Mike & Les: Living In A Log House

Before the future house, and before the present house, there was a past house....and it was made of logs.

Shortly before our second wedding anniversary, Mike and I and our baby Andy moved to Bridgeland, Utah; it is a small if-you-blink-you'll-miss-it-as-you-drive-by town in the Uintah Basin. We lived there for two years.

After our first year in Bridgeland we bought an acre of land that bordered the Duchesne River, and Mike's Dad built us a log house. There were two floors and a basement, each floor was 16' x 20'. The stairs went up through the middle of the house with the living room on one side and the kitchen on the other. Upstairs, the boys room and the bathroom were on one side and our room on the other. In the basement Mike finished one side as a den for him and the other side was laundry, storage, furnace, etc.

The home was built log over log just the way the pioneers built their homes. My father-in-law laid insulation between each log, but often when the wind blew we could feel a breeze blowing through the cracks so we would go down to the basement where we kept a roll of insulation and a spackling knife and we would fill in the cracks until eventually a day came when we didn't feel anymore breezes. On the day we moved in we didn't have a bathroom door, so Mike measured the doorway, then he went outside and cut a door out of a piece of plywood and hung it up. When we moved in our floors were just planks of wood, whenever I swept upstairs I'm sure plenty of dust ended up in the basement. It was a couple of months before we got carpet. Although we had a furnace, we built a fire in our wood burning stove everyday that winter, oftentimes I would put my two toddler boys (Jeff was born while we lived in Bridgeland) up to the window and instructed them to stay there as I went outside and chopped wood, that way I was able to watch them at the same time. We kept a live mouse trap in the house (shudder) and there were times when I actually thought that I could hear the mice conversing. It was Mike's job to dispose of the mice but one day I decided to do it....but that was the last time I did it, all I will say is this, don't drink water from in the Duchesne River. This was a very rustic home and we loved it.

One of my favorite stories to tell was of the day that I got locked out of the house. I was going to drive to Roosevelt and I had just put my boys Andy and Jeffrey in the back of the car when I realized that I had locked my keys in the house. We had no cell phones in those days and my nearest neighbor was a half mile away, I would have to carry Jeff and hold Andy's hand and walk to my neighbor's telephone. I walked around the perimeter of the house to see if there was any way I could get inside. I noticed that my bedroom window was slightly open, but how was I going to get to it? Suddenly I got an idea....the logs on the corners of the house protruded and there was a porch roof directly under my window, so....I climbed log over log until I reached the porch roof where I was able to get to my window and then into the house (refer to the photo at the top of the post, it was the left front corner of the house where I climbed up).

We only spent seven months living in our first home; we then moved back to West Bountiful. But during that cozy fall and winter, we had some experiences and made some memories that we will never forget.