How to Renovate a Heritage Log Cabin Interior – DIY Style

Reader Contribution by Victoria Gazeley

Renovating an old, heritage log cabin, DIY style (and inexpensively), isn’t really something I had on my bucket list.  Nor did I ever think I’d ever even live in one.  But in 2008 when I decided to pack up my son and finally leave the city to pursue my dreams of rural self-sufficient living, our old cabin was sitting there, waiting for us – and almost begging to be brought into the 21st century.

In case you haven’t read the story of our little cabin in the woods, it’s essentially this:  back in the mid-to-late 1990s, my dad found an old homesteader’s cabin while exploring the woods adjoining a piece of our family’s property and I was lucky enough to be able to buy it (or what was left of it) and have my dad step in to restore in 1998/1999.  At that time, it really was just a cabin, with a roughed in kitchen and no indoor plumbing.  

Over the years, it served as a guest house (for visitors OK with sharing the outhouse with spiders!), and later, after a working bathroom was put in, a home for my brother for a few years, and finally a rental.  By the time it came for my son and I to call it home, it had been empty for awhile, with bats, weasels and mice living inside, and was in need of a serious renovation.  Being the city girl I’d become, I just didn’t see myself living in a rough, or as real estate agents coin it, ‘rustic’, cabin.  I wanted some style, some pizzazz, a home that would be featured in a magazine one day.

So we set to work, planning and visioning what it would look like by the time we moved in.  And there was a lot of work to do.  Paint, new furniture, new draperies and finishings, wood floor refinishing, modernizing the bathroom, and most importantly, a new kitchen.

Here’s what we did.

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