In the first picture you can see a cabin just behind the sawmill. This was a homeschool project for our 4 sons. They were 11, 12, 13 and 14 years old when they started it. They weren't allowed to hire any outside help, or to purchase anything that could be made with the mill. We worked every Saturday (from daylight to dark) for nearly three years. Their reward was that as they "graduated" homeschool, they could move into the cabin and begin learning independent living while still being under Mom and Dad's umbrella.
The first fall, they logged, or rather learned to log, all of the materials. We decided on Cordwood construction to minimize waste of the trees we cut. The house is built as a timber frame with cordwood infill on three sides. The walls are 18" thick. The tops of the log trees were used to make the cordwood. The first 18 months we didn't allow them to use any electricity. They cut all of the joinery by hand using antique tools. We finally got overwhelmed and set a temporary power pole to finish.
The boys are mostly grown, now, and have built their own homes. We use the cabin as a vacation rental, now.
They learned to log, saw, build, lay block and stone, wire, plumb and a whole host of other things. They count it as some of their best memories. Dad kinda enjoyed it, too. :)
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8) 8) WOW ! That is some nice work and an excellent schooling project. Thanks for sharing.
WOW, what a great story and project. Kinda takes me back to when I was a kid learning from my grandfather and uncle. Tonto.
Great story, and what a nice place to show for it! I was not familiar with "cordwood" walls until I saw the picture. I thought it was stone at first. Thanks for sharing!
Great project and story. Heartwarming.
I thought cordwood walls would have the cordwood closer together. What fills in between the wood? (I assume a concrete or cement of some kind). It looks good, and wonder how often the cracks open up and need chinking.
Is that you in the last pic with the orange coat on? Might need a trim.
;D
The mortar between the cordwood is a special matrix of cement, sand, lime and sawdust. The logs that didn't dry long enough, shrank after a couple of seasons and we went back around them with perma-chink in a caulk gun. A lot of the logs dried enough initially that shrinkage hasn't been a problem.
When I first mentioned the cordwood house to my wife, she told me to build the front wall conventional log construction because she didn't want a "polka dot" house. After we finished, she asked me why I didn't do the whole house out of cordwood because she thought it was so attractive ;D
Greg
That is great. My wife does me the same way about most stuff. ;D
Those skills the boys have learned will serve them a lifetime. You have taught them much. That is a beautiful cabin 8).
I think that is a great idea. I love it.
What is the lime and sawdust in the mix for.
Is the cordwood treated in any way?
Brilliant!!
Wish I'd done something like that when I home schooled my lads, all they wanted to do was fish and surf :(
The way it was explained to me, the lime strengthened the mortar while the sawdust made the mix less brittle when dry. It needs to stand up well to mild expansion and contraction of the logs with seasonal changes. So far, so good. It's maybe 7-8 years old now. The logs don't get treated with anything for rot. The way they're put into the walls with both ends exposed, they breathe well. It's important not to seal the log ends with anything, for that reason.
Greg
Sounds like that along with building a fine cabin, you also built great memories. Thanks for sharing a wonderful story and pictures.
All I can say is WOW! Thanks for posting.
My hat is off to you Greg thats a good way to raise young-uns they will carry that with them forever.Frank C.
Greg, That's a great looking cabin. Makes me want to rent it for a week or so. :D. My daughter is looking at a cabin or small house(ever how you want to look at it) on some adjoining property to me that is in need of some repair. I told her if she could buy it cheap enough we could saw out whatever she needed and do the repairs ourselves. It was originally built out of rough sawn lumber so putting it back in original condition should not be a problem. I really like the old cabin style homes. Anyhow, hats off to your children for a job well done and the pride you must feel. Ron
Greg,
Love your story about the cabin and your kids. Seeing that your mill is so close It makes me want to bring my family up sometime and stay for a few days.
Tripp
Great Project very nice cabin! My neighbor has a garage built cordwood constructon 70yrs old & still in use today that his father built. Thanks for sharing this project.
Dave
I'm at a loss for words. You have given your children an education they could have never gotten in any school. And I know they will be an asset to humanity & mankind. You & your wife have my utmost respect & admiration.......Cheyenne
Thanks for all of the comments. It was truly a wonderful family time. We have five daughters (four were younger than the boys) who also committed every Saturday to preparing two huge meals to feed the hungry crew. Sausage, bacon, eggs, pancakes and biscuits and gravy for breakfast, then meat and potatoes after dark. With preparation, serving, then cleaning up afterwards, the girls were as busy as the boys.
The local paper did a feature article, full page, with pictures about halfway through the project. Kinda a human interest sort of thing. The boys were minor celebrities in our small community from the publicity. Part of the learning curve was keeping them humble. ;D They became and remain best friends as a result of the experiences.
My wife took pictures every weekend. She has assembled them into a chronological album, showing progress from week to week. The boys love to get the album out and show it to their wives and friends. My favorite picture is the four boys all wearing their Husqvarna helmets, standing in front of a huge pile of stickered lumber, higher than their heads. Looking at it now, they look like babies!
Renting the cabin, now, has become my wife and daughters' home business. The four girls are teenagers and earn spending money cleaning the cabin before and after rentals. It's a lot of fun for them to learn about managing a business, paying taxes, keeping records, etc. We are very close to the Bristol Nascar track, right on a blue ribbon trout stream and a mile from a large TVA lake. It's made for an appealing vacation getaway spot. Homeschooling is great if you have the opportunity!
Thanks,
Greg
Do you have any info on rental - prices and availability. We would like to go to a Bristal race some day. Thanks, Tonto.
Hi Tonto,
Her listing info is at cabins.com
Click on Tennessee, then Butler, then Country Cordwood. There are more pictures, there.
Thanks,
Greg
apm, not sure how I missed this thread. The cabin building project turned out great. Building a home sure seems to redefine my thoughts on "home" schooling. Sounds like you have done well with your family and mill.
Wow. Just Wow.
That is a brilliant way to raise kids...I wish my own career hadn't kept me away so much...
Quote from: zopi on October 31, 2009, 12:05:55 PM
Wow. Just Wow.
That is a brilliant way to raise kids...I wish my own career hadn't kept me away so much...
You and me both brother. I have had a lot of quality time with my family because on average I get more hours at home than a regular work a day job, but you sure miss out on a lot of stuff while you are away.
Thanks, guys. It was a very special time. The old saying about them growing up so fast sure is true.
Greg
Thanks for the pictures and the story that went with them. I'm sure your boys learned skills they would not have learned in a public education along with the family bonding time. Congratulations.
Quote from: tonto on September 03, 2009, 02:37:34 PM
Do you have any info on rental - prices and availability. We would like to go to a Bristal race some day. Thanks, Tonto.
DITTO - also, how far are you from the track??
Ditto on what everyone elso said too. Very neat!
My son who we started homeschooling last year was impressed.
We started homeschooling last year. He was a junior. I wish we would have started earlier as he was struggling in school. He is doing so much better now. He has to learn it plus we are on top of how he is doing. If I could do it over I would have done it for both of our kids and started alot earlier. There are so many options with homeschooling and things that can be done.
Thanks for sharing.
I don't mean to change the thread by getting on a soapbox about homeschooling, but.......... When a lot of people think of homeschooling they imagine replicating the public school classroom in the home. That is a recipe for disaster! There are so many options for being able to train (not necessarily teach) your children, at their pace, in the ways that they learn best. The public schools are a "one size fits all" system that leaves a lot of kids out in the cold. Even if they manage to learn something, they frequently never learn to "love learning" like they can in a home environment. Not to mention the undesirable influences, drugs, violence, challenges to their faith, etc.
We wanted to focus on character development over scholastics. Life skills vs. rote memorization. Book learnin' is important, too, but much more easily accomplished within the framework of customization that you can create at home. Some kids do very well in public schools, I don't mean to belittle anyones choices. But some blossom at home.
JD350cmark: we are about 45 minutes from Bristol Speedway. Really a neat place.
Thanks for your indulgence,
Greg
hey greg,
is that a foley belsaw m-14 that they cut that house out with? ive never seen one wtihout a huge pile of sawdust! just wonderin pc
If more parents stood on a soapbox because they care about their children we'd all be better off.
Way to go Greg. :)
Hi Paul,
yep, that's a Belsaw M14. At the end of every shift we raked the sawdust pile out flat around the mill. Kept the weeds down. Used a lot of the sawdust in the mortar mix for the cordwood. Soaked the sawdust overnight in a "kiddie pool" from Walmart, then mixed the wet sawdust into the mortar mix next day. Something like two shovels mortar, six sand, one lime and two or three of sawdust.
Greg
sounds like a good idea,but that would cause wet ground problems here in ne ok. my first sawmill was a belsaw m-14. it did ok but i can cut more lumber with less waste in less time with the manual bandsaw that i now have. good for experience though. like your kids i learned a lot of valueable lessons on that saw. i wouldnt trade anything for the experience and i wouldnt trade for another m-14 either! pc
awesome house, I just wanted to add my 2 cents, when you said schools don't teach children how to love learning. I agree , recently I heard a kid say when asked , why he deserved an award for being great at math. his response was cause he loves math and its in his heart. I never quite felt that way about learning in school myself. I went to private school growing up and still just wanted to get it over with. We are told how its going to aid us in getting the best jobs and such. Just never pushed it would help me learn what I really want to learn down the road when I finally figured out what I wanted as a career. they didn't emphasize the broad opportunities and choices that were out there. Like in a kids book it was all general careers. doctor teacher policeman and most popular trades. I say if you don't love what you do you will never be great at it.
Outstanding accomplishment Greg! .... 8)
I've been thinking about cord wood for a long time. Bought Rob Roy's books. We have the perfect property for a berm home, and a forest full of logs. The view would be stunning.
How well do things fair while taking a long time with construction like rain, snow, etc? I would probably take 3-4 years and work on it as time allows. A little at a time.
JPGreen,
I read Rob Roy's books as well. He outlines two basic types of cordwood construction; one is with the cordwood as a structural member, one with the cordwood as infill. We elected for a "modified" timber frame, using cordwood as infill only. That allowed us to frame up the building and roof it prior to starting the cordwood. We were infilling approximately 8' X 12' sections and could finish one, with four boys working in a 12 hour day. We got faster by the end of the project. All of the cordwood being done under roof made weather and time a non issue.
Our biggest quandary was the electrical inspection. I called the inspector ahead of time and told him what we were building and asked his advice. His only reply was "do it by code and you won't have any problems". When he got there for the rough inspection, I had run the wire inside the walls and out through the mortar joints to surface mounted boxes. He couldn't figure out how "code" applied to cordwood. We went through a few minor changes before he would approve us. All ended well, though.
Paul, I'm glad you're happy with your bandmill, but I sure can't figure out how a manual bandmill will cut more lumber in less time than a circle mill. Did you have limited power with your Belsaw or some other trouble?
Becareful, ah, there's a black bear in your kitchen!
Great story and it all looks great!
apm what kind of logs did you use in the cord wood part of the house and did you peel the bark off or just let it slip off when it dried a little bit?
The cordwood logs are 90% poplar and about 10% walnut. The cordwood is all peeled. The logs cut in the fall and winter took many, many hours to peel. We later learned, the hard way, that the logs cut in the spring, the bark just popped off of almost always in one piece. There's always a learnin' curve.......... the boys hung the bark spud in the cabin as a decoration. That's the part of the job they remember least fondly. It would have been all easy if we'd known when we cut the cordwood.
Greg
I'm resurrecting this thread, since I just took a trip with three of my nephews, aged 15, 16 and 18 to our family land in the U.P. I always wanted a cabin up there when I was their age, and they've since expressed a lot of interest in building something up there. I'd like to help it become a reality, so we went up north, spying the land, looking for the ideal spot for a cabin, and I told them that they are charged with helping to design the cabin, since it will be in their lives a lot longer than I'll have it. They're pretty excited by the prospect, and my brothers are interested in supporting it. I've got a pretty good schedule in the summer months to be able to go up there for extended trips up there and do work on building something with them.
As I've thought about the most efficient means of building, and avoiding the most waste, cordwood construction seems like a great idea, and then milling the lumber for the rest of the house from trees harvested from the land, which we have plenty of.
Anyway, I'm anxious to know a bit more about cordwood construction--I would imagine that you would need to debark the cordwood, right? I suppose that would be the most labor intensive part of the job. Any suggestions on good books to find?
Thanks ahead of time! That cabin is beautiful!
So Pas, are you going to be cutting trees this coming spring when the bark peels off easy?
And what species would you be cutting?
Looks like a great project for Uncle Pas to take on. I've four teenage grandkids, and don't think I could get a total of two weeks of their busy time in the summer months. Just too many things going on for them. Wish you better luck with your nephews. :)
Quote from: beenthere on September 23, 2010, 07:40:59 PM
So Pas, are you going to be cutting trees this coming spring when the bark peels off easy?
And what species would you be cutting?
Looks like a great project for Uncle Pas to take on. I've four teenage grandkids, and don't think I could get a total of two weeks of their busy time in the summer months. Just too many things going on for them. Wish you better luck with your nephews. :)
Well, that's the other question I had--we have all kinds of hardwoods up there...maple and ash, mainly, (still ash, for now), and a lot of spruce and hemlock. We have so much maple up there, it wouldn't seem like a waste to use it for the cordwood house, but honestly, I just don't know what kind of wood is typically used. I'm sure hardwood would work just fine. As to my nephews, there's nothing they'd rather do in the summer than get away from home for a few weeks, and work in the woods! Them's some good boys! 8)
Dan
White Cedar would probably be best in that area if you have it, Paschale. It's light, has minimal shrinkage, and is rot resistant. And it peels easy ;)
Quote from: barbender on September 23, 2010, 08:45:34 PM
White Cedar would probably be best in that area if you have it, Paschale. It's light, has minimal shrinkage, and is rot resistant. And it peels easy ;)
We've got cedar coming out of our ears up there, and it's ripe for the harvest, so that sounds like what it needs to be! 8)
Hi Pas,
There's a lot of information on the internet about cordwood construction. The only downside that I'm aware of is that it's very labor intensive. If you've got willing nephews, you've got the hardest part licked. Rob Roy and Richard Flatau have published several books on cordwood construction. Get the latest edition you can find because there have been updates on processes and methods. If you've got more time than money, cordwood definitely is worth considering. White cedar is considered an excellent choice in the book I've got. Sounds like you're looking forward to making some memories!
Greg