or whenever the snow melts. Follow the building process online, and be sure to check out the building site next summer!

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