By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Somewhere among the stuffed animals and fire logs, the bellows, copper kettles, hatchets , the powder horn, horse skull, snowshoes, sleds, razor strop, ox-yoke chandelier and crankoperated washing machine are Rob Schleifer’s 21st-century necessities.

“I ask people to find the refrigerator,” said Mr. Schleifer, who finally points it out: an all-but-invisible halfsize unit. It’s camouflaged forest brown, like his televisions, VCR, radio, telephone, computers, printers and just about everything else in the fifthfloor Manhattan walk-up his family has had since 1947.

Mr. Schleifer, a 61-year-old bachelor who compiles dictionaries and writes esoteric articles about lexicography, has carried an obsession with the frontier past to new lengths. For reasons he finds difficult to explain, he has spent much of the last 30 years turning his one-bedroom rental into his version of a colonial cabin in the woods.

“I’m always yearning for the mountains and pristine wilderness,” said Mr. Schleifer , who once fled to the Colorado wilds to live in a lean-to .

He began by trying to hide the white walls. “The color of death,” he said. “It wasn’t like a plan from the beginning. The more changes I made, the more I wanted to do to create a complete environment.” He etched woody patterns into the door frames and moldings. He broke into the walls and reopened two bricked-up fireplaces. He turned the bathroom steam pipe into a tree, complete with curling serpent.

“I know nothing about antiques,” he said. But he filled the apartment with found treasures. A stuffed cat. A zither he bought at auction for 45 cents. An ox yoke he turned into lighting. A horse skull picked up in the woods in Florida. A World War II radiation detector. Handcuffs. Brass knuckles, two sets.

“About 95 percent of the people are thrilled by it,” he said. The remainder, he acknowledged, include his girlfriend of eight months, a translator of French and Spanish.

He grew up in the same Stuyvesant Town neighborhood. His father owned an air-conditioning repair company, and he and his twin brother, Ronald, went to local schools. He attended the State University at Albany, where he majored in history, and in 1970 went to Colorado to build houses, sleeping out for a time in the woods. He returned in 1979, joining his uncle George, a painter, in an $87.72-a-month rentcontrolled apartment at 217 Avenue A that the uncle had lived in since 1947.

After several years, his uncle moved to a nursing home, and Mr. Schleifer left for Oklahoma State University to teach technical and scientific writing, letting an aspiring actor, Bill Pullman, move into the apartment.

“I thought New York is a wacky place with probably a lot of faux-Colonial cabins,” recalled Mr. Pullman, who went on to appear in more than 50 films.

Mr. Schleifer returned in 1985, repossessing the apartment for a time with his uncle, taking a job maintaining the air-conditioning in the Barneys store and working on a Macmillan high school dictionary. In 1995, he published “Grow Your Vocabulary,” a Random House trade paperback. He wrote for the Chicago-based language quarterly Verbatim, contributing articles like “Alchemical Calques or the Transmutation of Language.”

Now, though it is hard to imagine, he is taking it all down, like a frontiersman breaking camp. He was lured by his landlord’s buyout offer and the depressed housing market. “There are so many great deals, I want to buy.”

Will he re-create the cabin in his next home? “The work that I put into this place I can’t imagine ever doing it again,” he said, before reconsidering. “Oh, I’ll do something.”