It’s been a few weeks since I’ve taken the time to write a blog post. The month of May quickly slid into a pit of projects. We’ve been busy adding to the Love Shack, clearing dead wood and brush off the slope of the bluff and burning it in bon-fires, planting trees, bushes and grasses on the newly cleaned areas of the bluff. We’ve also had time to host some Drive-In movie nights, make a fast trip to Vancouver to pick up a fridge and bring up more items from the house, and meet with the builder and architect in preparation of the big house build. The entire month of May seems like it was over before it started.
I told Mitch that if we were going to be living on the Bluff this summer, we needed to figure out how to cook meals, store food and keep items cold or frozen. Otherwise, we’d be eating take-out, trying to cook everything on a BBQ and be unable to keep food from going bad. I don’t mind hard work, sweaty days and living an indoor/outdoor glamping lifestyle for the summer, but if I couldn’t cook regular food and avoid constant restaurant take-out fare, then I’d be spending more time in Vancouver than up here. Since I keep Mitch well fed, he wasn’t about to argue, so we planned out our new glamping kitchen and built it ourselves. We started out with a camp stove, a cooler and one assemble-yourself metal counter. That only got us so far and so we then added a roof and a built-in food and dish cupboard. At last, Mitch agreed that we needed to make this a legitimate part of our “Love Shack” complex, so we added on a floor deck, a fridge hutch, a washing station, a food preparation station, and a pot cupboard and counter top to go beside the Camp Stove. By the way, that camp stove puts out 30,000 BTU and works like a dream. We bought the grill that goes on top of one of the burners and that also works incredibly well. It’s now my favourite way to do shish kabobs.
The new kitchen is just to the East of the Solarium. It gets the morning sun and is a really nice place to have breakfast and look out over the Salish Sea. It’s surrounded by forest and the bird-song in the morning is amazing. Also, there are a lot of humming birds around, so we get a lot of little visitors checking out the new neighbours and making good use of the humming bird feeder that I hung from he Love Shack. Everything locks up and is contained enough to handle wild animals (the jury is still out on whether it’s actually bear proof). However, the kitchen functions beautifully and I’ve been able to cook just about any meals I can think of (although with no oven, I have learned the ancient Jedi ways of the “Instant Pot”).
Finally, because Mitch can’t live without long hot showers, we also added in a propane hot-water heater which works for dish washing, but also provides a seated shower area (see the second last photo above). This is behind the Love Shack and hidden from view, so privacy concerns are not an issue.