Cabinology (CABINS) Encore with Dale Mulfinger

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Hi there, 2024, Allie here to say this is a cozy encore of an episode that is a pure delight.

Such a treat.

I love it.

One of my faves.

And it's woodsy, it's chill, it's cozy.

We recorded it a few years back, but I've added in some updates.

Okay, enjoy.

Oh, hey, it's that friend who can't sit at a diner table without making modular sculptures with the half and half creamers.

Can't not do it.

Allie Ward back with another episode of Apologies.

Okay, but before we hit the road, let's make a pit stop at Thank Youville to say thanks to all the folks supporting this podcast on Patreon.

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Okay, cabinology.

Woo!

Ho boy howdy.

Let me say right now, I love cabins.

I think I'm obsessed with them.

Like I look for cheap deals to rent them.

I have dreams about them.

I Pinterest them.

I don't Pinterest anything.

I covet them.

I admire them.

And in fact, this past week, I found a photo in my phone from five years ago I took of one of this guest's books without even knowing who he was or that I would meet him.

I follow many hashtag cabin porn Instagrams, which has everything to do with cabins, literally nothing to do with naked people.

I see pictures of cabins that I want to hug too hard, like something cute that you'd squeeze to the point of peril.

So let's dive into a subject I could not be more excited about.

Okay, so the word cabin comes from the Latin for hut, and P.S.

cabana is related.

How did I never realize that?

Duh, wow, okay.

So cabinology is a relatively new but established term.

It was coined in relation to this ologist's work and career.

I first became aware of this ology blissfully enough actually while in a lodge in the wilds of Montana.

It was the summer of 2017.

I was surrounded by my huge weird family that I love.

And side note, my dad is one of 11 kids and so the Ward family reunions They're roughly half the size of like a summer music festival.

They're a party.

And I was drinking an evening margarita out of a chipped coffee mug and the sounds of my elders crushing each other in a pinnacle game two tables over.

I thumbed through this Outdoorsy magazine.

I saw the byline of this very guest touting himself as a cabinologist.

I was like, hot damn.

I vowed to myself, I will find this cabinologist when I finally launch that Ologies podcast in my future, and I will interview him.

And so indeed, I did, and you're about to listen to it.

The stuff dreams are made of.

So I made my way to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where his headquarters of his architecture firm are it's Sala, which he said means special room in Italian, and it also stands for the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

So I went up some breezy stairs to his crisp downtown office filled with light wood and clean lines, high ceilings, a lot of airy white, and we cabin chatted.

So we cover what is a cabin?

When does a cabin just become a house?

And why are they so cozy?

And what makes cabins horror flick fodder?

How is a summer cabin visit different than a winter one?

How do you build one?

What about those weird franking cabins built out of old stuff from a bunch of different buildings?

How big should the windows be and which way should they face?

How do you even design a cabin?

And in all caps, bold italics, why are cabins the best?

So come watch the sunset, drag a chair to the fire pit, pour a mug of whatever's handy, and breathe in an episode with architect, author, expert, and a warm, warm, bright lantern of a person, cabinologist Dale Mulfinger.

And I might make you scooch into this just a little bit more.

These are like stage mics, so they're like, get on up in it.

I know you are a cabinologist.

I am a cabinologist.

It was anointed upon me by an external person, actually a radio personality, who upon hearing that I was researching cabins with students at the university, he

announced on the radio that I must be a cabinologist.

So I consider myself having an instantaneous PhD.

How long ago was that?

That was probably about 15 years ago.

Where you're like, well, I'm changing my business cards.

That's it.

I adopted it immediately, and I've been using it since.

And I wrote a book called Cabinology after it.

And I always credit this person

who gave me that name.

I didn't invent it for myself.

Quick aside, credit goes to Minnesota Garage Logic radio host Joe Satchery for dropping that C word so, so many years ago.

Now, as for Dale's bibliography, it's extensive.

So, between designing cabins, he's also managed to churn out a bunch of books, including The Cabin, Inspiration for the Classic American Getaway, The Getaway Home, Family Cabin, Inspiration for Camps, Cottages, and Cabins, Cabinology, a handbook to your private hideaway.

So, in his author bio, he is credited as a cabinologist.

The dude has earned it.

You've been a cabinologist for, you know, at least 15 years, but how long have you been a cabinologist in practice, not just in title?

Well, probably

about 30 years ago, as a part of my architectural practice, which we design residential homes, I was asked to do my first cabin design.

And I realized then that I didn't grow up, although I grew up in cabin world, Minnesota and Wisconsin, I didn't grow up with a cabin of my family background.

So I had not spent much much time there.

And as I might often do, when I get asked to design something I'm not used to, I try and do some research.

And in this instance, I thought, well, it'd be fun to do some research with my students at the university.

So I hustled a few students over to do a summer class.

And the essence of the summer class was, let's go out into cabin land.

And every student and myself included would have to document 10 cabins.

And out of that 10 cabins, we would say, which cabin feels more cabin-like than any of the rest and why.

And so, as I was telling them, search for the quintessential cabin.

So, we did that, and we, I think, learned a little bit along that process.

And a good friend of mine who

had was editor of a local magazine said, well, if you find anything interesting in this process, why don't you write an article in my magazine?

So I wrote my first article, and then I wrote my second article, and third and fourth, and ultimately 72 articles

over 12 years.

Heck yeah.

Always researching.

And so these were little brief vignettes about some cabin that interested me for some reason.

So

vertical log.

We're all familiar with horizontal log cabins, but all of a sudden

I noticed some that have vertical logs, which turns out that it's an old French trapper's method.

So coming into Minnesota and the northern part of the country and in northern Wisconsin, you have French trappers who made quick cabins.

And the vertical log technique allowed them essentially single-handedly to make a simple shelter.

Okay, so side note, I looked these up, and apparently vertical log cabins are also easier to build because you can use a bunch of 10-foot tall logs up and down instead of having to find and drag perfectly straight 20 to 40 foot logs to lay horizontally.

Now, in addition to vertical logs just being more slimming than horizontal logs, they were also tested by time.

So, before the French fur trappers traipsed about harvesting beavers and such, indigenous folks like the Yarik tribes and the Chinook peoples had been building vertical plank houses out of cedar in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years.

They knew what was up.

And that tradition sustained itself for a while.

So, you know, finding out why, vertical log, who did it, you know, all those things are fun.

It's fun to see somebody turn

a building that you wouldn't expect to be a cabin into a cabin, a church or a

small church or a school or whatever, a box car, a train car, a caboose.

So a lot of cabins are inventive as to somebody's got a crazy idea and they say, oh, that'd be fun as a cabin, and so they just try it.

Metal containers, buildings?

So Dale explained two things that separate cabins from houses are one, cabins typically don't have garages, and the master bedrooms don't usually have en suite bathrooms.

So rather than hide away in your big bedroom, using your toilet away from the rest of the family, all the bedrooms tend to branch off a main living space.

So people can spend this time in nature bonding together and being lovingly in each other's business.

So privacy is not a particularly big issue in a cabin.

Tell me a little bit about square footage.

Can you have a 2,000 square foot cabin?

Yes.

Okay, you can.

Sure.

So what makes it a cabin?

I think what makes it a cabin are some of its attributes, how it flows, whether it captures views or things that are important to the land that you're connected to.

But yes, you can have a larger structure that is a cabin.

Maybe because you're gathering a lot of people there.

So

my last book that I wrote was called The Family Cabin, and it probably has projects in it that range from 400 square feet to 2,500 square feet practically.

And some cabins are created for extended family.

So I have one for two sisters.

They're each married, so they have husbands.

They each have four kids.

So now we're talking about whatever that is, 12 people.

Grandma and Grandpa show up, there's 14.

You can't do that in a 400 square foot structure.

So you need more space, more place for the activities of those youth as they're growing and changing and they're eventually bringing the Boy Scout troop with them or whatever.

So, yes, cabins can be of quite a variety of sizes.

At some point, when they get too large, we might call them a lodge.

Oh, I hadn't thought about that.

The family lodge.

I wonder if there's a lodgeology out there.

There you go.

I'm going to have to look into it.

Somebody's going to have to step into the void.

Okay, side note: I found one record for logology from 1961, and I wanted to tell you about it.

It's from the University of Montana when the Student Union Gathering Center was called the Lodge, and Logology was deemed by students the most popular course in sport on campus.

One student said: the most popular phases of the logology course are smoking 101 and advanced time-killing Killing 201, which I suppose nowadays I guess would be upgraded to Introduction to Vaping.

Perhaps extra credit, fixing the cultural and climatological mess we have inherited.

Not to get too dark.

Anyway, enough of lodges.

Where are cabins?

Now, in terms of the culture of cabins in this part of the country, because there are more lakes, are there more cabins?

Is this the best place to be a cabinologist?

I think this is one of the premier places to be a cabinologist because we really, really do have an incredible cabin culture here, particularly in the Twin Cities.

And we go out to the lakes of Minnesota and or the lakes of Wisconsin because although we may be better known for our lakes, Wisconsin actually has quite a number of them as well.

So we probably have more cabin users per capita than any other part of the country.

And part of that is that

when you're on the coast, for instance, where there certainly are getaway places, often when you have a place on the coast, it might be referred to as a cottage, a seaside cottage rather than a cabin.

Cabins plus etymology.

I'm dying right now.

If you can't hear in my voice, I was like starry-eyed floating in a cloud this entire interview.

Dale Molfinger is like the Beyoncé of cabin designers.

There are some names that

Cabin competes with.

And if you go into the Adirondacks or in Upper New England, you will come across the name Camp, which is commonly used for what we here in the Midwest and or further west might refer to as a cabin.

And the name camp shows up again down in the bios of Louisiana.

I'm not quite sure of the origins of that other than I think a lot of cabins

in the early days in New England were created as a part of an ensemble of many structures and were part of what we might think of as a camp environment.

Oh, like maybe there's a main lodge and then some outbuildings that are the camps.

Right.

And also the name cottage shows up.

So you can take the same structure and slide it first out of Minnesota.

It might be called a cabin in Minnesota, but head further east and get to Michigan.

It might be called a cottage,

particularly if it's along Lake Michigan.

And then if you hit the Adirondacks, it'll be a camp.

And then if you slide it all the way to the coast of Maine, it'll be back to being a cottage again.

And what are some of your favorite styles styles of cabin?

A-frame, log cabin, modern?

All of the above.

All of the above.

I really am fascinated by the variety.

So no one singular thing stands out.

I'm as fascinated with an A-framed or a log cabin or a very contemporary structure or one made out of containers.

Yeah, they all interest me,

and I love designing all of them.

So it's not just a matter of recording what others have done, but also

being faced with a challenge of design and

trying to determine with my clients what seems most applicable for them and their situation.

So he likes to freestyle as well as hark back to traditional designs of yore.

Now, speaking of history, Dale grew up on a dairy farm.

And according to a 2013 article in the Star Tribune, he had said about dairy farming that when he was a kid and his blue ribbon yearling died, he knew that he didn't want to be a farmer.

But he was great at drafting, so he enrolled in the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota in a time when you had to be really good at rulers and pencils and precision.

There was no Command Z.

There's no undo buttons as well.

And getting to your design career, when did you start in architecture?

When did you know that you were an architect?

I went into the university wondering what I might be doing, but I had excelled in drafting in high school.

And so started into architecture

at the university and gradually got to enjoy it more and more and more and did quite well by the time I was exiting school, not so well when I started.

And then I worked for the first decade actually in urban design.

So nothing to do with small little buildings, but rather city planning and large-scale structures.

And then

probably in about 10 years out into my working career, I started gradually to work on smaller things.

And when I got to houses, I really enjoyed being invited to dinner after you were all done.

So out of that came a firm, which is now Sala,

and an initial partner, Sarah Susenka, who wrote a book called The Not So Big House, which made her kind of famous.

And

so we had a pretty swift start as a career in

her and I and creating a firm that does houses.

And out of houses came

the possibility of doing a second home for someone, which then led me to Cabin World.

Okay, so quick side note.

I was wondering, how many people have a second home, though?

It's so hard to get just one.

So I looked it up, and according to 2017 stats, 9.3 million Americans live in a house that has a second home.

So a very slim percentage.

But I did some digging, and one figure estimated that folks in the state of Minnesota are three times more likely to own a cabin or a lake house than the rest of Americans.

But the average age of cabin ownership is 68, and no one's quite sure what's going to happen.

Are millennials going to take over the cabins?

Are they going to sell them?

Who knows?

But Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes.

That's a lot of shoreline to cozy up to.

So Dale's in the right place.

But what about the rest of the country or world?

Are there places in the country where it's more common to have a house that you would go enjoy the seasons in?

Is there something maybe about the cold weather that you really appreciate the snow or really appreciate the spring or summer?

Well, I think people who appreciate being outdoors in the snow, whether you're cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, or ice skating or whatever, those people enjoy their cabin year-round.

Or if they just enjoy sitting by the fire reading a book when the snow is falling outside.

Obviously, if you have a cabin in the Rocky Mountains, it might be because you really enjoy skiing and therefore you've chosen a location next to Big Sky, you know, or something like that.

Here in the Midwest, people seem to vary.

Either they are truly just one-season cabin goers or they actually enjoy going year-round as I do.

I love the solitude of winter and some cross-country skiing, even though it might be minus 20 degrees outside.

I know, I don't know how you guys, I literally don't know how you survive.

As a Californian, I'm like,

the amount of layers.

If I could grow a beard, though, I think I would be able to able to do that.

That's helpful.

Come on, I'm Italian.

Do you have a favorite cabin that you've designed?

I know it's got to be so hard, but it was something that's really memorable or was a challenge.

The next one.

The next one.

No, I think one that I did up on Madeline Island where people wanted a unique retreat.

And

one of the couples said, I want something quite unique for me.

And I designed a 100-foot-long wall with a portal in the middle.

And after you pass through the wall, you step into a glass pavilion and look out over Lake Superior

and then if you want to go into a private space you walk down inside the wall to a blue box where you have a private sleeping area.

It's a very unconventional structure and it probably still stands out in my repertoire of work as a very unique structure.

And it's all about the notion of a retreat, having a phenomenal place of a retreat that leaves the other world behind.

And I think that's one of the things that when you say, can a cabin be a year-round house, one of the challenges with that is cabins often work best when they are the other world,

when they're not the everyday.

They're kind of like the mistress of the house world, I guess.

I guess so, yes.

Sweetie, it's a scientist.

And does a cabin have to have a fireplace?

No, it doesn't.

And in fact, wood stoves can be

an economical way of having fire without, say, having the cost of a fireplace.

And wood stoves are very effective in terms of really heating space.

Do they have to have fire?

No.

I mean, a cabin can,

we did a, we've done cabins without any fire in them, and it helps with the insurance rates if you don't have it.

And what do you think about, you know, in the last few years, the tiny house movements and tinier spaces.

Where do you feel like cabins fit in with that?

Or is it a completely different thing?

Well, there's an overlap between tiny houses and cabins.

I think the tiny house movement is a fleeting movement, and it'll disappear as fast as it arrived, because I think resale on it is challenging.

So, much like dome homes and other fads that we jump into every once in a while, I think this one will leave.

But I think cabins will remain, and having a tiny structure be a cabin will still be out there.

and I think tiny homes, as far as actually being one's home and living in it

365 days a year,

you know, it'll be questionable whether people do that in the long haul or whether it'll just be for two years of their life or a segment of their life and then they'll move on to whatever.

I will say, in researching tiny home living, a little abode tends to cost between $20,000 to $30,000 on average to build.

And in looking this up, oh my God, I stumbled upon an article about a woman who built a 196 square foot tiny house out of an old $500 RV, some upcycled wood pallets, very resourceful, but then she adopted a great Dane, a 150-pound great Dane to live in it with her.

Oh, then she got married.

And then they had a kid.

And I had to stop reading in the middle of this article and just pace the floor and do like a meditation because woman, what?

So sometimes life throws you curveballs in the form of quadruple the number of people living in a space the size of a kitchen.

Also, I asked Dale about this Danish concept that's all about cozy living all year round, but I had to ask my Swedish friend, Simone Yech, aka the gizmology episode gizmologist, aka the host of Shitty Robots.

Also, she just turned her Tesla Model 3 into a truck and named it Trukla.

It's glorious.

I had to ask her how to pronounce this word that looks like Higgy.

She helped helped me out.

So it's pronounced higge.

Higge.

I know that you have talked about cabins and huga,

and I would love to know a little bit about that concept and how you think it relates to the feeling of a cabin.

Not just the architecture, but the emotions of being in that kind of retreat.

Well, I think hooga comes from a...

comes from Scandinavia and it's been common in Scandinavia to live in small space.

They don't really need luxurious houses.

In Scandinavia, I haven't felt they've needed it.

So they have defined ways of using space that are effective, and therefore

the notion of hookah overlaps with the notion of cabins as we understand them.

So how you use that space and how you not, say, over-decorate it,

over, you know,

fill it with too many things, I think there is some common overlap.

I must confess that I'm rather new to the term hoogah.

And so I've been playing with it, if you will, and doing a little writing about it.

But I'm probably not as well versed in it as others might be in this country.

Yeah, I came across it pretty recently myself.

I have a friend who married a Norwegian woman, and so their Instagram is just rife with hoogah in the winter.

And so I'm like learning about what it is.

But just shout out here to the Lapidopterology Episodes butterfly expert Phil Torres and his charming and kind new bride, Celia Danielson.

Just get all up in their Instagrams for some breezy summer living, some really high-quality, cozy winterness.

They got it on lock.

Okay, speaking of, how do you feel that social media culture or Instagram culture has maybe changed the way we appreciate these remote buildings or structures or retreats?

Well, one big difference is that we now can rent structures everywhere, and part of that is made accessible through social media.

So we can now not just have our, say, our own cabin, but we can rent anybody in everybody else's cabin almost anywhere in the world.

And I think that's really changed.

And then we can immediately share that experience with an innumerable number of people.

So

those are probably the big things that have changed through the media as we understand it today.

Are you okay with that,

with cabin sharing?

Are do you share?

Sure, no, absolutely.

In fact, I think one of the phenomena about cabins is that we feel much more comfortable with sharing our cabin with others than we, say, do our home.

So we're less likely to offer up our home as a place for strangers to stay in.

Whereas cabins traditionally were places where maybe

we weren't accommodating strangers, but we were accommodating Uncle Harry and Cousin Beth and

the colleague we work with.

So we've often shared our cabin with many diverse people.

Do you have any memories of being in a cabin that are some of your favorites?

Well, I think snow falling and sitting quietly reading a book with a fire crackling and my wife's good cooking smells in the background is probably one of my best experiences or looking out the window and seeing the five or six deer that are eating the corn I've just set out there.

You know, those are some of the best.

And I think then I've had an opportunity to gather larger family groups together.

Not necessarily in my cabin because my cabin is a little bit too small for that.

But through the borrowing of friends' cabins or renting a friend's cabin, I've been able to gather, say, 16 of my wife's family members together.

And that made for a special occasion.

Okay, quick aside, I made you a list of things you can do in a cabin.

You can play dominoes, you can read a book, you can gossip, you can ask older people important questions about their lives, you can carve spoons, you can learn to needle point, you can roast marshmallows, you can write a list of all the things you want to do in your life, you can make your friends all tell stories about how they met each other, you can enjoy a poem, you can bake a pie, you can sip coffee out of one of those metal enamel mugs that they sell in camping stores, you could write a short story, you could learn to fry a fish, you could nap, you can throw your phone into the lake, you can quit your job, you can disappear from the internet, you can live off the land like that Walden Thoreau guy, hope you don't get arrested, you can wish on a shooting star.

I also like playing rummy cube.

Okay, now let's say you want a taste of that cabin life, but maybe a little closer.

You could fashion a garbin, which sounds like a portmanteau for garbage and bin, but it's actually a cabin you fashion in the rafters above a garage.

A garbin.

now what about a straight-up cabin in your backyard is that okay I've certainly recorded cabins that occur in the backyard of somebody's home now they might think of their cabin as a man cave to escape to or her writing

you know a place that she can retreat to for writing we call that a scriptorium oh I've heard it called a she-shed yes and a she-shed

so I think that's not uncommon and I've recorded a few of those in books I've done and in articles I've written.

Yeah, I guess a cabin is kind of like our childhood version of a fort, but realized and with plumbing.

Yes, without plumbing.

And some not with plumbing or the outhouse or whatever nearby.

But

yeah,

it might have some modicum of plumbing in it, some way to heat it up, which may be our little fort when we were a kid didn't have either of those.

And did you have a treehouse or a fort when you were growing up?

I grew grew up on a farm and a fort might be a few bales of hay thrown together with a tarp over it or something quite temporal.

And there were lots of places to go build in the in the forest nearby.

And so yes, I had all kinds of inventions of space that were getaways to hide out so I wouldn't have to do the chores.

I wonder if that's something about the mindset of a cabin or a shed or anything that we get out of our normal space to go to a new space, do you think that makes people more creative?

Do you think it frees us up emotionally?

Well, I think when these environments are small enough, we imagine that maybe we can have a hand in making them because it's not a super task to do that.

I'm always amazed as I drive to my cabin and I pull up behind a pickup truck loaded with things that are going to be in someone's cabin, whether it's a door they just pulled out of the church remodeling

and I'm often tailgating, and my wife is complaining that I'm too close to the back of the pickup truck, because I'm trying to figure out how in the heck are they going to put that thing in their cabin.

So I think cabins have some freedom of personal expression attached to them that makes them special places.

So you're inclined in a cabin to say, cut the notches.

of the height of your children as they're growing, you know, to score that

in the door frame.

And you wouldn't do do that in your house.

That would be defacing your house in a way you wouldn't accept.

But in a cabin, you're willing to do that.

See, cabins are casual.

They are the taking off your pants as soon as you walk in the door vibe of the architecture world.

They allow us to dream of a life with fewer restrictions.

Perhaps this is because there are fewer judgy neighbors in the middle of the woods, maybe?

I don't know.

Do you ever dream about cabins?

No, I don't.

I don't dream very much about cabins.

No, it's not a pervasive dream.

Yeah, I was just wondering.

I wonder if...

I had this dream.

Okay, tell me if you've ever had this, where you're in your house or you're in some house that you live in or whatever.

And then you realize that there's a door or a cabinet that you've never noticed before.

And then there's another room or another area that you've never realized that you've had.

Have you ever had that dream?

No, but I think we should talk about your dream for a while because

it's going to tell a lot about you.

There's this place you're trying to escape to.

You're just trying to escape to one of my cabins.

I know.

I just really want a cabin.

Okay, I look this up.

Virtually every decoding dream website seems to just plagiarize directly off each other verbatim.

But apparently, this is a really, really common dream.

It means that we're discovering new abilities and strengths within ourselves.

Okay, so let's say this is not flim flam and has some kind of psychological merit.

I just decided to stare out the window for a minute and think, okay, what part of me am I I neglecting truly?

Like, let's get honest with myself.

And the main thing that came to mind was just general grooming.

But I think I also had these dreams more when I was working from home and just living in a studio apartment, which isn't quite like Grade Dane spouse and baby level cramped, but it was a little tight.

Also, 2024 Alley from the future to say, since this episode came out, two things have happened.

One, I've built a shed in my yard.

Well, I didn't build it myself, if I'm being honest.

I paid someone to assemble it for me.

And I hang out in it and I ride in it.

I love it.

It smells like the woods.

It has spiders in it.

It's my dream come true.

Oh, speaking of dreams, we have a two-part episode now that has come out since this aired on dreams from one of the world's most foremost expert ownerologist, Dr.

G.

William Domhoff.

And we will link that in the show notes.

Also a treat.

Any Hoozel, dreams.

Windows to your gross soul.

Now, speaking of windows, when you are designing a cabin, do you decide to face the windows a certain way or is it different for every?

Oh,

where do the windows go?

It depends on the view, depends on the sunlight.

So, if you told me, boy, I really like waking up in the morning with sun coming in where I'm going to have my morning coffee, well, that's the east.

Or there are trees over here that are going to block this kind of sun or whatever.

So, yes,

window locations are extremely important.

And

here in the Midwest, we are putting our cabins quite often

on lakes.

And I have to remind my clients that lakes are a horizontal view, not a vertical view.

So we see a lot of people building cabins with very tall windows, climbing up under the roof.

for what?

To see more and more and more sky, not more and more and more lakes.

So

horizontally banding windows here is great.

Now if I'm in the Rocky Mountains, their views are often very vertical, looking up, trying to catch the mountain peak, and then a different kind of architecture evolves out of it.

Huh, that's so brilliant.

That's so interesting to know.

Anything in pop culture, any cabins that you've loved in movies or TV, or maybe like a cabin in the woods is always a scene for a horror setting.

Oh, whoa.

It's a cabin in the woods.

We need to go hide over there.

Nah, man, I'm not going in there.

It reminds me of a horror movie I once saw.

What horror movie?

The one with the cabin in the woods.

How do you feel about how we see cabins?

Well oftentimes I think cabins are connected to some of the horror films, you know, that that they're out in that dark wilderness of heavy forest and and and or they're next to a lake and some somebody drowns or whatever.

So they are often attached to that v genre of of movie in a way.

There's certainly exceptions to that where the cabin is seen as a tranquil place of escape.

I don't think I have any singular cabin or the singular movie that jumps out at me and you know the on Golden Pond.

Yes, that was going to be what I mentioned.

Okay, so On Golden Pond is a classic 1981 Academy Award darling starring Peter Fonda, Catherine Hepburn, and Jane Fonda.

It involves a lot of sun shimmer on a lake, a lot of soft focus filters, some difficult family relationships.

There's some emotional reflection, some struggle.

There's some trout, some growth.

Also, Catherine Hepburn wailing in ecstasy multiple times about loons.

The loons.

The loons.

They're welcoming us back.

I get it, Kat.

Loons are tits.

Which, yes, is an egregious ornithology pun.

What about myths about cabins?

What about something people misunderstand about cabins that you...

Well, I think they

they think they're not going to be high maintenance.

They do require levels of maintenance depending upon what you want to be there when you show up.

They're not inexpensive to make, even though you might think, well, shouldn't something primitive and shouldn't I be able to find laborers in remote places that are going to work for dirt cheap?

No, you know, almost anywhere today, you're going to pay pretty much the same price for a decent window and you're probably going to pay as much per hour for a craftsman in the woods as you would for a craftsman in the metropolitan area.

So

yeah,

those are probably a few of the myths.

And is there an easiest type of cabin to make?

Is it a log cabin?

Is it a shed type of cabin?

If someone is like, I'm desperate for a cabin, maybe don't have all the resources, what would you say is like an entry-level

setup?

Creating a cabin that only has four corners rather than 20 is a good start.

Log construction is a possibility, and certainly homeowners have educated themselves on how to do log construction and done it for themselves.

It has a lot of unique attributes that people don't think about.

It looks more attainable than it is,

and there's a lot to learn about the nature of what happens to a tree after you cut it down and how it shrinks.

Shrinks in diameter, not in length.

And so you set log upon log upon log.

They're all shrinking in diameter, which means your wall is starting to drop.

And it will crush the top of the door, the top of the window if you haven't designed it to take it.

So there's a lot of nuance to log that people don't fully understand.

You know, a little kid might have a Lincoln log set and think, well, that's a really easy way to build, but it's probably much more complicated than just a standard frame wall made out of two by fours.

Did you ever see that PBS?

Well, it was was on PBS, but did you ever see, is it Dale Wernicki's cabin in the woods?

It was good to be back in the wilderness again, where everything seems at peace.

I was alone, just me and the animals.

Oh man, oh, side note, oops.

I meant Dick Prenkey, not Dale Wernicki.

Who's Dale Wernicki?

I don't even know.

What the hell, Ward?

Also, thanks to Jarrett Sleeper's very on-brand gift of this DVD set a few years ago, I own this in its entirety, and it's been a dream of mine to host like a screening party with a mandatory flannel dress coat.

Friends all just hanging out, maybe silently whittling as we watch.

But if you need some dick, Pernicki, ASAP, a quick Google will bring you to a YouTube clip of Alone in the Wilderness, which, by the way, has 11 million views.

So apparently, we are just united in our lust for solitude.

He's just filming himself on like an 8mm or 60mm millimeter just hand hewing.

You just think, oh my god, how is he doing that?

Yeah,

to actually do logs and do them well so they're going to last is a skill that you don't get overnight.

And I've certainly known plenty of people who have done their own log cabin, but I've also known a lot of people who might have done their own log cabin and then had a lot of problems with it later because they didn't really understand some of the nuances.

And on the other hand, in many of the areas of cabin world, there are log vendors who will do these things for you and they will build the log cabin at their what they call their yard which is where they work in their place and they just they dismantle the cabin and and number the logs as they're dismantling them and then they reassemble it on your site like a puzzle exactly so it may take them five months to make the cabin in their yard and but then only three days to reassemble it on your site oh wow and they'll bring it all there in a big truck.

And is there a cabin that you have on like a lifelong goal list that you really want to see, some cabin on a cliff in Iceland?

No, not a singular cabin.

I mean, I love the cabin experience.

One of the fun things about being a cabinologist or someone who designs cabins is I often get to stay in the cabins that I've created for others.

So it's pretty easy to ask a cabin owner for whom we've done a cabin to say, can I use this on weekend when you're not there?

And I prefer the weekends when they're not there because I like bringing my wife along and she's one of my toughest critics, of course.

The spouses will be.

But I like waking up in the morning and saying, how does this thing really work?

Is the sun coming in where I thought it was going to come in?

And how does it feel with a wind outside?

So that's been a nice opportunity in this line of work.

Oh, man.

Lesson, design things you want to use for yourself.

It's sneaky and I like it.

And can I ask you a couple of Patreon questions?

Sure.

Okay, great.

Okay, great.

Okay, but before we get to your Patreon submitted questions, we'll take a break and chat about some sponsors that I really like.

But before that, the sponsors make it possible to donate a portion of the ad proceeds to a charity of the ologists' choosing.

And this week, Dale would like the episode to support the Clarence Wiginton Fund at the American Institute of Architects of Minnesota.

According to their donation website, quote, the Clarence Wiginton Minority Architectural Scholarship recognizes the extraordinary professional and civic accomplishments of the first African-American municipal architect in the United States.

He was also the first licensed African-American architect in Minnesota, quote.

Now, this program provides an ongoing partial tuition scholarship to students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color who seek to pursue a professional education architecture and who hold promise for succeeding in such a career pursuit, they say.

And Dale adds that it's really well administered and it assigns mentors to each recipient.

So thank you, Dale, for that.

And there's a link to find out more about that organization in the show notes.

That's the Clarence Wiginton Fund at the AIA of Minnesota.

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Okay, so back to your questions.

Okay, so for this first question, think about thick socks.

Looking out the window, it's snow shuffling down from the gray morning sky, but your coffee's still warm and it has an absolutely shameful amount of creamer in it.

A fresh log is on the fire.

Maybe you smell pancakes being cooked by someone who's not you.

But you're under one of those heavy quilts that your aunt made in the late 80s out of old denim when she was going through a divorce.

Okay.

Gingernut wants to know: why do wood cabins seem like the coziest thing ever?

What is it about wood that makes us feel cozy?

Well, I think wood has variety built into it.

It also feels like it's connecting us to the forest that might be right around it, around us.

So it might be a local wood.

And it has a nice auditory characteristic.

So it's a softening, it softens the sounds,

whether the sound is crackling fire or the chatter, the quiet chatter of the friend you're with.

And it's something pretty to look at.

So it creates a nice background to a warm, welcoming environment.

Let's repeat that because it's like peak hooga cabinology vibes.

So it's a softening, it softens the sounds.

Whether the sound is crackling fire or the chatter, the quiet chatter of the friend you're with.

Sidney Brown wants to know, do cabin makers still utilize techniques that homesteaders used back in the day?

Somewhat, yes.

Obviously the logs, log building was common to homesteaders.

I have a log cabin on my property that I use as a guest cabin, and I'm quite certain that its original life was that of a settler's cabin.

I don't think it actually was originally on my property.

I think it was put on my, you know, was one of the things about logs is you can dismantle a log cabin and reassemble it in another location.

And I think that happened with a lot of early settler cabins.

So in this area where there was a preponderance of wood available within arm's reach, practically, of where settlers were coming in, they often built log structures.

And some of our earliest cabins that we associate with getting away to kind of places were the recreation or actually the reuse of those early settler cabins.

Oh, I didn't realize that.

Okay, now a quick aside here: because for all of the history of North American settlers, there's also the history of indigenous displacement and resource exhaustion and architecture borrowed from Native customs.

So that narrative is a huge part of American history and can't be ignored.

I was doing a little more research.

I just found a book through the University of Tennessee Press called Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast, which was published, no joke, last week.

I looked at the publication date and I was like, June 2019, what?

So good timing there.

And it tracks the origins of Native American cabins and building traditions.

They look at the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Catawba peoples.

2024 Allie here to say we also have some great episodes that delve more into that history, like the Bisonology episode and the Indigenous Cuisinology episode about Native foods, and a recent episode that we did on genocide.

Also, this book, Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast, looks at elements of this architecture introduced by people of African heritage who were enslaved in America.

And the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture has actually relocated plantation cabins that were used as quarters for enslaved people and put them on exhibit as a reminder of our country's not too distant history.

Speaking of horrors, where do cabins factor in the apocalypse?

Mike Monikowski wants to know, what's the biggest obstacle of going off the grid if one wanted to do

Water.

What's your access to water?

If you're off-grid, are you going to be willing to have, say, a hand well or somehow treat water that you're getting out of a lake or stream?

So that's probably one of the bigger challenge.

Toiletry, you know, what are you going to do about a bathroom?

Are you going to accept having an outhouse?

And then bathing, a lot of people who are off-grid

in other words, they don't have power to

run a well.

Therefore, they're not going to have a bathroom in the same sense.

And they will often use a sauna as a form of bathing.

P.S., if you're in Minnesota or around a Finnish person, don't you dare say sauna.

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Sauna.

You're going to feel like a fraud, but you will avoid a lecture.

or correction.

Also, many high fives to my sweet and gentle Innovation Nation producer, Stephanie Hamango, for teaching me about how much Finns dig saunas.

Winter, summer, you just go sweat it out in this wooden box.

You beat yourself with a birch branch and jump in a lake.

I'm so into it.

Anyway.

So they all have a modicum of water available somehow.

They bring it with them.

And that may be enough to take a steam, you know, a steam sauna.

And that's the sauna is really their form of bathing and cleanliness.

And are there a lot of those up here in this?

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

There are a fair number of off-grade.

We did one just recently, an off-grade cabin, and

it has a sauna, and it has an outhouse and it has a hand pump well.

Oh what a dream.

And Jen Anath wants to know what eco-friendly upcycled or non-traditional materials other than wood can cabins be made out of?

And I guess we did actually kind of cover this because we talked about anything from containers.

It can be made out of many, many different things from straw bales to

And again, these are probably best if they're materials that are readily available to that region or area.

So containers aren't the best product if you're building, say, high on a mountain cliff in Montana because they're heavy and you have to have a big crane to lift them into place.

But you can buy them dirt cheap.

For $1,000, you can have a

20 by 8 foot by 8 foot container.

to get it on your property might cost you another 50,000 hours.

And then you need a welding torch to open up a window in it.

Right.

That's a good point.

Hey, hi, I looked this up for you, and you can buy a used 40-foot shipping container for less than the value of my 2007 Prius, which, if you must know, according to Kelly Blue Book, is less than $5,000.

So soup up that container house.

Maybe $20,000 later, you can live in it.

Just don't adopt a great Dane.

Or if you do, just don't tell me about it because I can't handle that stress right now.

And Carolyn Butler wants to know, do you believe that cabins should A, be a minimalist escape from the modern world, or B, that they can include most, if not all, of the features of a modern home in a more compact form?

So minimalist or

I think they can be either and it really has to do with your proclivity for what you want there, what you need there, what you feel comfortable with.

They certainly can be primitive, particularly if you enjoy the out of doors and all you're really looking for is shelter

that will warm you up a little bit and provide you a place to store a few articles and maybe some food, then you really don't need much.

But a lot of early cabins really are just that.

That is to say, they are just shelter.

And it was kind of common to imagine you're going to be outdoors to snip the beans, you're going to be outdoors to chop the wood.

So you're going to be outdoors a lot and you're really just sleeping and

maybe putting together a little bit of the food indoors, but you might actually be doing a fair amount of the cooking outdoors.

So

that was common with settlers' houses where settlers' houses were primitive shelter, but a lot of their food prep and even some of the eating all occurred out of doors.

So if you're going to be indoors a lot, if you're going to use it in the winter a lot, then you probably need a few more

facilities,

maybe a bathroom and a proper kitchen.

Your pod mother, Jarrett, and I have a word for these type of liminal lifestyles that we envy, and that is ideodee, indoor, outdoor.

Places that are ideody, for example, are an outdoor kitchen in a gazebo, sleeping in a screened porch, camping is ideode.

Or oddly, the most ideode place I feel like I've ever been to is the Honolulu Airport, which is just like an inside building, normal with a roof and terminals and gates and a food court.

But then you look around and there's just no walls.

There's no walls anywhere.

Perfect temperature year-round, no need for AC.

Go ideody.

all the way.

Now, speaking of energy bills, the next question is about offsetting the energy you use by way of generating renewable energy.

JCW wants to know: is it financially worth it to build net zero energy cabins?

Which I don't really know what that is.

Well, that depends on how you

what kind of dollars you have up front.

It's going to cost you more to build net zero, but think of it as money that you're putting in up front that you'll save downline.

But you have to have that money up front available to you.

So,

as I say, it depends on how you get your money as to whether or not you can afford to build

the extra finances up front versus putting them into mortgage and paying them off over time.

And yeah, if you have the money,

you can build net zero and save those dollars downline.

I guess, yeah, just what do you have in your pockets?

And I think it might have to do with your lifestyle.

A lot of saving energy has to do with making sure that you have a hands-on approach to being a participant in how you use energy in your dwelling, you may think of it as passive energy, but it's maybe active in terms of

the need for you to participate in that, whether it's for you to chop the wood or for you to manage the thermostat through your iPhone or whatever, in order for you to keep tabs on just how energy is performing in that structure.

So you can't just build it and then let it do the work.

You have to be active.

It can do some of that work, like the extra insulation you put on.

It's like putting on a warm coat.

You know, you can leave it on and

all you have to do do is button it up.

Some of the needs you have for

energy performance, such as for solar panels that have battery storage and something like that, do require maintenance.

Okay.

Just a little heads up, your grandpa dad sent me an article a few days ago about an Irish team of researchers who are using carbon nanotubes in batteries to increase energy storage capacity by 2.5 times.

Everyone is jazzed as hell about this.

This is like a huge, major leap.

Hell yeah, nanotechnologist Valeria Nicolosi and chemical physicist Jonathan Coleman working on that.

We all want better batteries.

I owe you a margarita in a mug or a perfectly toasted marshmallow for that work.

I think we covered a lot of these things already, so I'll ask the last two questions I always ask.

Sure.

What is the most annoying thing about your job?

Is there anything about

well, I have to do a lot of driving.

Oh.

I mean,

I enjoy driving, but

it is a lot of driving.

So I put a fair amount of miles in my car.

And I certainly know the Midwest extremely well because of all that driving.

So, you know, sometimes having to drive four hours, five hours to a cabin site.

And I never want to design anything where I don't see the land.

You know, people will bring me pictures and they'll say, oh, we don't want to pay for you to go all that distance.

I'm sorry.

Land talks to me, and

more than you, the owner, the land tells me a lot about what it is I need to do here.

So I always want to go see land.

Do you listen to audiobooks?

No, I listen to local radio stations a lot and a lot of public radio

in various locales.

And even though

I would consider myself a liberal politically, I sometimes, the one and only time I'll listen to

conservative talk radio is when I'm driving.

And I would like to hear what the other side is talking about and how they say it.

So whereas I'm not likely to listen to that at work or in my home.

When you get to your cabin, then I guess you can decompress if it's been upsetting to you, right?

Yes, that's right.

What is your favorite thing about cabins or about what you do?

Well, I really enjoy the act of creating something out of nothing.

Standing in a piece of land, whether it's in the Rocky Mountains or in New England or here in the Midwest, and using only one's imagination while you're standing there trying to figure figure out, well, how should I create this thing?

Standing there just daydreaming about or doodling and or pacing off saying, well, it could be in this direction, it's going to be about this big and you know, I need to borrow a ladder and climb up this tree so I can see what the view's like from the second floor.

That's to me the most fun part

is that very initial, as I say, going from nothing to something in one's imagination and then trying to record it in a on a sketchbook or something so that that you can start to manipulate it that idea when you get back to your office.

Or sometimes sitting at the local coffee shop not far from the cabin and doing all one's doodles, you know, recording what you were thinking about when you were out on the land.

I'm more likely to do that, to record it quickly before I even get back to my home or office.

Do you give the cabin owners those sketches?

Sometimes.

Yeah.

I'm not I usually have nothing against giving it to them.

I sometimes forget about giving it to them, but most of them certainly appreciate when you do.

And then fairly early on, I make little cardboard models.

And that's many of my cabin owners now have those

models sitting in their cabin somewhere.

No, I think it would be great to have that too at your desk at work, just so you have that to think of.

Yeah, we make a lot of models in our office, and it's usually the designer themselves who makes the models.

And not like we're not hiring, say, student interns to make models.

Models are like our doodles.

They're a form of our own artistic expression.

This has been such a dream.

Thank you so, so much.

Your work is.

So I was wondering if you'd like one of my books.

Oh, I would start crying.

I would love to.

Oh, my God.

It's all yours, and if you want me to sign it, I'll do that too.

Duh, yes.

Oh, this is so exciting.

Thank you so, so, so much.

What a dream.

So get yourself in the presence of an expert and then ask smart people, giddy questions all you want.

And then maybe go in with some pals, save up for a night or two away if you can, or you can crash a friend's family reunion.

If there are enough relatives, they may not even notice.

That would happen at mine.

So to learn more about Dale Molfinger, go find his wonderful books.

Just Google Cabinology.

It's going to lead you down a little sunny, leafy path right to him.

So his architecture firm is Sala, and they're on Instagram at Salah Architects.

I'll link that in the show notes, along with all the sponsor and donation links.

And there are more links up at alleyward.com/slash ologies/slash cabinology.

We are at ologies on Instagram and Twitter, and I'm at AlleyWard with one L on both.

You can do follow, say hi.

Um, thank you to Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch of the podcast You Are That for managing ologiesmerch.com, where you can get bathing suits with the ologies logo on your butt and t-shirts and stuff.

Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the Facebook Ologies group.

Thank you, Jared Sleeper, for supporting my love of cabins and for doing assistant editing on this.

And to editor The Hearthstone, Stephen Ray Morris, for stitching together all these sound clips.

Since the initial recording of this, we also have Noelle Dilworth to thank for being our scheduling producer.

Susan Hale is our managing director of the whole show.

Jake Chafee is a wonderful editor.

And our new lead editor is Mercedes Maitland, who did touch-ups on this encore.

Thank you, Mercedes, and all involved.

And also since this episode aired, Dale and I have kept in touch.

I love him.

We email back and forth when he sees an ology that might be fun or if I find a picture of a cool cabin or when I built the shed.

And he wrote me last week that he was just working on an off-grid cabin near the Boundary Waters Wilderness area.

And it used material recycled from another cabin.

It has an open floor plan, he says, so everyone can smell the coffee brewing in the morning.

And another client came to him recently for a well-insulated cabin, thick walls and triple-paned windows, he wrote me, right off the Lake Superior hiking trail.

He said, one could probably heat this cabin in cold Minnesota with a hairdryer, and said, you'll be able to step outside, strap on your cross-country skis, and go for miles.

Happy holidays, Dale.

Ah, dude's the coolest.

The loveliest cabinologist on earth.

I'm so glad you got a chance to meet him through this episode.

And since you have stuck with us for the whole episode, what I do is I tell you a secret at the end.

This week, it's that I still have not made the acorn cookies.

The acorns are still chilling in a jar in my refrigerator, which is currently 2,000 miles away from me.

But another secret is in the last couple of months, I have felt so disorganized.

And for some reason, around my house and office, I have, if I'm thinking in my head, I have probably six different canvas tote bags that are like half filled with stuff that doesn't belong in them.

Like I took a tote bag for an outing and then came home, and instead of taking everything out, like melted lip balm, and maybe there's a pamphlet in there about a garden and a toothpaste sample from the dentist, instead of putting those away, I just didn't know where to put those things.

So next time I left the house, I just got an empty tote bag.

I took my wallet and keys, used the new tote bag, collected some extra ephemera and detritus, like hotel pens or a sewing kit, or a magazine I read, and maybe we'll use for, I don't know, like a vision board in the new year.

And so now I'm daisy chaining them, and like there's like half dozen totes and little corners that I need to just dump into a pile and figure out what to do with the stuff inside them.

I don't know if this is something that happens to other people or just me, but it's a maybe it's a type of procrastination that's like, I don't know where to put these things and I don't have the mental space right now to strategize.

Now, there are bigger problems in the world.

Trust me, that's probably one of the reasons why I can't manage to unpack a tote bag, but this is just one of mine.

Okay, enjoy a fireplace, enjoy a campfire or a landscape of some kind of serenity.

Maybe do a game of rummy cube with the people you love.

All right, enjoy.

You deserve it.

Bye-bye.

Friday the 13th?

No, the one with the cabin in the woods.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

No, the one with the cabin in the woods.

Rain?

Uh-uh.

The one with the cabin in the woods.

Player waste project.

No, man, the one with the cabin in the woods.

The monsters.

That wasn't in the woods.

That wasn't even a damn movie.

Look, man, we ain't got time for this shit right now.

We need to get to that cabin in the woods.

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Does that sound crazy?

And it doesn't hurt that you're gorgeous.

Okay, that's it.

I'm taking you home with me.

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