The Story of our Bunkhouse
This is the story of our farm stay bunkhouse. It all started with an outhouse. Wait, that’s not right. Let’s backup.
Jayce (my husband) and I (Sari) had been investing in properties here and there over the years to help diversify our income. Then, when Covid hit, the whole world went crazy. Remember that? I don’t know about your area, but here, everything went SKY HIGH, worst of all being real estate.
We decided investing in anything during this time would be pure craziness – unless we invested in ourselves. We had dabbled with the idea of building some sort of guest house on our property, but it never seemed like a good time, until then.
Jayce had built an outhouse in 2021 next to our barn for clients to use. We decided that outhouse provided a perfect opportunity to build an old fashioned bunkhouse right next to it, and so it began.
Fall of 2023 we broke ground. Or Jayce did I should say. Using the backhoe attachment for his skidsteer, he dug out the crawlspace. Not claiming to be builders, we hired the help of a contractor friend to get the building “dried in”.
The bunkhouse sat dried in all winter long while we waited on the trades to have an opening in their schedule to be able to come out and rough in the plumbing and electrical. Once that was done we could move forward BUT…
Then we got sidetracked. And when I say we I mean Jayce. Enter the Sheepwagon. He found it online, couldn’t stop thinking about it so we took a short break from the cabin, picked up the sheepwagon, restored it, rented it out, THEN got back to work on the bunkhouse. Learn more about our cool old sheepwagon here.
Back to the bunkhouse – the whole inside needed to be finished, plus some outside work too. Jayce made fast work of everything that needed finished… although maybe it didn’t feel like it at the time. He plumbed the water line in, dug the trenches for the electrical, put in the drain field, insulated the entire bunkhouse, installed the tongue & groove walls & floors, painted, stained & sealed, refinished the clawfoot tub, built the bases for the sinks, built the kitchen cabinet & shelving, built the interior doors, forged the hooks that adorn the walls, fixed the antique bed, fixed the handle on the vintage fridge, scrubbed the vintage stove and wired in a new plug, built the desk and the dining table by repurposing a vintage singer sewing machine base and finally built the boardwalk to the outhouse so our guests wouldn’t have to trudge through the mud to use the bathroom in the winter.
Whew that was a lot of things to jam pack into a summer and a single sentence!
A few fun things about the bunkhouse:
Bedroom:
The bed in the master bedroom was bought from a family about 2 hours southwest of here. That bed had been in their family since the 60’s and the Grandparent’s were just about to celebrate their 70th anniversary. That style bed frame is friction fit, mortise and tenon style. The rails that came with it were not the original rails, they were ones that look like they were dug out of a junk pile judging by the amount of rust pitting. Because they were not the original rails (and so not the correct size) the tenons were too small for the mortises on the head and foot boards. Because of this, they would slip through and then break the mortises. Someone in the past had done a great job of fixing the mortises on the head and foot board; however, the tenons were still too small and with enough pressure or weight, would slip through the mortise and potentially cause the same damage over again.
To address this issue, Jayce welded a piece of flat iron onto the top of the tenon to keep it from falling through the mortise. He also wrapped the tenon in leather to make it friction fit. Ta-dah!
The old cosco step stool was picked up in Great Falls, about 90 miles from here. We felt this needed a place in the bunkhouse because Jayce’s Grandparents used one in their camper when he was growing up. Plus we needed something to reach those top shelves in the kitchen! Not to mention it just had the “right look”.
The hooks hanging on the walls (also in the living room) were forged by Jayce out of railroad spikes.
Kitchen:
We picked up the International Harvester Fridge in Rapelje, a small town about two hours from here while out on a drive celebrating our 10th anniversary. The fridge came from a woman whose parents had bought the fridge brand new in 1952. Funnily enough, the granddaughter (and great granndkids) live in our town!
If you have never been, Rapelje is one of those “out in the middle of nowhere” towns. Armed with google maps (so not reliable in rural areas!) and a sense of adventure, we headed home with our new fridge. We had general directions from the woman we purchased it from who told us “just keep heading west” and you’ll get home.
Well we headed West, but we were racing the sun which was setting fast on a cold November day. I decided to follow my google directions which had us take some funny turns.. Jayce was getting anxious as it seemed we were getting off the beaten path and perhaps driving down driveways instead of actual county roads.
We could see the lights of Ryegate (a small town at the main highway) however, a couple turns later and we were driving away from the lights! Well we stayed the course and FINALLY came out to the highway. Not where we were expecting, further west at a small town called Barber instead of Ryegate, but came out where we needed to be none the less. An adventure!
Another fun fact about our fridge:
The door handle – arguably one of the coolest parts of the fridge was broken. Jayce had told his brother about this and one day he sent a picture of an old fridge door and said “Is this the handle you need for your fridge?” He had just a door, with the same handle, sitting out in the junk pile. Jayce’s dad had brought it home for an unknown reason not long before he passed.
Jayce washed the new to us handle, repainted it and got it ready to go on the fridge door. Now I don’t know if you have ever tried this at home, but there is some work involved in swapping out the fridge door handle – you have to remove the entire skin of the door to get to the handle bolts.
As Jayce was removing the door skin, something fell out and hit the floor. When Jayce looked down, it was an old, silver dime! When he looked at the date, it was from 1952, the same year the fridge was produced! Someone from the factory must have stuck it inside the door when it was being built. How cool is that?
Our cute vintage stove came from a nearby ranch just south of us. This stove came out of the original ranch house, barely used before being put in storage because presumably, it was just too small and they upgraded to a bigger stove as soon as possible.
When Jayce and I came across the stove it was stored in something called a cook house. This is an old portable building on big steel wheels that would have been hauled out to the fields to cook for the men farming with steam equipment. We couldn’t believe how good of shape the little stove was in. We asked if they’d be interested in letting it go, and before long, it was ours.
With a little elbow grease to clean it up and a new modern plug, the little stove was ready for cooking on! Imagine, sitting for possibly 70 years and still working as good as new?
The beautiful drainboard sink in the kitchen is also a local piece. There is a historic B&B called Meadowbrook not even 10 miles from us. It is a beautiful sandstone building with an amazing barn. The sink didn’t come out of the main house but out of a small building behind it. Still, it was in too good of shape to pass up. We did nothing to it other than a little clean up and building the base for it. It is a joy to wash dishes in that sink!
The Kitchenaid mixer that sits up on the shelf came from a thrift store in Lewistown. We paid $4 for it and it STILL WORKS PERFECTLY! It of course, is from the 1950’s and the glass mixing bowl is known as a “beehive bowl” due to the design.
The old tins on the shelves were picked up at an auction in Lewistown, a whole box of them for $5.
Bathroom:
The clawfoot tub is special to us because it is from Jayce’s mom. It came from a house Jayce’s family lived in. After moving out of that house that tub sat outside, upside down for 35 years destined to be turned into a flower garden. Fate intervened and we brought the tub home.
Jayce spent hours with a wire wheel on a grinder knocking the rust off the outside. Next he primed the outside and then spray painted it the green that you see today. After that he refinished the inside. He taped up plastic all around the walls in the little bathroom of the bunkhouse and put a heater in there so it was about 90 degrees. He proceeded to refinish it with 2-3 coats of the bathtub epoxy. The few dings you see in it is from the plumbers dropping tools in it after it was finished and they were plumbing it in. Oops!
The sink in the bathroom came from a house in Hobson. It originally had the hot water faucet on one side, and cold water on the other. We searched high and low and finally found a bridge faucet to fit the sink so that our guests could have the benefit of a mixing valve, so they didn’t have to burn their hands on one side and freeze them on the other.
The cast iron porcelain enamel towel racks and hooks came from a man in Hobson. He just celebrated his 90th birthday! And when he heard we were building our bunkhouse he brought us this awesome gift. They are in amazing shape, with just enough wear on them that shows they are in fact OLD (we are thinking circa 1910 or so) and not just a reproduction.
Living room:
Originally we wanted to find a porcelain enamel table with chrome legs or a formica table with chrome legs for the dining area. While we were able to find some, they were all too large for our small space. I came across a neat table on Facebook marketplace that was a cast iron sewing machine base with a table top on it. My mom happened to have such a base, so she gave it to Jayce and he got to work.
Jayce built the top for it (out of our leftover pine tongue and groove flooring), but when we sat down at it to try it out, our knees hit the drawers. We quickly realized that wasn’t going to work, so Jayce came up with a solution. Jayce removed the drawers and came up with a plan on how to utilize them.
Using more leftover wood, he built a base and a top for the drawers and made the cute desk that now sits in the corner of the living room.
The TV we realize is totally of the wrong era, but we ended up with that TV when we cleaned out a mobile home we bought and when we brought it home and plugged it in to see if it worked, we could barely peel our kids away from it, they were so enamored with a tv “with a box attached”. So we thought it would be fun to stick in the bunkhouse for other kids like ours who had never seen this style of tv.
As we were getting everything moved in to the living room, something felt missing. We had that big open gable wall and it just needed something. Not long after that Jayce took our daughters (twins – age 8) treasure hunting – looking through the junk piles in the breaks. They found what was left of a 37 Pontiac car and decided to take the door off of it and display it on that gable wall. If you have never been to the breaks, it is extremely steep and it was a workout for them to get that door off and brought home!
One last thing – the floors. We knew we wanted to go with something that would have been similar to what would have been in an old bunkhouse. So we knew it had to be wood, but we also needed something budget friendly. We decided on pine tongue and groove for the floors. Yes we know pine is a soft wood, we were hoping the dings and scratches over time would just add character to these floors like they had been there for the last hundred years. But this is what I wanted to tell you…
To make the floors look like they had been there a long time and weren’t brand new floors, we brought the kids out to the bunkhouse. We gave them a choice of tools. We closed our eyes and turned them loose. Yes, we turned loose two 8 year old girls and a not quite 2 year old boy with hammers and other tools. While they had a blast beating up our floors, Jayce and I silently had panic attacks! What are we letting them do?!! Are they going to ruin them??
When we couldn’t take it any longer we gathered up the tools and put them away. Scared to death, we cleaned up the floors and took stock of all the new dents and dings. We proceeded with sanding, vacuuming, washing, staining and then several coats of polyurethane. To our surprise, the parts of the floor most beat up by our children looked the best. Good job kids, good job.
Thank you so much for reading this long post about the story of our bunkhouse. We’d love to have you come stay so we can hear about your favorite parts of the bunkhouse!!
If you are interested in booking our bunkhouse click here
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