The Careful Art of Historic Log Home Restoration.
The story behind restoring a 130-year-old Colorado mountain cabin.
High in the mountains near Nederland, Colorado, sits a small log cabin with a long memory. Built sometime around 1890, the cabin originally belonged to a mining family named Barkeen. For decades, it stood high on the mountain while the family worked the nearby mines. Then, in 1950, the structure was moved down the mountain and rebuilt on a new site in 1953.
Seventy-five years later, time had taken its toll.
That’s when the log experts at Colorado Finish, LLC were called in.
What followed wasn’t just another log home restoration job. It became a two-month effort to preserve a piece of local history and, in the process, add a new chapter to the cabin’s story.
A Cabin Built for Mining, Preserved for History
Today, the cabin belongs to a man named Rich, whose family inherited the property through generations. Although the last name in the family line no longer matches the original Barkeen name on the cabin, the property has stayed within the extended family.
Rich has approached the entire property with a simple philosophy, preserving as much of the original character as possible. Inside the cabin, artifacts from the past fill the space, everything from historical pieces hanging on the walls to a vintage wood-burning stove that still carries its original crest and dates.
If something needs replacing, it gets replaced, but only with careful thought. Many of the people he hired to work on the cabin he describes not just as contractors, but as artists. One welder, for example, built a completely custom handrail for the flagstone path leading from the cabin to the road, something that simply couldn’t be bought in a store.
When Colorado Finish, LLC came in to restore the logs, the goal was the same: protect the structure while respecting its history. For the exterior finish, Rich chose Transformation Stain in Gold Tone Light, intentionally selecting a color that would bring the logs as close as possible to their younger appearance while still allowing the natural character of the aged wood to show through.
Inside, the logs received a coat of Symphony Interior Clear Coat to preserve their natural look.
The goal was never to make the cabin look brand new. Instead, the aim was to honor the structure’s age while protecting it for decades to come.
Digging Out the Past, Literally
The restoration focused heavily on the cabin’s chinking, the material between the logs that seals the structure. Originally, the cabin used concrete chinking. After decades of weather and movement in the logs, much of it had begun to crack and crumble. Removing it was no small task.
The crew spent weeks carefully chiseling the old material out of the logs. In several places, they discovered something incredibly cool and unexpected, handwritten signatures embedded in the original chinking from when the cabin had been rebuilt in 1953 (Goosebumps? Us, too!).
Pat, who owns Colorado Finish, LLC, understood the resonance it carried. He told us, “I had my pick and chisel, and I was trying to shape around the signatures,” he explained. “But the concrete was so old that a lot of it just crumbled away.” Still, he managed to recover fragments. At one point, he even assembled the broken pieces on a workbench like a puzzle, so the names could still be read.
Those signatures were a small reminder of the people who had worked on the cabin decades earlier, workers whose efforts were now being revisited generations later.
When Snow Becomes a Work Tool
The restoration happened in late fall, and the timing turned the project into a well-planned and thought-out winter adventure.
Pat and his crew finished the exterior just before the first snowfall. But when they returned the following week to begin work inside, the mountains had other plans. Two feet of snow had fallen. The cabin was buried.
The crew shoveled their way inside and got to work, but another challenge quickly appeared. They needed to remove piles of old concrete from the cabin interior. Normally, that kind of debris gets hauled away in wheelbarrows or tarps. Not this time. Instead, Pat improvised.
“We actually brought toboggan sleds,” he said. “There was so much snow outside that we were sledding loads of concrete down to the truck.” Chunk by chunk, the old material slid down the hill on sleds before being loaded into the truck and hauled away. It wasn’t the most traditional construction method, but it worked.
And it added a memorable moment to an already unusual job.
The Cabin Earns Its Place in History
After the restoration was complete, the cabin reached an important milestone; it officially received historic landmark status. For Rich, that meant the preservation effort had succeeded.
For Colorado Finish, LLC, it meant something else as well. This was the first officially registered historic landmark they had restored, a personal milestone in a career spent working on log homes.
But the most meaningful moment came when the final work was finished. When Pat discovered the signatures of the workers who rebuilt the cabin in 1953, names that had lasted for generations hidden inside the walls, he added something of his own. He added his own signature.
“I think it’s pretty cool how you can do a job like that,” he said, “where you’re trying to preserve someone’s signature from decades ago, but then you leave your own behind for the future. My signature will be on that wall for at least another 50+years to come and won’t have to be touched.”
Placed on the interior where it will remain protected, his name now joins the earlier builders as part of the cabin’s continuing story.
Some jobs are just construction projects. Others become something more. For Pat, restoring the little Barkeen family cabin wasn’t just about repairing logs and sealing gaps. It was about helping preserve a place that holds generations of memories and leaving a small mark of his own in its long history.
Learn more about Colorado Finish, LLC, on their website, or follow along on Instagram and Facebook.
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