A sturdy little cabin with a stone chimney and cathedral ceiling has sat nestled in the forest off the beaten track in Falkland since it was built by hand in the 1970s.

Jim Harrison grew up in the rural community and when he was a young man in 1974 he and his brother bought 110 acres of river bottom land in the area for $34,000.

Using material found on the property, a lot of smarts and back breaking work, Harrison built the 600-square foot cabin just above the Salmon River for less than $500 and it is still structurally sound today.

“All the materials were there, I just had to cut the trees down and gather all the stones,” Harrison said. “There was an old farmhouse on the property I tore down for basic lumber and two by fours.”

iN PHOTOS: How a North Okanagan cabin was built for $500 in 1974 | iNhome — A man is seen constructing a cabin in Falkland in 1974.
SUBMITTED / Jim Harrison

Harrison started by cutting down the trees on the property in early spring and stripping them using the blade of a hoe he had straightened to run parallel to the shaft.

“In early spring the bark is full of sap so it peels off easily, you just run the hoe up and down the tree just under the bark,” he said.

He gathered stones from the property and made a foundation up to waist height around the perimeter of the cabin, along with a big chimney.

He then sunk vertical posts every six feet out of the stone wall, and tongue and grooved horizontal logs into the vertical posts. The spaces between the horizontal logs were filled with fibreglass insulation “chinked in” with a mixture of lime, cement, sand and water.

For the roof, he gathered truckloads of shingles off a conveyor belt at a mill in Enderby that were destined to be scrapped and for the windows, he used scraps of glass left over from a stain glass project he had been working on.

The door of the cabin is made out of cedar planks, and its hinges made from scrap metal with a cutting torch. Harrison put in an outhouse and electrical service for a phone.

It was the first cabin Harrison had ever built and is still structurally sound today.

“I’d never built anything before that but it was instinctual,” he said. “My dad was a mechanic but also did carpentry and could do electrical and plumbing. I basically picked up how to do that stuff from him.”

The property was sold in the late 1980s. The last time Harrison saw was in the late 1990s when he took his wife and kids to see it.

“It’s perfectly sound, it’ll probably last for a couple hundred years,” he said.

Harrison currently lives in Vancouver and is building two similar cabins on his acreage on Gabriola Island