Compiled by Katherine Owen
Photos courtesy of Robyn and Rick Athmann
When Robyn and Rick Athmann set out to build their dream home on Minnesota’s Lake Vermilion, they kept coming back to one picture as their muse — a cover of Log Home Living magazine (the predecessor to Log & Timber Home Living). Here’s their story.
Robyn: We used to live on a lake in the Twin Cities, and we decided that we wanted to move out of the city. We wanted to move somewhere in the woods, and we actually thought it would be Colorado. So we went to Colorado and loved the mountains but realized we’re really water people. We have a 24-foot Cobalt cuddy boat, and we would take it and our snowmobiles out to explore different lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Eventually, we came up to visit Lake Vermilion and realized this is where we want to be.
Rick: It’s a really good fishing lake, and it’s very scenic. We just fell in love with it.
Robyn: Rick has done a lot of building, so we knew we were going to build our house. We looked around for about six years before we finally found the right lot to build on.
Rick: It was challenging; I was the contractor and had worked on multi-million dollar homes on Lake Minnetonka in the Twin Cities area. I’ve gotten to do a lot of really nice custom homes in my life. But when we got up here, it was a little different, because the ledge rock underneath the soil can be very difficult. You either have to deal with it, or you dynamite it and shape it to what you want. I decided to conform our design to what we had here.
So what you do is clean all the dirt off it, scrape it, blow it off, put water on it and get it down to pretty much bare rock. Then, you know what you’re really dealing with. After all that, we stepped our footings up and down and drilled into the rock, and we put in rebar and poured our concrete. Now my foundation is tied to this thousand-year-old ledge rock.
That all took about a month, but once we had our foundation up, it went pretty smoothly from there. It had taken us a good two years to design our home exactly how we wanted, so we were pretty informed as to what we were doing once we got going.
Robyn: We had a cover of Log Home Living, which had a beautiful home on it, and we took a lot of ideas from that design. We met with Voyager Log Homes, who took us around the lake and into some log homes they had built, so we could see some different styles. But we kept coming back to the one that was on the front of the magazine.
A local architect helped us design a hybrid home with pine log siding to match a lot of those same features that we were after, like a lot of custom windows and custom dormers. Now we have a big dormer in the dining room and one in the master bedroom and bathroom. I think those dormers really add a lot to the style and to the light in the home.
That connection to nature — the fresh air, the fresh water, all the beautiful trees we have — is my favorite part of living here.
Rick: The Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Superior National Forest are right across the lake. I like to hunt and fish and snowmobile, and there are thousands of miles for that. I groom trails up here for snowmobiles, so it really is just a big playground, and it’s all public land. It’s not boring, that’s for sure.
Robyn: Sometimes we’re out there boating or snowmobiling, and as big as the lake is, we still don’t see another boat or snowmobile. It’s as if we’ve got all this to ourselves.
Want to share your home’s story? Contact Managing Editor Katherine Owen at kowen@aimmedia.com.
See Also: Getting to the Root of Hybrid Homes
