New Property, basic questions

[CJ5]

I have purchased my dream property. I am begining to work and plan. I have built my shed for the tractor and tools and am starting the next phase. The plan is a campground area with a pavilion and then a cabin. This will be a place for family generations to use.I am planning roads to each area.

I have a lot of questions and what to do and not do, what is a waste of energy and not and what is practical and not. My property is all hardwood with a few pines mixed in. I dont want to cut anything down unless necessary but would love to use what I can for structures.

First, can I use my wood to build a pavillion or does it have to be dried for long periods and not worth the hassle  Is there a min size tree that is a keeper and smaller is just firewood and not worth anything?

If I want to keep a tree do I cut the stump off, delimb, and cut a certain length and then drag to an area to dry a while?

Is it possible to find someone interested in bartering raw trees for cut lumber. Or possible to find someone interested in harvesting the amount of trees I would have clearing roads and a building site?

These are basics and probably not even good questions but I am looking for some experienced guidance to separate the dreams from reality.

[OneWithWood]

Contact your state forestry department to see if the state provides forester services or can provide a list of consulting foresters in your area.  A trained forester would be in the best position to assess your property and help you attain your goals.

[tyb525]

Welcome to the Forum, CJ5.

[Maine372]

welcome to the forum.

it is most certainly possible to use the wood on your property for building. you can build with round pieces or saw out your own lumber (theres a section of the forum for sawmilling)

the best way to preserve wood until you can work with it is to keep it off the ground. lay some sacrificial logs down on the ground the put the wood you want to work with up on those. keeps the moisture and the decay fungi away. might also be helpful to peel the bark off to help the drying process. im not familiar with Alabama so what species would be best to use would be a question for a local.

best of luck!

[Ljohnsaw]

How much property do you have there?  If you have enough, you could thin and have the wood you need to build your structures without changing your property "woods feel".  Have fun!

[Puffergas]

"then drag to an area to dry a while?"

I like sawing green logs but maybe your doing a log cabin thing.

[Clark]

Yes, there is a lot you can do with cutting your property and utilizing the wood for building projects. In the process you could thin it perfectly, taking the worst trees and making the next thinning a more lucrative proposition. You could also high-grade it really easy (especially since you are looking building materials) and make the property miserable to manage for the next 40 years.

Bottom line is that your questions, while good and needing answers, are too in depth to fully answer in the forum format afforded by the internet. I highly recommend contacting a local consulting forester who can guide you through managing what your property needs, what you want and what course of action will best achieve both.

Clark

[Ianab]

While it sounds like a basic question, you are going down a rabbit hole, that branches out into all sorts of things.

Knowing what you have and managing your forest.
Logging.
Milling.
Building stuff.

But this is the place to ask them, because we have sections on all that sort of thing, and folks that are already doing the sort of things you want to do, at all sorts of different scales.

irst, can I use my wood to build a pavillion or does it have to be dried for long periods and not worth the hassle

An open structure like a pavilion could certainly be be built with freshly sawn wood. I will dry in place, and using good construction methods, it will stay in one piece. Even a cabin is possible, but again you need to let it dry in place before you seal everything up

s there a min size tree that is a keeper and smaller is just firewood

Depends a lot on the species. You can save small cedar logs down to around 6" on the small end, and saw a useful 4x4" post out of it. Other species you probably want to be up around 12" dia to be worth sawing. Small logs take a lot of messing about, for a small amount of low grade wood. So eventually it gets to the point where firewood is a better use for them.  Quality of the log makes a big difference too, if it's got big knots, rot and isn't straight, it's not going to make good boards no matter what size, so again, into the firewood pile.

If I want to keep a tree do I cut the stump off, delimb, and cut a certain length and then drag to an area to dry a while?

Basically yes, but you aren't trying to dry it in log form. As soon as a tree is cut, the log will start to degrade. How long you have depends on the species / climate / season. In summer the bugs and fungus will be getting into pine logs within weeks. Or walnut can sit for years, have the sapwood rot off, and still be worth sawing.
So it's best to get the logs sawn, and dry the boards (or build with them right away). Once boards are sawn and dry, it's generally safe to store them until needed.
So plan your harvest around whatever milling operation you can arrange.

Personally I would be looking at buying a small sawmill, baby Woodmizer or something like the little Woodland mill. They aren't expensive, and you may be able to find a good used one. This gives you the freedom to process your own logs in your own time.

Maybe you have some saleable logs that can be sold or traded? But first you need an inventory of what you actually have (hence the advice of talking to a professional forester for some initial advice). Then a plan on what you should harvest, what should be thinned, and what you should leave to grow bigger.  But an advantage of your won mill is you can process logs that might not be marketable because you only have a few, or they are an odd species, or they are too short etc.

Knowing what you have also helps with your building plans. Different woods work better in different applications. Strength / decay and bug resistance etc play a factor. You don't want to go to all the trouble of building something, and find it rots out in a couple of years because you used the wrong wood. Where the less durable wood might have worked great for the interior of your planned cabin.  Questions like that are what I mean about the 'rabbit hole"  ;)

[AMBoser]

You've received some great advice from people on the forum with more experience than me, but I wanted to share your enthusiasm. We bought our dream property 5 years ago (10 acres) and have been working on it, first building a shed to store our building stuff and now starting to plan for a cabin. A pavilion would have actually been a great starting project, especially since the wood could dry in place. That's the good part about a pavilion not being an indoor structure. But as mentioned before, you want to be careful about what type of trees you use, as some species don't weather as well. I'm not sure if you can protect it though with some type of preservative.

We took a 8-week forestry class that was put on by the state university extension service that taught us a lot. If you have that available in your area, I highly recommend it.

Our shed was made with store-bought lumber, but for the cabin we want to use as much wood as we can from the property. We have fire danger in our neck of the woods  :D, so we have to clear 50 feet around where the cabin will be built. We cut those trees this past summer and are having them milled for the cabin. We also purchased a chain saw mill to cut some larger beams. We won't have any of this lumber kiln dried; it is all stacked off the ground with stickers (1x2 spacers, which we will use for finishing wood). We have it covered with a tarp, but the stack has good air flow.

The guy who milled our lumber made a two-sided pavilion with the first green wood he cut with his sawmill. It looks awesome, but the boards have 1-2 inches of space between them, because of how much they shrank when they dried. That works well for his purposes, but wouldn't be so great for a cabin. So our plan is to let our wood air dry for a year, then put up the main cabin structure and roof next summer, leaving as much air flow as we can without compromising the structural integrity. Then we will finish the cabin the following year. Hopefully, that will give the wood enough time to dry and settle together so the cabin doesn't develop too much character in terms of shrinking and creaking.

Based on what we learned in the forestry class, we will start thinning next spring. Those trees will be great for outbuildings and easy to make square as needed with our chain saw mill. Our plan is to thin over a 3-5 year period so that the canopies of the trees do not touch. We will take out the smallest trees (even though that's not so great for building material, it is best for the forest), trees that are too close together (we will get a few bigger ones from this), and also pay attention to diversity. We have a good mix of trees, although it is dominated by Doug Fir. To reduce fire and insect vulnerability, we want to have more cedar and pine, so when looking at what trees in parts of the stand to take down, if there's a smaller pine, we will let that stay and perhaps take a bigger DF.

In the class we took, we developed a forest plan that helped us clarify these objectives and made the project quite manageable. The class teachers were very supportive in helping creating a plan (and giving us the education) so that we could best meet our objectives, which are much like yours: to have a place for recreation, family gatherings, forest stewardship, and wildlife habitat.