Winterizing a cabin means one of two things depending on whether anyone's in it. If you're leaving it empty, you drain every drop of water out of the plumbing, shut off the supply, put antifreeze in the traps, and set a low-temp alarm. If you're staying, you protect the pipes that can freeze, stock what you can't get to when the road closes, and get the stove and the wood ready before the first hard frost, not after. I do both every year: two of my cabins sit empty from November to March, two are rented through the winter, and I live in one at 2,400 feet where the first freeze comes in October and the last one leaves in May. This is the checklist for both, with dates, and with the winter I got it wrong.
The wrong winter was 2018, cabin two, which I'd drained "well enough" and left. A trap I'd missed under the kitchen sink froze, cracked, and thawed in a February warm spell, and by the time I got up there in March the cabinet floor and a section of subfloor were gone. About $1,900 and a lesson that "well enough" isn't a plumbing standard.
When to winterize a cabin
Before the first night that drops below 28. Not the first frost, the first hard freeze, because a light frost won't get through a wall to a pipe but a hard one will, and a pipe that freezes once doesn't always show it until it thaws. Up here that's usually the second or third week of October. Lower down, in the valleys, mid-November. I keep a note of the first hard freeze date every year going back to 2014 and it's moved around by five weeks, so I go by the forecast, not the calendar. If the ten-day shows a 25 anywhere in it, the empty cabins get drained that weekend.
Winterizing a cabin you're leaving empty
This is the full shutdown. It takes me about three hours per cabin now. The first time it took a day, because I hadn't mapped the plumbing.
Turn off the water at the main, or the well pump, and turn off the water heater's power or gas. Open every faucet, hot and cold, starting at the top of the cabin and working down, and leave them open. Open the drain valve on the water heater and let it empty; a 40-gallon tank takes twenty minutes through a hose to the outside. Open the low-point drain on the supply lines if there is one, and if there isn't, find the lowest fitting and crack it. Then, and this is the part I'd skipped in 2018, blow the lines out with an air compressor at 40 to 50 psi through the hose bib, faucet by faucet, until each one spits air and nothing else. Water hides in low spots and horizontal runs and it won't drain by gravity alone.
Flush every toilet and hold the handle until the tank's empty, then sponge the last inch out of the bowl. Pour a cup of RV antifreeze, the pink stuff, into every toilet bowl, every sink trap, the shower and tub drains, and the washing machine drain if there is one. That's the traps: they hold water by design and they're the thing that freezes and cracks. The kitchen sink trap under the cabinet was my $1,900.
Disconnect and drain the washing machine hoses and the dishwasher supply line. Leave the cabinet doors under every sink open so the room's air can reach the pipes. Unplug the fridge, empty it, prop the door open. Take out anything that freezes and bursts: cans, bottles, paint, the cleaning stuff under the sink.
Then set the low-temp alarm. It's a $30 device that plugs in and texts you if the inside drops below a set point, 40 in my case, and it's what tells you the power's out before your pipes tell you. I have one in every cabin. Two of them have paid for themselves with a phone call to a neighbor.
Last: walk the outside. Gutters clear, downspouts pointed away, firewood off the wall, anything that catches snow pulled back from the eaves. Lock the crawlspace vents closed. Mice come in when it gets cold, so steel wool in every gap bigger than a pencil, and a couple of traps set inside, because a mouse that spends the winter in your cabin has a very large family by March.
Winterizing a cabin you're living in
Different list. The pipes are running, so the job is to keep them from freezing while they're full.
Insulate every pipe you can reach, especially in the crawlspace and anywhere on an exterior wall. Foam sleeves, $2 a length, an afternoon. The ones you can't reach, on the cabin I live in that's the kitchen supply that runs along the north wall behind the cabinets, get heat tape, the plug-in kind with a thermostat that switches on below 40. That was $45 and it's the difference between a working kitchen and a frozen one in January.
Skirt the crawlspace if the cabin sits on piers, which most old cabins here do. Cold air moving under the floor is what freezes pipes and it's what makes the floor cold enough that you'll wear boots inside. Rigid foam panels between the piers, or even hay bales stacked around the perimeter, which is what my neighbor does and which works. Mine is foam and it dropped the floor temperature by about eight degrees the first winter, measured with a cheap thermometer on the boards.
On the coldest nights, below 10, let the kitchen and bathroom faucets drip. Moving water doesn't freeze as easily. Open the cabinet doors under the sinks. If you're going away for more than a night, leave the heat at 55, not off, and know where the main shutoff is so a neighbor can close it if the low-temp alarm goes.
The stove and the wood
The stove gets swept and inspected in October, before the first fire, every year, no exceptions. A brush and rods from the roof, twenty minutes, and a look at the gaskets on the door, which go hard and leak after a few seasons and cost $20 to replace. I covered the install side in the wood stove post; this is the annual part.
Wood: three cords for the cabin I live in, for a winter at 2,400 feet with the stove as the main heat. Split, stacked, and covered on top by August of the year before, so it's had a full year to dry. Under 20 percent on the meter or it's next year's wood. I keep a week's worth in the mudroom and a day's worth by the stove, and I bring wood in on the sunny afternoons so I'm not doing it in the dark at 15 degrees. The wood-shed-to-mudroom walk is 60 feet and in February it's the longest 60 feet on the property.
The roof and the snow load
An A-frame sheds snow. A low-pitched log cabin roof holds it, and two feet of wet Appalachian snow on a 30-by-40 roof is somewhere around 15 tons. Cabin three's roof had a sag in the ridge when I bought it that I'm fairly sure came from a winter nobody was there to rake it. So before winter I check the roof from the ground with binoculars for anything loose, clean the valleys, and make sure the snow rake, a wide blade on a 20-foot pole, is where I can find it. After any storm over a foot, I rake the eaves back four or five feet so the load's off the overhang and the ice dams don't form. Twenty minutes, from the ground, no ladder. The ladder in winter is how people end up in the paper.
The road, and what to keep in the cabin
My road closes maybe six times a winter, for a day or three each time. Not by anyone's decision; it just becomes ice on a grade the truck won't climb. So the cabin holds what a week without leaving needs: food that keeps, water in jugs in case the pump loses power, a full propane tank for the cooktop, batteries, a headlamp per person, and the medications anyone actually needs. Plus a shovel, sand or grit for the steps, and a bag of ice melt for the porch, because the porch is where you break an ankle.
Power goes out a couple of times a winter for a few hours and once in 2021 for four days. The stove doesn't care. The well pump does. I have a small generator that runs the pump and the fridge, with a transfer switch an electrician put in for $400 so I'm not running cords through a window at midnight. The off-grid post has more on that side. Test the generator in October. Nobody wants to find out it won't start in January.
Winterizing a rental cabin: the version for guests
The two cabins I rent through winter get a third version of the list, because the people in them don't know where the shutoff is and won't be dripping the faucets at 2 a.m. So the cabin has to protect itself. Heat tape on every exposed line, on a thermostat, so it's on whether anyone's home or not. The thermostat locked at a 55-degree minimum so a guest can't turn it off to save my money and freeze my pipes. A low-temp alarm that texts me, same as the empty cabins. Firewood stacked on the porch by me every Friday, dry and split, because a guest with wet wood and a cold cabin writes a review about it.
The laminated sheet on the fridge in those cabins covers the stove, the generator if the power goes, the number for the guy who plows the road, and the sentence "if a faucet stops running, call Wade, do not wait until morning." One guest called at 11 p.m. in January 2023 because the kitchen tap had gone to a trickle. Heat tape had tripped its breaker. Ten minutes to reset, no damage. If they'd waited until morning I'd have been replacing a wall. I tipped them a free night. Best $180 I've spent on a rental.
The first season renting post has the rest of what I learned; winter is where most of it came from.
What a cabin in winter is actually like
Quieter than any other season, and darker. The sun's down by 5:30 in December and up after 7, so you're living by lamplight fourteen hours a day, and the lighting in a cabin decides whether that's cozy or grim. I've written about lighting a dark cabin more than anything else on this site and winter is why. Warm bulbs, lights at eye level on the walls, the stove doing the low light, and a good lamp by the chair. Overhead lights in a cabin in January feel like a waiting room.
The other thing about winter is that it's when the cabin earns its keep. Summer up here is easy. Winter is when the chinking you patched in October, the pipes you wrapped, the wood you stacked in August, and the stove you swept all show up at once, and you either sit by the fire with the wind going or you're on the phone with a plumber. I've done both. The first one is better.
The checklist, dates attached
August: split and stack next year's wood. Early October: sweep the chimney, check stove gaskets, test the generator, order heat tape and foam if you need any. Mid-October, or the weekend before the first forecast 25: empty cabins drained, blown out, antifreeze in the traps, low-temp alarms set, mice sealed out. Same weekend, the lived-in cabin: pipes wrapped, crawlspace skirted, cabinet doors open, a week of supplies in. Every cold snap below 10: faucets dripping. April: reverse all of it, slowly, and check every trap and fitting for the crack you didn't see in October.
Cabin two hasn't frozen since 2018. The kitchen sink trap has a note taped to the cabinet door in my handwriting that says "ANTIFREEZE. YES, THIS ONE TOO." My renters think it's funny. It isn't.
Fourteen hours of dark a day means the lamps matter. Plug-in wall sconces at the bed and the reading chair, 2700K, no wiring through a log wall. First thing I'd add to any cabin before the clocks change.
