#217 The Cabin I Didn't Buy

I'm on a road trip. This is a special place for me because this is the first cabin I visited that I was interested in buying, five years ago, above Lake Como. It's an incredibly beautiful place small hut on top of the hill. If you just walk a little bit up you have a 360 view. It's incredibly beautiful. So It's still here, nothing has been done. it's a ruin, basically, an old barn under two very big beech trees, and It was for sale at the time for 90,000 euros, which was far above my budget, if I wanted to buy something out of the pocket and because it's a ruin and a barn, paperwork was heavy, restrictions were there.

So I needed to get a loan, a building company, so I didn't do it, but it's still a magical place... I'm not sure if it's sold. I couldn't find it online anymore, but Kind of excited it's still here. I'm happy where I am, but this would have been another adventure Ciao!

Hi I picked up some new tools as well.

That was the main reason for the road trip. Set of chisels. Um, yeah, beautiful chisels. Sharp I always had old chisels like, where is the... I was working with these ones. This one I used a lot but things have been rusting inside here, so Even newer chisels, like this one I bought 1,5... 2 years ago but it needs a lot of care, and a dry place to be stores and i have to workshop for that But yeah, sharpening materials, chisels, a nice mallet for chiseling. Another one here This is Japanese, but a much larger one so, for the rougher work like cleaning up beams but also for finer work, it's just nice to have this leverage to, really, to cut something I look forward to use that.

New plane as well. This is an a number five. The one I had was a number four like a Stanley replica And this one as well. It's just rusty. It doesn't work very well. It needs a lot of care and maintenance. And this one I'll have to store dry as well, but Yeah, beautiful stuff. And some clamps, these are for making doors and windows. Something like a parallel or a pipe clamp to glue up doors and window frames. Four of those. Some smaller ones as well. These are Japanese style clamps for finer work And a few more small pieces like marking gauges, stuff like that's still in the car Also a new vise, something like this.

But then one with two screws and a chain in between. So because this one racks when you try to clamp something So a double vice will be better than this. That's gonna be installed in the workbench there, which I will build myself, probably this winter. Yeah and then these were, I think the end vice I'm gonna take one of this. so eventually this workbench is gonna be partly taken apart and I'll make a new one But yeah, beautiful new tools. I'm very excited about it. Gonna take good care of it Oh.

you're ok? This is with uh cheese, like Philadelphia with uh cooked ham and salsa Because the good part is the center, it still needs to grow and this needs to go away, but they're not good.

It it is all right. Go lower, yeah. That's good.

You can have more Alright, everything works! Which is a relief.

so the the new inverter, 48 volts ,and the new battery that do their work So I run the planer now together with the dust extractor and they're both on the on the Victron system Because also the dust extractor trips on the Ecoflow. So the EcoFlow at the moment is only powering the lights here. Maybe I connect the outer kitchen also with that, but we'll see. I'm a lot more flexible now with the way I connect it. it's great Alright Not as much work done this week, mostly organizing, road trip...

I was trying some oils for the beams and the rafters for the inside. So the outside is gonna have the same brown color as the other cabins, but the inside I'm gonna keep much lighter. So I think I'm gonna do a... A transparent oil. see how it turns out, but yeah so next week we start building scaffolding and move everything from upside downstairs and in the workshop. So the upstairs is completely empty so I can actually work on the inside and on the roof. The roof is the main job for this summer. The building scaffolding is quite a job too because it's quite high. So I think we'll do that next week. The electrical system is working. There's a lot more power. All the solar panels are now connected as well and just how much sun... is put into the into energy is just incredible.

It's always staying at 100%, the batteries are staying full the entire day. Also with some heavy use. Obviously it's summer now so there's a lot of sunlight. The machines work most of the time. So I run the planer which is the heaviest machine and let it run And once it runs stationary it uses about 500... no 700 watts or so, when you're not using the machine, but the thing is rolling and then I turn on the dust extractor... And they run together well. So that's good. But not all the time. If I try it another time, sometimes the system still trips. It doesn't really go in an overload it just goes in idle, switches off for a few seconds, and then turns back on, so it's it's not 100% without problems, but it it does work. But you know these big machines with single phase motors, they they often give problems also on the grid.

That's what I've got from emails that people sent after last time when the machines didn't work Also online I read about it. Usually those machines are 3-phase, so 380V, but yeah it works so I'm happy with that Yeah, nice to be on a road trip. I'm always spending time here, you know, so I really wanted to go away for a few days. Was it Lake Como, I crossed Switzerland, Lake Lugano, These are just beautiful places Swam a bit, mostly driving, but it's always magical to cross the Alps, such beautiful places, castles... little villages everywhere, And it was exciting to kind of go back to the old dream, five years ago, when I was moving from the Netherlands to really look for something new.

In a time when it was not really going well, I was coming back from traveling around the world by bicycle So I didn't have much money. also because I was freelancing and... People had kind of forgotten about me and business had dried up a bit because of COVID, so 2020 it was an unsure time, so I was really looking for a place that was affordable, like the one that was here that's why the place in Como didn't come through. But it is an exciting place and just the feeling you have when you visit those places and you just look at the potential, you imagine living there, working and building there. It's super exciting That place would have been too much to start with... in terms of the amount of work and the the difficulty of the work site.

This one's a bit easier but now since I've got a lot more experience I could have actually tackled that one as well. So who knows? But I'm busy enough here. It's good to um keep some old dreams a dream. I actually checked out this place is still for sale. they're taking it offline for some reason. Um so yeah I guess it's gonna stay where it is It's just difficult to build there. You can't come there with the car and um but yeah it was nice to be there