Cabin History

Wes and Elsie Sullivan built the cabin in 1947. Wes wrote the account of it years later, and he is plain about Elsie's share: she built the concrete block foundation with him, did as much physical labor on the building as she could, and looked after two small children and the cooking under primitive conditions while she did it. His mother, Orma Sullivan, had bought the land in 1942 and paid the bills.

The later work went the same way. Dave and Barb Sullivan rebuilt much of the cabin between 2008 and 2015: Barb cut and stuffed the underfloor insulation — outside in the rain, while Dave stayed dry underneath — worked the come-along that raised half the ridge beam of the new family room, and the breakfast bar that makes the kitchen work was her idea.

Wes, Steve and Dave Sullivan also wrote the whole thing down as a book — see The Books. Much of it, with a good many more photographs, is on the pages listed here.

Where to start

Also here: Photographs with their stories and The Books.

The short version is below: what happened, in what year, with a link to the fuller account of each job. Underneath it is Orma Sullivan's ledger of what the cabin cost to build.

The cabin through the decades

Timeline

1942

In October, Orma Sullivan agreed to buy lots 11, 12, 13 and 14 of Lincoln Beach Park from George Betts — $675 plus 6 percent interest, at $20 a month. She paid the balance off in January 1944. Read more

1947

Wes and Elsie bought a truckload of shiplap, flooring, windows and doors from the Army base at Camp Adair as it was dismantled, pulled the nails out of it in Salem, and built the cabin with it over seventeen straight weekends — Sundays through Tuesdays, worked around Wes's nights at the newspaper — plus his two-week vacation. A bulldozer driver cleared the site for $25. There were no footings under the foundation: Wes's own explanation is that the bulldozer had scraped down to hardpan, "fully as solid as any concrete foundation would have been." Read more

1947–48

Orma paid the bills and kept the accounts, because she was a bookkeeper. She recorded the materials for the cabin as $3,142.59; her ledger is below.

1962

The water was turned on too early that spring and a toilet froze and cracked on 14 March. Somebody winterized the cabin every November for decades afterwards. Read more

1980

A year's running costs: taxes, fire insurance, electricity, and water and sewer. The four lots were assessed at $21,850 and the cabin itself at $11,210. The figures are below.

1981

Dave and Steve tore out the brick fireplace and its chimney and put a small wood stove and a triple-walled stainless stack in their place. The bricks became the hearth and the wall behind the stove. Wes wrote the whole episode up for the Statesman Journal that August. Read more

1980s

The roof was replaced late in the decade. Shingles kept blowing off it, and it lasted only about fifteen years. Read more

2001

In September, Dave and Barb drove down with a load of materials and the family built the front deck, with a wind screen on two poles and a used telephone pole bought for $75 and cut up for decoration. The brick planter came out to make room for it. Read more

2001

At Christmas a tree blew out of the lot to the south, landed on the cabin, punched a hole in the attic roof and broke the outer pane of the kitchen window. Dave and Barbara spent the trip cleaning it up. Read more

2003

Over Thanksgiving, Steve and the next-door neighbors swapped the worn-out Resolute stove for a smaller Intrepid NC and cleaned the chimney. They got the cabin up to a toasty eighty degrees. Read more

2004

A new roof, this time done properly: half-inch plywood underneath, thicker architectural shingles, six nails to a shingle instead of four. Wes paid for it — about $1,900 in materials — and the plaster puffin that had been dissolving in the rain was replaced with a concrete one. Read more

2008

In March, sea salt having corroded the 1940s meter base until the lights flickered, the cabin got a new underground electric service. While the trench was open Dave ran a second conduit under Mina Avenue and into the vacant lot next door, with cable and phone lines beside it, and stubbed them several feet in so they would be easy to find later. Read more

2008

In September, Dave took 26 inches of foundation out of the north wall so that a person could actually get under the cabin, then insulated the floor and laid a plastic ground cover over the crawl space. Read more

2008

That autumn the trees on the lot to the south came down, a retaining wall of used telephone poles went up along the front, and the driveway was moved off the vacant lot, because one day a house would go there. Read more

2012

The big year: the kitchen was rebuilt from bare studs, dormers went on the north and south sides, the asbestos siding came off, a second-floor deck went up on two telephone poles lifted into place with a Bobcat, and the hole was dug for the new family room. Read more

2013

The family room and its bathroom were begun — forms built from scrap lumber, concrete poured, walls up, ridge beam raised with a come-along, and the new siding left to weather into beach-cabin grey. Read more

2014

The Prowler trailer was sold and hauled off the property. Then lights and insulation went into the family room, the bathrooms were plumbed and passed inspection, and a cedar ceiling went in downstairs to match the one upstairs. Read more

2015

Buddy McClure laid the oak floor in the family room and gave it three coats of finish. The floor came out about an inch and a half low, so you walk uphill into the original 1947 cabin — which, everyone agrees, looks better than it sounds. Read more

Orma's construction ledger, 1947–48

Orma Sullivan paid the bills for the cabin and kept close track of them, her job being bookkeeper. This is what she recorded.

The table above is the transcription as it stands, with Orma's own total at the foot of it. The two do not agree: the line items as they were copied onto the old website add to $3,130.06, while the total Orma wrote down was $3,142.59. Without her original pages there is no way to say which is right, or whether a line was dropped, miscopied or added up wrong.

What a year cost in 1980

In 1980–81 the four lots — 11, 12, 13 and 14, each of them 80 feet by 25 — were assessed at $21,850, and the cabin itself at only $11,210.

The old website gave the total as $819. The four lines it printed add to $719, and those four rows are all the old page had. What caused the difference — a missing line, a copying slip, an addition error — has not been established.

People and ownership

The land came to the family through Orma Sullivan in 1942, and before her it had passed through half a dozen hands back to Emma Taylor, a Siletz woman granted a trust patent to eighty-five acres in 1894. Orma left the cabin to Wes and Elsie; in the 1980s they gave it to their four children, Steve, Nancy, Dave and Bill; and through gifts and purchases it came to Dave and Barb Sullivan, who keep it as a shared place for the extended Sullivan and Diviney families. The whole chain of title, with the deeds and the dates, is on the Ownership page.

Wes Sullivan's own account of building the cabin — the best thing anyone has written about Sullishak — is on Wes's History.