lazajam
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# Posted: 2 Apr 2020 06:03pm
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Hello, Small Cabin community! 
Happy to have found this forum, lots of valuable first hand experience from your membership. Thanks to the admins for hosting this and to everyone for sharing their wisdom. This will be my first post here. I will keep scouring through to learn as much as I can from all these threads, but I thought I'd also go ahead and share the situation I'm up against with my family's camp property, and our intended remedies, in case anyone can share their opinions/ best practices when approaching these types of problems.
First, hope you all are doing well amidst the ongoing challenges and major lifestyle changes imposed by the pandemic. The implications of Covid-19 are definitely factors my parents and I are keeping top of mind if/when we decide to get into these projects. We'd need to take every precaution to self-isolate and reduce any risk of unnecessary injury. Over-estimate our material orders and have everything delivered from suppliers. Indeed, it seems like this offers a very good window of opportunity (with forced time off of work, for me) to put some work in at the camp, when those are otherwise hard to come by.
My parents are retired, 65yrs old and generally healthy, but at age 32, it's become evident in the past couple of years that it's my turn to be doing the heavy lifting at camp. For now, I'm just trying to do as much homework as I can to inform the workflow, and if I have to wait until the pandemic clears up.. so be it, although it's hard to resist the temptation to get up there where I feel I can be most productive with all this free time. This will be the 4th season that the property has been in our family. New to us, but located on the same lake as my paternal grandfather had built another camp back in the 1950's, which is now in my aunt's care.
As you'll see in my very crude birds eye property drawing and a few other pictures attached, we inherited some serious drainage issues and resultant frost heave with the placement of the Sleep Camp, which was the first structure built on this property in the 50/60's. It's still in usable condition, feels worth trying to rescue. Unfortunately, it's right in the middle of where all the water from up the hill wants to drain out to our lake.. The original large concrete pilings it stood on have been long churned out by the frost heave, so every year we have been re-supporting it with whatever is lying around.. very messy.
SO. We are going to make every effort to control the water as it makes its way down to the lake. French Drain + Catch Basins along southern edge of the parking lot, as we have experienced some water pooling up there. And with a small backhoe rental, we'll dig a trench above and west of the sleep camp to install culvert pipes / french drains and do whatever possible to dry up this area.
My main question to the group is, what type of foundation should we replace this with??? I was wondering about building some Gabion Cages around the base, but I suppose, even with drying the area up.. we will still have to contend with some frost heave. Difficult to install much under the existing structure though.. I would be so grateful for any ideas and recommendations you may have. Thank you!
Birdseye Drawing
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Sleep Camp
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Wide Shot From Lake
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Southwest Corner
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