This might be a tiny bit boring to y’all, but I like to record our annual home improvement projects for posterity, and the blog is a good place for that to live. And I realized I never recapped summer 2023 projects, so better late than never as we are halfway through summer 2024!
As a preface, here are three things you need to know about life in remote Alaska.
1) Dwellings are interspersed within the boreal forest—sometimes a geometric arrangement of stove parts, tires, buckets, tarps, and other things that come to Alaska to die in Alaska. Sometimes permafrost and the general growth patterns of Alaska cause these items to sink into the Earth, or at least shift, and seem to have always been there. Dwellings may be unlivable by most people’s standard. But in Alaska, anything goes.
2) Many improvement projects remain undone because the appropriate time falls within the 3 months—4 if we are lucky—of summer. However, summer coincides with the time we all make the bulk of our income. Dictated by daylight, every minute fills up and the summer disappears.
3) Easy & fast are not part of Alaska’s home improvement vocabulary. There is no one to hire to do the things. You are left to your own devices. Believe me, I am the person that would hire out anything (my husband is the opposite of me & would rather save money). But people to hire don’t really exist. Add to that, supplies are not readily available. We have an Ace Hardware in our community, which would always be the overpriced first stop. Then there is a Home Depot (and other various supply stores) 2 hours north in Fairbanks. But even those places can be limited. Anchorage is 5 hours south, and has more variety, but not always everything. Ordering online means you are often met with the “we do not ship to Alaska” message, as if we were another country. So often times, supplies become your checked bag on your flights from the lower 48.
With that being said, we accomplished a lot during the summer of 2023! Some bigger than others.
Every year, we are fire-wising our properties by clearing dead branches, and I have become an expert at hauling off the loads of brush to our transfer station.

This is only a me-thing, as Justin doesn’t really subscribe to my obsession, but I’ve been adding wood chips—which I backhaul from our transfer station—to our outhouse path and picnic area path for the last 2 years. Much cheaper than laying gravel, and I think it has helped with our spring drainage situation (that, and the trench we dug). His obsession with the outhouse path has to do with collecting as many random pieces of junk from the dump to add decor to the path. We all have our things, I suppose.


Another obsession of mine? Lining the yurt driveway and picnic area with rocks. I will never be done with this project … always more real estate to line with cool rocks!

We also did some upgrades to our yurt outhouse. We actually contracted out someone to replace the roof to a clear one, but we replaced the floor, seat area and painted a tiny design to mimic an aspen or birch tree bark ourselves. Overall, much cheaper than any bathroom reno I’ve heard of!



An ongoing project that started in the summer of 2023 and will continue probably for the next few years is sanding, repairing and staining the logs on our cabin. It’s not necessarily that we’ve had issues, but it is highly recommended for the longevity of the logs. I had an inkling this would be a very tedious undertaking, so I figured we’d start with the back wall. For the record, tedious is an understatement. In 2023, I was the one with more flexibility in my summer schedule, so I feel like I spent many days of July and August sanding, then staining. Justin came to my rescue for the middle step of filling in the “checks” (cracks) with caulk. It requires a lot of finesse because they are tiny, and takes a lot of muscle to battle the caulk gun (a battery-powered caulk gun would be too much for the size of these cracks).


Anyway, we have another long list of things to do for summer 2024, including another cabin wall, as well as staining and sealing the beams of the yurt. Home ownership is fun, said no one ever.
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Ok, but that path to the outhouse is super cute and whimsical! Y’all have done a lot of great work!
I love the birch bark in the outhouse. It looks great!