The Tower

A timber-framed fire lookout tower at the top of Dave Sullivan’s property in Polk County, Oregon. Twenty-by-twenty foot base, traditional Forest Service profile, modern materials. Documented on the design side as the Pedee Fire Lookout Tower at lookouttowers.org/lookout-homes.

Why we’re building it

Most Forest Service fire lookouts from the 1920s–1950s put a tiny 14×14 cabin on top of a tall truss. Beautiful silhouette, terrible to live in — drafty, steep, no bathroom, more like camping than dwelling. The Kraemer Tower belongs to a newer class — the Lookout Home — that keeps the iconic lookout profile but adapts the inside for actual living.

Dave’s longer framing for that idea lives at lookouttowers.org/lookout-homes, where this tower is catalogued alongside three siblings (Mina Casa, Monster Lookout Home, Budget Lookout Home).

Who lives here

Eli expects to make the tower his home. That’s the single most important fact about the build. It changes what “finished” means, and it changes the conversation with Polk County (see the Permit Conflict section below).

Who owns what, as of 2026-05-26

This is a Dave-and-Barb-and-Eli project.

• Dave Sullivan — design and funding. Tower scale, aesthetic decisions, money to make it happen. The design conversation continues throughout.
• Barb Sullivan — project manager. The day-to-day point person for keeping work coordinated and decisions made. Eli reports to Barb on the build.
• Eli Kraemer — construction planning and on-site execution. The build plan, the materials list, the crew, the day-to-day decisions. Eli leads the build, and he’s building his own residence.
• Cody and Russell Richardson of Solid Rock Construction — currently scoped to the septic completion, available for tower-side advice when Eli wants it.

Design pedigree

The tower’s design history is unusually long for a structure this size.

2020–2022 — Fire Tower Engineered Timber (FTET). Dave worked with the team at FTET, particularly Ben Brungraber, Ph.D., P.E. — co-founder of FTET, a timber-frame visionary with forty-plus years in the field and trend-setting research on mortise and tenon joinery. The effort was an attempt to produce signed, sealed structural plans. After two-plus years, it didn’t reach a buildable signed-and-sealed set.

What it produced is still load-bearing: a class of designs called Sandbox Lookout Towers, with 12’×12’, 16’×16’, and 20’×20’ base options. The Kraemer Tower is the 20’×20’ “Papa Tower” instance. The Junior Tower at 12’×12’ was the first to be fully engineered and sealed — its plans are on lookouttowers.org and the design connections, stair sizing, and corner-post geometry scale directly upward.

Recent design work by Dave. Dave has continued sketching and refining the design after the FTET phase. Those drawings are coming in soon — when they land in _intake/, they’ll appear here as the up-to-date plan-of-record.

Design principles (adapted from lookouttowers.org)

The Sandbox Lookout family follows a small set of rules that make the build practical:

• Twelve-foot base sections. Modern building codes require a stair landing every 12 feet. All Sandbox Lookouts have cross-braced base sections at that height, so the same stair design works at any tower scale.
• L-shaped corner posts. Two 4×12 Douglas fir beams joined at right angles. Resists bending forces without depending solely on guy wires the way the classic Forest Service designs did.
• Heavy steel post anchors. Quarter-inch plate bent into L-shape with punched holes — rebar into concrete on the lower holes, 3/4″ bolts to corner posts on the upper. Real connection at the foundation.
• Wide eaves and waterproof catwalks. Keep water off the wood. The fastest way for a tower this size to rot is rain finding its way to a horizontal surface.
• Pressure-treated Douglas fir. Cut to size and notched first, then treated, so preservative gets into every penetration.
• Industrial removable connectors. 3/4″ galvanized bolts, 3″ bridge washers, 4″ split-rings, TimberLok screws. Goes up fast; comes apart for repair or relocation; looks the part.
• Prefabricated metal stairs and railings. Forest Service ladders were terrifying. Modern code-compliant stairs are non-negotiable for a residence.

The Polk County permit conflict

This is the part to think carefully about, given Eli’s plan to live there.

The relevant Polk County rules cross-cancel each other:

• Section 177.025 says a fire lookout tower on Sullivan timberland is an outright permitted use. ✓
• Section 177.070 says the site does not qualify for a dwelling.
• Section 110.186 defines a dwelling as “a building or portion thereof which is occupied in whole or in part as a home, residence, or sleeping place, either permanently or temporarily.”

Polk County’s resolution of the contradiction (per their Community Development office during the 2022 design phase): the fire lookout tower is allowed as long as it has no bathroom — a restriction that has no obvious basis in the actual code, but it’s the line they drew. They also strongly encouraged building under Oregon’s Agricultural Exemption (ORS 455.315), which means no structural or engineering analysis is required.

For a fire-watcher’s overnight cabin, “no bathroom” is awkward but workable. For Eli’s residence, it isn’t. The path forward will be one of:

1. Negotiate. Show the county that the original “no bathroom” decision wasn’t grounded in code, and ask for a dwelling determination on the site.
2. Restructure. Build a separate small ADU or detached bathroom nearby, with the tower itself remaining technically bathroom-free.
3. Reclassify the site. Find a path to a residential land-use determination on this part of the property.
4. Accept the risk. Build it as Eli wants to live in it and accept the legal exposure.

This is exactly the kind of decision that needs a sit-down with Polk County early — not after construction. Polk County Community Development: 503-623-9237, cd.permits@co.polk.or.us, 850 Main Street, Dallas.

The build-design philosophy

Because FTET’s engineering effort didn’t yield a sealed buildable set, and because the Agricultural Exemption permits unsigned construction, the current approach is “build-design” — build first from informal plans using trees harvested on the property, then analyze for safety after the structure is up. Reinforcement (additional metal connections, guy wires, gussets) gets added wherever the analysis flags risk. Materials adapt to what’s on hand.

This is a non-standard approach. It works because Eli is building it for himself; the labor is partner-time, not contracted; and Dave keeps the design tight.

What’s already standing

Site prep complete (as of the 2022 lookouttowers.org snapshot): trees logged near the build site, stumps removed, trenches dug for electricity and water, septic tank set (July 2022 — see the Septic page). Corner posts began coming out of property-grown Douglas fir during 2022, with Evan Diviney cutting trees on-site for the L-shaped post lamination.

The 2023 work-in-progress photos:

Eli running detail work, July 2023.

Concrete and structural work at a tower foundation, August 2023.

Strap anchoring with the structural drill, September 2023.

Work paused after fall 2023; the 2025 logging job re-set the project’s pace, and Eli’s now-formal role brings the build back into focus.

The view from the top — the Osborne Fire Finder

The center of the observation cabin will hold an Osborne Fire Finder — the alidade-on-a-map device every classic lookout used to triangulate smoke columns. This particular Osborne Fire Finder was salvaged from a North Carolina lookout that was demolished. It’s a working historical artifact, and it’s the thing that makes the cabin a fire lookout rather than just a small house up high.

See the Osborne Fire Finder on lookouttowers.org →

What’s next on the tower

This is Eli’s planning area. The first questions to settle, roughly in order:

1. Engineering review. Whether to pursue a fresh structural analysis (Tom Rogers of Rogers Engineering, who did the Tiller Lookout engineering, would be a good call) or stick with the build-design + Agricultural Exemption path.
2. Materials inventory. What of the 2022–2023 materials is still on hand and usable; what’s been weathered out; what’s missing.
3. The dwelling-or-not conversation with Polk County. Eli’s residency goal means this can’t wait until the tower’s framed.
4. Crew. Eli + Dave on most labor; possibly Cody and Russell for excavation or heavy-lift help.
5. Phasing relative to septic. Tower work can resume in parallel with septic finish — different parts of the site, different inspection regimes — but the septic gate question dominates calendar.

When Eli starts populating this page with phase lists, materials, schedules, and decisions, it stops being a planning document and starts being the actual build log. The Contribute form (Phase II) is how he’ll keep it current.

Reference designs at lookouttowers.org

The full reference library lives one click away:

• Junior Towers — 12’×12’, the first fully engineered Sandbox design. Signed PDF specs (Ben Brungraber, FTET) and Revit model. Scale-up reference for stairs, anchors, connections.
• Tiller Lookout — 2010 Oregon fire lookout, full engineering plus an extended interview with the engineer on load modeling and guy-wire anchoring.
• Fire Lookouts (Sandbox family overview) — design philosophy, USFS CT-2 lineage, the standardization argument.
• Lookout Homes — the four-design family including this one.

All licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — usable with credit.