by Edward on Dec 19, 2013
in Rustic Home Décor Times
We were recently married and we needed more space. I grew up hunting and I have some mounts that I obtained while hunting with my dad. My wife and I did not want a room with just a bunch of heads in it. If you have ever seen deer and elk mounts in a room with 8 foot ceilings…it looks funny. They tend to be too big and too crowded for a space with ceilings that height. We live on a 50 acre property and woods are plentiful. I grew up with a wood stove and swore I would never own one once I moved out of my parents’ home..till I started getting $600 dollar a month electric bills (electric heat) during the winter. So we wanted a woods stove and tall ceilings…and that is how it began and we started our list.
The layout of our room was to be 27x 17 feet with 14 foot ceilings. We got bids from three different contractors to build the shell and roof the structure. My father in law is a retired electrician and he agreed to wire the addition. From this point we really needed to define what we wanted, outlets, lighting etc.
My short list included:
Hunting cabin theme – because I grew up hunting with my dad and is a passion of mine
Western Cowboy cabin theme- I always wanted to be a cowboy, rode bulls for a brief time- was not that good
Lumber jack theme- I grew up around loggers, log trucks, and national forest lands all of which remind me of home
Tavern bar decor theme- I love the neighborhood pub and cheers! Where everyone knows your name
So many hours and hours of scanning the internet, I found an eleven foot bar from a reclamation house that pulls out old things out of old buildings before they are torn down. Pretty rough shape but I am pretty handy with wood tools and power saws- and that bar ended up being a diamond in the rough. More hours and hours of searching and I found a used woodstove, pipe, and hearth.
So wiring around where the bar would be, the flat screen TV which was going to be above the bar and detailing out where the wood stove would sit- I kind of picked walls for each of our theme component parts. The majority of mounts and racks on one wall, eclectic Western Tavern behind the bar, logging motif on another wall and a good dose of cowboy on another and peppered though out all the walls, which pulled all the elements together.
Putting in a knotty pine tongue and groove ceiling, wood floor, and we stained all including the bar a matching stain that pulled all the wood elements together. Finally, we agonized over wall color and ended up hitting a home run of a two tone color scheme of a mocha brown earth tone on two walls and a coffee cream on the other two.
Decorative elements of rawhide snow shoes, antique saws, spurs etc. were found at estate sales, countless hours on online sites, garage sales, auctions, etc. I think we may have spent as many hours searching for décor items as we did putting up walls, floor, ceilings, and finish trim.
What I would have done to have had access to this site at the time!
I would have cut my search time down at least in half by finding items and elements all in one place and tons cheaper! This fact was the motivation for our creating this site, to give others the help and assistance to find new and new reproduction cabin décor items as well as an easy access to one of a kind period vintage antiques with inventories that are constantly updating!
