Compiled by Katherine Owen
Photos courtesy of Walter Gardella
Step inside the 2,000-square-foot log cabin dutifully restored by owner Walter Gardella, who used his background in construction to transform the 1973 structure from top to bottom. Here’s his cabin story.
Walter: I first saw this house when I went to look at it for somebody else who was interested in buying it. There was a big old tree sitting on top of it, and the roof was shot. It was a mess, but I fell in love with it. And then COVID rolled in. I’m a contractor, and nobody wanted us working in their house. So I ended up buying it as a project.
The kids said I couldn’t. They said it was too much work. Too much money. My wife wasn’t even here at the time. I told her I had bad news for her: “I just bought something up in Hamden.” But soon they all fell in love with it too.
I looked right through all the garbage, and I saw it finished. I was in the car business originally, and I’m in the construction business now. I’ve done some pretty big renovations, so it didn’t scare me. I’ll tell you what though—I had trouble with the roof from the day one. The roof, flooring and the decks were all rotted away. It was dangerous.
Someone had put Styrofoam on top of the sheathing, and then they roofed right over the top of the Styrofoam. So once I eliminated that problem, I fixed all the decks and I chiseled out the basement.
Inside, it had carpet floors [on the main level] and concrete floors in the basement. I ripped all the carpet out, put cherry hardwood floors in and tiled everything else. We rehabbed the whole thing.
It was my first time working on a real log home, and it was a learning experience. The process was a little different, but we figured it out. Luckily, the original owner had a couple leftover logs here and there so I could fix it. But all in all, the logs were in pretty good shape, as were the windows. In total, the project probably took me six to eight months.
I go up there quite a bit in the wintertime—just about every weekend. We have a good time at the cabin; we’ll have a fire pit outside, and you can cook up a storm in that place. We’ve even got a little tractor museum in a barn in the back now, with a bunch of antique tractors. (Once you get one, you get the bug.) And the area it’s in is very secluded, so it’s just relaxing and enjoyable. You feel like you’re a thousand miles away when you walk into the place. When you look at the walls and all the logs, my God … the way it all interlocks together and everything, it’s just amazing. It’s an old-school cabin. It’s the real deal.
