[From Lars' memoirs.]

We built the cabin from cedar trees that we cut in the spring, when the new season's sap
made bark stripping easy. Some of the Reid boys brought a horse one Saturday and
dragged the peeled logs out to the back end of the field, where the cabin would be built.

Then, at the end of June, our trapper friend, Magnus Nyman, arrived.
I had met Magnus the second year I hunted with Fred Johnson in the Chapleau area.
With Magnus's craft and my assistance, the cabin was erected.

The cedar logs were held in place by Magnus's beautifully dovetailed corners and by
vertical dowels made from slender jack pines, inserted into holes that we bored with
hand augers. The only materials purchased were a few nails, plywood sheets for the floor,
and hand-split red cedar shakes from B.C for the roof (.just like the ones I split
for my mink shed years ago). Total cost, including Magnus's wages, was only $1500.

I took my annual holidays during the month of July, and the cabin was completed in
exactly one month. During the building, Magnus and I, and sometimes Mark and Elsen,
stayed in a tent on the property.

Mark was then just eight years old. In my opinion, Mark always seemed to have a problem
recognising his limitations. In actual fact, I had trouble believing his abilities!
Many times I tried and failed to convince him that certain things were beyond him. For example,
he made a little three-legged stool out of the sawed-off end of a log, bored with a
hand auger to accept jack pine dowel legs. "Mark," I said, "You can't do that. It's just
too much for you!" Well, he persisted -- and proved me wrong.

On the 31st of July, in the afternoon that we completed the building, we had a hard rain.
Magnus, never having worked before with hand-split shakes, was very worried that the roof
would leak. Because if the nature of these shakes, their irregularities, bows and dips,
one could stand in the cabin and see bits of the sky here and there through the shake roof.
When the rain thundered down that afternoon, Magnus stood there in the cabin fully expecting
our new roof to leak like a sieve, but no, not a drop came through! My confidence in the
hand-split shakes was not misplaced; to me they were far more aesthetically pleasing than
the more commonly seen sheet iron or tarpaper roofs on log cabins.

Our 44 acres in the country became a very important recreational retreat for us. In fact,
I feel that "Cedar Wild" became one of the most important influences for our lives as a family.