Sunnywood

Sunnywood Farm site is up

2012-01-09T05:51:00.001-05:00

We will be shutting down the Maine Smallholder blog in favor of a Web site: http://www.sunnywoodfarm-maine.com/. Rather than making regular blog posts (which we clearly lack the discipline for), we plan to use the Web site to post information that others might find useful. Topics are likely to include farming with heritage breeds, farming sustainably, incorporating permaculture principles, growing food, preserving food, living with minimal fossil fuel use, and others. We will continue to add information over time: please check it out!

Archiving Sunnywood blog—and announcing "The Maine Smallholder"

2011-01-09T13:43:00.004-05:00

As I sit here early on a January afternoon, the winter sun is streaming through our south-facing windows, just as we intended. The high louver windows above the sliders work just as we'd planned: they catch the low winter sun from late October into early February, but exclude direct light the rest of the season, and vent heat in the summer. The NON-low-e sliding glass door has proven to be the perfect place for winter seedlings. And our cedar ceilings do something we hadn't expected: they reflect a golden glow, making the name "Sunnywood" as appropriate to the inside of the house as the outside.

Sunnywood inside and out!

Since finishing the cordwood exterior of Sunnywood in September, we have been working on the interior (and building farm outbuildings), and have come to realize that something we have often heard from owner-builders is true: the inside of the house is never finished. And while in our case we have still been constructing fairly integral elements, such as walls and ceilings, it is clear that installation of flooring, behind-stove masonry, a hot water system, bookshelves, trim, etc., etc. could go on for many years. In which case this blog would start to become a kind of home remodeler's blog. So I've decided to keep this site as pretty much an archive for other would-be mortar stuffers searching the Web for cordwood building information, and start a new site about our mixed farming enterprise at Sunnywood farm: The Maine Smallholder.

So thanks for following our cordwood building journey, for rooting for us, and especially for helping us when we needed it. Please come join us for the next stage!

Remaining doors and windows in (mostly)

2010-09-28T13:10:00.005-04:00

South side with photovoltaic panels and some NON-low-e glass (finally)

Joe and Ben got the windows, storm door, and sliding glass door installed before everyone arrived for Common Ground Fair.

West wall

The extra enclosed floor space was, I think, much appreciated by those with sleeping bags! Joe and I treated ourselves to three full days at the fair, going to workshops, touring gardens, watching livestock demos, and eating wonderful food. In the evenings we got to connect with visiting family and friends and show off the completed cordwood.

The sliding glass door, although double-paned, is NOT low-e glass: the only non-low-e window in the house. The low-e windows help keep the house cool in the summer, and help prevent heat loss on winter nights, but really reduce passive-solar warming, making our house sun-tempered rather than truly passive solar. In addition, low-e glass does NOT grow plants well. The plain-glass sliding doors, when permanently closed for winter, will become the site for our winter seed-starting shelves, and allow some much-needed late-afternoon sunlight into the house.

So except for some finishing work around the doors and installation of the wooden nine-light door inside the storm door on the west wall, the exterior construction of Sunnywood is complete! It has been a long haul, starting with cutting the cordwood for the walls in June of 2007. The post-and-beam structure was put up during the house-raising of September 2008. We began laying cordwood in July of 2009. Last fall we closed in enough house with windows, doors, and a temporary wall to make the inside habitable (depending on your definition of the word) and move in, in time to cook Thanksgiving dinner. Now we can expand into the rest of the house and complete interior walls, ceilings, lights, shelving, closets, and perhaps begin upgrading the water supply. And get back to work on the Sunnywood Farm project.

WE ARE DONE

2010-09-20T13:11:00.002-04:00

As of 12:18 p.m. 356 batches total. We've only had one beer. So far.

Homestretch

2010-09-20T06:11:00.001-04:00

So today is the last day, I think. I kept waking up all night, like you do when you have a job interview or a trip the next day.

As has so often happened since we began this adventure, serendipitous help arrived just when we seriously needed it.
Longtime adjunct family member Ben drove in two mornings ago and said he was here to do whatever needed doing. (Just shows what boredom can do to a between-semesters, out-of-work college student at loose ends.) So we might just mix our last batch of mortar today; fingers crossed, with Ben's help . . .

17 and counting

2010-09-15T06:36:00.003-04:00

It appears that it is only possible for the two of us to mix and lay six batches of mortar in a day if we have done all of the preparatory putty mixing and log cleaning on a prior day, and if everything goes absolutely perfectly. This means no unexpected livestock management,, no turning off the alarm clock in your sleep, no visitors,and no dogs taking off after some phantom in the woods---
yes, it was Shadow the rescue dog, with farm collie Lily following---Newf Ciara didn't think it was important enough to warrant getting up. (The dog episode ended with the morning's milking spilled all over the milking stand: Joe had gone after the dogs, so I continued milking without someone to hold the goats' back legs. It was Rhondi, of course, who put her foot in the bucket.)

Sunday we managed 4 batches. Monday we visited with Ray and Avril, who made time on their way back from Cranberry Island to come see what Sunnywood is all about. It was great to see them, and it was nice to have a break and see the place and the work through other peoples' eyes (let's just say that I don't think they're going to go home and start planning a cordwood house with no electricity and running water). Yesterday we mixed and laid up 4 batches by 1:00. I was excited. Yet by the time we ate lunch and went to town for supplies, then pointed all 4 batches, it was pretty late. So 4 it remained.

We will be back at it today, with 17 batches to go. Joe has mentioned the possibility that he has underestimated how much mortar it will take to finish. I hold that this is highly unlikely. He also mentioned that it is possible that we will run out of log ends, which explains why he was fishing through the pile of too-short logs last night, pulling out any that can be used in a pinch and cleaning them.

Almost up over the window frames on the last two panels

Countdown . . . 25 (ish) batches to go!

2010-09-11T22:14:00.003-04:00

Alright, so,life gets in the way. Especially farm life. This morning we had some buckling escapism to deal with, and a bit of fence reinforcement to ensure that our girls don't kid in January. Then we spent about an hour scraping and cleaning log ends before we could start mixing mortar.

We had forgotten how much all of the prep work cuts into laying cordwood. Last summer, when we were so fortunate to have so much help, Joe could keep barrels of lime putty mixed and perking, sift sand, clean log ends, etc. while others laid cordwood. With just the two of us working, we have to take time to do all of this prep. So tonight at 8 p.m., while I was preparing a quick dinner and feeding the dogs, Joe was mixing another barrel of lime putty by generator light.

Anyway, we are in serious countdown mode. We are almost out of logs and lime, which means (hopefully) that we calculated well.

We did five batches today: about 25 batches to go!

There are no shortcuts in cordwood

2010-09-10T10:52:00.003-04:00

Well, there are; but they come with a price. Most of the shortcuts we have taken have been caused by the fact that we were in a hurry. Most of them started with a phrase like, "We don't care what the book says" or "we don't need to . . ." and continued with the phrase, "we'll just . . . ." We are here to tell you that the people who wrote the books know what they are doing. Care what they say. And don't "just . . . ."

Some examples:
1) "We don't care what the book says about pointing (the process of smoothing the mortar and tightening the joints with small, bent butter knives); we'll just use paintbrushes to jam the mortar flatter between the log ends. (Note the telltale phrases: "We don't care" and "we'll just.") Jaki Roy was right: pointing matters. We have some walls to prove it. However, pointing takes time---almost longer than laying up cordwood.

2) "We don't need to use a cutoff saw (which requires cutting the wood twice: once in the woods and once on-site). We'll just measure 18-inch lengths as we cut." There are those telltale phrases again. We now have walls containing log ends anywhere from 17 to 19 inches long. Wall surfaces that bubble and wander like sand dunes. Wall surfaces that are really hard to point well. Rob Roy was right: use a cutoff saw for exact lengths and 90-degree cuts.

3) "We don't need to sort all of the logs; we'll just use them as we bring them out of the woods." So, the east side of our house is made of small logs ends and the west side is made of big ones. And it kind of size-progresses across the south and north sides. Sort your logs.

Cordwood is not for the hurried. Cordwood IS simple. However it is NOT easy. And as our friend Suzanne of Second Wind Farm likes to point out, simple is not always easy. Fortunately, cordwood is also very forgiving. So even with all of our ill-advised shortcuts, we have a house we love, which largely does what we wanted it to do.

Get 'er done

Earlier this week Joe calculated that we had about 40 more batches of mortar to go, of the 357 or so that this house will require. A "batch" is the amount we can mix in a wheel-barrow with a hoe at one time, and consists of about 34 pounds of lime putty and a 5-gallon bucket of sand. We are working on the last two of the 14 "panels," or infilled spaces between the post and beam framework. So the end is tantalizingly in sight.

Pointing mortar below window frame. These are our last 2 panels!

But building with cordwood is slow, and mixing mortar is hard. I remember the first batch I mixed last summer. I thought I was going to throw up. It's easier now. Part of that is physical conditioning, and part of it is mental conditioning. We as a culture are not mentally conditioned for this kind of labor. It's not part of our expectation or world view, that we should endure pain and sweat, and do something tedious, all while not being entertained. It requires learning to focus one part of your mind on the work---a smaller part, as it becomes automatic---while letting the larger part focus on something completely unrelated. It requires entertaining yourself.

Last summer, the most we were ever able to mix and lay up in one day was 12 batches. On that day we had a big crew helping: Ian, Isaac, Heather, Heidi, and Holly, in addition to Joe (I was at "work," where, curiously, I was being paid to sit at a desk). The most Joe and I have ever done on our own was six batches, but this was on a day when we had all of the sand already sifted and measured, all of the putty mixed, all of the long ends scraped and cleaned, and nothing else that needed doing. This season, with the demands of the farm, the most we have managed in one day is 4 batches. More often we have only done 2 batches.

So we were lying in bed the other night, trying to figure out how many batches a day we'd have to do in order to finish before frost---while still putting up the harvest, mouse-proofing the eaves (look for our future post, "Rodent Wars"), fencing off the bucklings, building a ram pen, building a hay barn, bringing in hay, etc.---as well as hosting visitors for what is known around here as simply THE FAIR---and I said, "Hey, if we just put everything on hold except animal care and daily milkings, and milk earlier and work later, and live on cereal and peanut butter, we can do six batches a day and be done in a week!" After saner reflection in the morning light, we decided we would do this for two days, then take a day for other chores, then two more "push" days of cordwood, etc.---and still be done before THE FAIR.

So we just completed two "push" days. The day before yesterday we ran into some snags, largely resulting from the fact that we thought we had 3 windows left, and we only have 2, and one of the window boxes we'd built was the wrong size. This is what happens when you keep changing the floor plan. So we got 4 batches done amidst all of the figuring.

unpointed mortar filled with sawdust insulation, waiting for log ends

Yesterday we got 6 batches done. We finished the morning chores and a quick breakfast in time to begin mixing mortar at 8 a.m.. We finished pointing the mortar at close to 7 p.m., and ended up milking in the near dark. The does were not happy. But they're not happy anyway, because they all seem to suddenly be in estrus, mooning at the bucklings, who are trying desperately to get to the girls through the fence. Got to get that buck pen built . . .

We're down to about 30 batches to go . . . and counting! Two halves of two panels left! We'll be catching up with other chores today, and back at cordwood tomorrow.

P.S. Eggs!

Have you ever seen such YELLOW eggs???

We were thrilled to find our first eggs in the chicken coop yesterday!!! We got 30 chicks in April and have been waiting pretty much ever since for our own Sunnywood eggs. They are rather small, but delicious.

Our first all-Sunnywood dinner

2010-08-14T09:35:00.002-04:00

While we have been consuming our garden produce and goat's milk all season, I think we may just have eaten our first all-Sunnywood meal: roast chicken, roasted French fingerling potatoes, fresh goat's milk, and a slaw of cabbage, carrots, and scallions. This meal also marks the first time we have eaten our own livestock.

As you can see, this is not your average supermarket roaster, nor is it even a plump farmstead meat breed. This is a lean, mean bird who led an active and happy life.

Meat breed chickens, such as Cornish crosses, are very fast-growing, heavy-breasted birds that can become so top-heavy by eight weeks of age that their mobility is limited. We opted instead for two heritage breeds this year---Buff Orpingtons and Buckeyes---that promised to be good foragers and all-purpose laying and meat birds. They have enjoyed running all over Sunnywood Farm, chasing each other, roosting in the woods, gleaning insects and worms from the livestock pastures, eating grass shoots and weed seeds, and plundering (and adding to) the compost pile.

About half of the chicks we got in April turned out to be roosters. It didn't take us long to find out that more than one rooster is too many. What a racket! And the poor beleaguered hens! So the four most aggressive roosters (all Buff Orpingtons, incidentally) went to the local butcher early this week. (Eventually we will need to slaughter and process animals ourselves, but that learning curve will need to wait until we finish building the house.)

I was prepared for this well-exercised, older (for a meat bird) chicken to be tough and stringy, but we slow-roasted it, breast down, and it was tender, juicey, and extremely flavorful, with nice crispy skin. Delicious.

Next post, coming soon: There Are No Shortcuts in Cordwood.

A little bit of cordwood; a lot of farm

2010-07-29T09:21:00.010-04:00

We are finally laying up cordwood for the first time this summer. We still need to fill in the four panels that surround the fifth "bay" of the house's timber frame structure. However our decision to create a farm where there was none---when Sunnywood the cordwood house project became Sunnywood the fully diversified farmstead project---means that the demands of the farm keep getting in the way.

Joe has been doing his best to keep us on track, reminding me that we will once again face a frost deadline sometime in September (even though we could have built through October last year, had we but known). He built a woodshed, not because we have all of our firewood ready to stack under cover, but because we needed a place to put all of the tools and supplies that had taken over the space in which we need to build the remaining cordwood walls. After moving all tools and supplies to the new woodshed, he mixed up new barrels of lime putty, screened buckets of sand, mixed wood shavings and lime for insulation, and dug out the gloves and pointing tools.

But the farm keeps demanding attention. If we don't keep up with insect scouting, the Colorado potato beetle larvae and Japanese beetles will complete defoliate our potatoes and berry plantings. Weeds must be constantly beaten back, crops harvested and preserved, spent crops removed and succession crops planted. The chickens are reaching laying age, so the coop required nest boxes. Sheep and goat grazing management required the fencing of additional pasture areas and construction of gates, pasture shelters, and mineral feeders. The opportunity to acquire four new Shetland lambs at a very good price HAD to be seized, and the new lambs transported and acclimated. Which required more fencing, gates, and moving of animals. Animals still need daily tending; goats must be milked.

We had also been watching our very pregnant doe, Casual Elegance or "El." get bigger and bigger, and preparing for our first Sunnywood Farm birth. I thought she was due on July 4, and prepared a kidding pen in the barn on June 30. The 4th came and went with no signs of El going into labor. I reread the book sections on kidding and put together a kidding kit with towels, iodine for dipping umbilical cords (she could have up to 5 kids!), Nutridrench, headlamps for night birth (we have no electricity in the barn), and bottles and nipples, in the event that El would or could not feed them all.

Another week passed. I called El's prior owner, Suzanne of Second Wind Farm.
"The 4th? No, she's due on the 14th," said Suzanne.
The 14th came and went. I called Suzanne again. "Well, she could have been bred on her next cycle, which would put her out three more weeks." I began taking El out on pasture again with the other goats.

Finally, on the 24th during evening milking, we noticed El lying down and breathing loudly and rhythmically. So after some hastily eaten dinner, we went back to the barn with the kidding kit and camped out. Sarah arrived for a visit just in time to join us. As El began grunting and vocalizing, I scrubbed up, not because I knew what to do but because, as Sarah said, I have the smallest hands.

We watched as El began to push out what appeared in the meager light to be a giant eyeball. This sack looked nothing like the drawings in the books of possible positions of heads, bodies, and feet. Eventually and without too much trouble, El expelled a large, healthy kid, positioned perfectly with head resting on forelegs. She immediately began to lick it clean.

I grabbed it and began wiping the mucous away from its nose and face so it could breathe, even though El was already doing an excellent job of this. The kid found El's teat and took a first drink within about ten minutes.

We settled into chairs in the dark to wait for El to birth the rest of her kids. It finally hit us a couple of hours later, after she expelled and consumed the afterbirth, that there weren't going to be any more. The first birth in our dairy herd had resulted in no hoped-for future milkers. Just one buckling.

Now, we've read all the books that caution you to have a plan for livestock offspring before they arrive. For instance, if you are breeding for a milking herd, any bucklings not destined to be herd sires might best be drowned at birth. That's all well and good until you are presented with a newborn kid. I mean, it's a BABY, for goodness' sake. All of a sudden you're worried about whether it's getting enough colostrum.

I was on the phone to Suzanne early the next morning. "He doesn't seem to be suckling enough. And I couldn't get him to take a bottle." Suzanne and Doug kindly offered to visit and see whether all was well.

"He's HUGE!" they exclaimed when they arrived a couple of hours later. It didn't take them long to determine that his tummy was extremely full, and the reason he wouldn't take a bottle is because he wasn't hungry. "He's a big, healthy, strapping boy!" Suzanne confirmed. What're you gonna do with him?"

Joe and I looked at each other and shrugged. "I guess we'll grow him up to a year and then eat him."

Suzanne looked at us. "You're not going to eat the first kid born on your farm." It wasn't a question, a challenge, or advice. Just a statement of fact. "You could wether him and keep him as a companion for your herd sire." Which is probably what will happen. And as the first animal of any kind born on our farm, he has been dubbed "Uno."

The amazing thing about baby animals is how much less helpless they are at birth than humans. Uno was standing within 15 minutes of birth, and spronking about within 24 hours.

Uno, one hour after birth. El is a very good mother.

Uno, 12 hours old.

Okay, enough. Back to laying up cordwood!

Tarp Wood

2010-07-11T22:12:00.005-04:00

Tarp livestock shelters, tarp hay shelters, even a tarp-wrapped outdoor shower. The person from whom we bought this land, who happens to be an abutting neighbor, was careful to include deed restrictions prohibiting mobile homes and overhead power lines. She must be kicking herself for not thinking of tarps.

I have to say that the outdoor solar shower stall Ian built feels like a sinful luxury on these hot sunny days. The solar bags bring the water to just the right temperature. Showering out under the summer sun, after a sweat-drenched day of good work . . . I guess you have to have lived a while without indoor plumbing to really appreciate something like this.

At this moment we are waiting for Big Bad El to go into labor and birth one or more baby goat kids. El, whose full name is Casual Elegance, is a Nigerian dwarf goat with feet like a Percheron draft horse and the disposition of a donkey. Our other two Nigerians are wasting no time in eating all of the hay that El can't reach from her kidding pen. I believe they are grinning at her.

We have fenced our south pasture and begun dividing it up for rotational grazing. We have named our south subdivisions Scrubby (it is) and Noisy (it is---our neighbor on that side likes to share his music). Our High North pasture is in the best shape: we harvested 145 bales of hay from it last month. So we need to begin fencing up there and get the sheep on some of this good grazing.

The reality of living with and caring for animals that we intend to eat is something that will take some adjustment. Especially the sweet, cuddly animals. (The chickens, not so much.) We tried hard not to name the meat lambs, but you have to refer to them somehow. So they are Fatface, Skinnyface, and Brown One. Skinnyface always runs up to greet me and asks for a chin scratch. Sigh. But I guess, if I don't intend to become a vegetarian, I'd best think about the life of a feedlot beef animal the next time I eat a hamburger before feeling guilty about Skinnyface. For those of you seriously considering becoming vegetarians for similar reasons (and I have, at times), I suggest you read Lierre Keith's Vegetarian Myth as well as Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle before making up your mind.

Our garden is beginning to burst and now the problem is finding the time and space to preserve what we can't eat. I am trialing lacto-fermented shell and snow peas, so we'll see what happens.

Thanks to Joe's steady organizational persistance, we are taking a break from farm development activities and gearing up our cordwood operation again tomorrow! We still have 4 of Sunnywood's 14 panels to build before frost hits this fall, so we'd best not delay any longer. If any of you have some unresolved hankerings to learn to lay cordwood, this is your chance to get hands-on experience at no charge. Stop in any time. Bring gloves. :)

Stock panels for pasture fencing

2010-05-20T22:16:00.006-04:00

So, leave it to my brother to ask me to explain why we chose to install stock panel perimeter fencing. It occurred to me that if he had this question, others might as well. So for all of you with an incurable curiosity about livestock fencing, here is our answer.

First of all, everyone has to approach fencing in a way that works for them in their situation, in terms of thinking about short-term and long-term resources and goals, what kind of livestock you plan to have and for what purpose, how many animals, how much land, whether you plan intensive rotational grazing, etc., etc.
Most people will tell you to use some variation of electric fencing, whether it be New Zealand style or whatever. And it is certainly easy and cheap up front. But if something shorts it out, it's immediately ineffective, both at keeping livestock in as well as keeping predators and marauding dogs out. And tall grass, or snow, or a branch, or all manner of things can short it out. So it requires constant vigilance. Plus, when it's working, you have to worry about zapping yourself on it---or your neighbor's kid or your grandkids doing the same. Based on the kind of farm and lifestyle we want to have, electric doesn't fit.

The next thing many people recommend is woven wire. We did the dog run with it, just to see how it would go. What a pain in the neck. It is really hard to do anything other than a straight line on level ground with woven wire. You've got to stretch it, and it really needs wooden posts, which will rot unless you are willing to put pressure-treated wood into the soils that will feed you and your animals. It is impossible to unroll and work with in a wooded area. And if something falls on it, or your animals challenge it, either of which is fairly likely, you've got to redo an entire stretch of fence.

Stock/cattle panels make sense in both the short and the long term. Short term: they are fast and easy to install using T posts. They do well over uneven ground. It is easy to carry them into and install them in wooded sections that would be impossible to run woven wire through, and impractical to run electric fencing through. They don't need to run in a straight line, and in fact are stronger when curved and bent around corners, trees, rocks, etc.. The t-posts are easy to whack in among tree roots. Gates are a snap.

Long term: They last a long time with little maintenance. Stock panels are strong. T-posts won't rot. The stock panels are easily moved if you decide to rearrange your fencing or carve up paddocks differently. If something falls on a stock panel fence, you can just bang the affected panel back straight and reclip it to the T-posts. You haven't lost a whole stretch of fence.

We are in this for the long haul. All things considered, we figured that stock panels cost about twice as much as woven wire, and that this was one of those up-front infrastructure costs that is worth it, and will repay us for years to come. And, like anything else, it's a choice to spend this money over other things that people might decide not to live without (like . . . hot running water).

(We are indebted to Gene Logdon's ruminations in All Flesh is Grass, for providing us with a sane, common-sense perspective on pasture fencing for small farms.)

The Coop de Ville and a half mile of fencing

2010-05-19T21:39:00.005-04:00

The chicks, which have now begun to look like smallish chickens, have been in the completed "Coop de Ville," as Joe calls it, for about two weeks. We have installed a small pen covered with netting in the front where the young birds can get used to the outdoors and their surroundings while remainng relatively safe from hawks. Eventually we will need to let them range around the farm and take their chances.

They were pretty surprised by the big, bad world at first, but they got over it.

We have been feverishly installing fencing so that we can go fetch our sheep. The grass is so tall, and needs grazing desperately! For a variety of reasons, we have decided not to use electric fencing. We are taking Gene Logdon's advice regarding a small pasturages and starting with good perimeter fencing, using stock panels and metal posts. We need to keep predators and neighborhood dogs out as much as we need to keep sheep and goats in. We will figure out how to carve it up and rotate animals as we go forward. We have completed nearly a third of the necessary 2460-odd feet so far. But fencing during the height of black-fly season? This is either evidence of, or the cause of, our complete mental deficiency.

Tacking . . . toward Sunnywood Farm. With incremental progress.

2010-05-01T22:28:00.006-04:00

Given the acceleration of political, economic, and environmental deterioration around this fragile world, we have put completion of our cordwood house on hold in order to develop food-production and farm infrastructure. The Sunnywood blog will be evolving into the Sunnywood Farm blog. (Yet there is more cordwood building to come in July and August).

Anyone who knows anything about farming knows that there is a steep learning curve. So despite our years of reading and workshops, nothing compares to the real thing. Every morning and evening we do battle with our small but stubborn Nigerian dwarf dairy goats, who delight in kicking over the milking pail, and refusing to let down their milk.

The 16 heritage-breed Buckeye chicks were tiny little balls of fluff when I brought them home a few weeks ago, and when I fed them I would say, "Come here, little peepers!"

Now they have outgrown their second box. When we open it to feed them, some descend, beaks-first, upon our hands, while others mount a mass escape. Our feeding-time crooning has changed to "Keep your beaks to yourselves, ya little savages!" Joe is in a coop-building frenzy so that we can get the killer chickens out of our greatroom.

We have six or so sheep arriving soon. As soon as we can get enough fencing installed. There is no fast, easy way to install fencing. Although we have discovered better tools than the sledge hammer/step ladder system we used for the goat paddock.

The weather has rendered all normal planting schedules irrelevant. Even though I planted my peas early, even by Maine standards (where it is a point of pride to have your peas in earlier than your neighbors), they are already balking at the warm weather. Same with the cold-weather greens. But it's not warm enough at night for warm-season crops.

Our garden plan comprises 14 beds, and I have prepared and planted three so far. Our driveway contractor had offered to haul away the sod and topsoil he scraped up, and bring back some loam. But I liked the looks of our sod/topsoil, and I had no idea what his "loam" would be like. So instead, I'm busting up and screening mountains of sod, one 30-inch screenful at a time. This is a time and place where fossil-fuel-powered equipment would be useful.

Diggiging holes for apple trees today under an unseasonably hot sun, plagued by clouds of early black flies, I longed for someone with a backhoe to rumble by. We have found, in situations like these, that it is essential NOT to regard the whole task at hand, which leads to immediate psychological defeat. Just like the winter when Joe moved all of the cordwood for our house, on snowshoes, with a plastic sled: it is imperative to concentrate on one small piece of the work at a time. And before you know it, you're done. Incremental progress.

I have decided that this will be the Sunnywood Farm motto. Incremental progress.

We are Sun-powered!

2010-03-24T21:36:00.002-04:00

(with a capital "S"!)
After a long, dark winter of limited Internet access and limited posting, we are now the beneficiaries of electricity from the sun. Well, from the sun via solar modules, a charge controller, batteries, and assorted other gadgets. And courtesy of invaluable assistance and consulting from John, without which we would still be power-free. We haven't wired in any lights yet, but I am currently connected to the Internet without running the generator! Best of all, we have installed a Sundanzer DC refrigerator: no more buying ice, lugging ice blocks, emptying drip pans, etc. for the icebox. (However we learned a lot through the icebox experiment: I'll do another post on that soon.) Even after two days of overcast rainy/snowy weather, our small PV system is powering our 5.8 cu ft refrigerator.
We hung the modules from the fascia rather than mounting them on the roof, as we were concerned about the wind and associated lift on our shed-style roof. This will provide nice shade to this section of the house in the summer, but may well be too low to allow our low winter sun in when we need it---we may need to relocate the panels eventually.

All the water we want!!! ---and other updates

2010-01-31T13:56:00.001-05:00

A while back we mentioned that our excitement over our Bison water pump was dampened (sorry) by what the Bison folks surmised was a break in our water line that caused the pump to lose pressure. We thought we were looking at a long winter of 200-stroke primes and water-line excavation come spring, but it was manageable. Well, a few weeks ago we got up one morning to discover that no amount of pumping would produce any water. I bathed with what was left on the woodstove and went off to work, wondering how on earth we would manage with no water, leaving Joe staring bleakly at the pump. Late that evening I returned, to find Joe sitting at the table, looking, I thought, insufficiently miserable for someone who had no access to water. "Go over and try the pump," he said.

"Why?"

"Just try it."

I lifted the handle, getting ready to settle in for a few hundred strokes. I lifted up, began the downstroke . . . and felt resistance. Pressure! I heard gurgling. I brought down the handle and water surged out of the pump into the sink. I looked at Joe. He nodded, "Go on." I pumped again, and again, and each time, fresh, cold water gushed out. "Woo hoo! What happened?" I was pumping merrily away. "This is awesome!" Joe came over and quietly placed a small, dark object on the counter. It was a rock, about the size of a dime. "I found that stuck in the valve," he said. Apparently he'd spent the better part of the day disassembling and reassembling the pump, finally dismantling a part he hadn't been able to get apart previously. Time was never better spent. Life is good!

We have come up with a couple of makeshift methods to ease washing and bathing until such time as we get a gravity system rigged. One is a simple plastic trash can mounted above the bathroom sink, with a hole drilled toward the bottom and a spigot installed. We fill it once a day and have "on-demand" water for tooth-brushing and hand/face washing.

We have also rigged a way to shower! After looking at camp-style showers like the Zodi Extreme, which pressurizes via a hand pump, we bought an inexpensive stainless steel garden sprayer. I then headed to our local hardware store (the employees of which are my heroes, day after day). After having shown up with that blue plastic trash can, looking for help making it into a hand-washing station, they weren't the least bit surprised when I showed up with a garden sprayer and asked for help turning it into a shower. I went home with some plastic hose, a flow-amplifying shower head, some clamps, and some fittings to allow us to disconnect the tank for refilling. It's pretty slick! We fill it with hot water, pump it about 30-40 times, and get about a five-minute shower with less than two gallons. You do have to pump it again about half-way through your shower, but I have read that this is also necessary with the Zodis.

What else? Joe got the storm door installed on the kitchen side. The effect of 18-inch-thick walls is that you end up being able to stand between the storm door and the inside door: it's like an air lock! This has greatly reduced floor drafts.

During Molly's recent visit, Joe and Molly built a nifty trestle table with benches that fit underneath. This way when we don't have company, which is most of the time, the benches don't clutter up our small space, but can be pulled out when we do have visitors.

Oh, and while Ian was home, he built us this extremely cool rig for the kitchen counter extension, which in the "up" position holds the counter securely and can't be knocked aside, and which swings down between the counter legs, allowing the counter to fold down completely flat.

We probably won't be accomplishing much in the way of major projects over the next month or so, as both of us have full-time job commitments in February. Jobs get in the way of so much productive work! But we are lucky enough to have them this year, by all accounts.

We hope 2010 finds all of our far-flung family and friends healthy, safe, and secure.

Winter Solstice at Sunnywood

2009-12-22T17:39:00.002-05:00

It is 5:27 p.m. I have fired up the generator simply to power the modem long enough to upload this post (how much sense does that make?) and a battery-powered LED light clipped to my shirt allows me to see the keyboard on my laptop.

We celebrated Winter Solstice with family and friends---those who could make it on short notice, since the date had completely escaped us. Thanks so much to the intrepid! A skinny, not-quite-Charlie-Brown tree top graced by fat-butt Santa---ritual outdoor fire in the icy-cold wind---dogs!---good cheer and good people.

I am always thankful for the end of the shortening of days and the promise of the return of light, but found myself thankful more than ever this year. Since our necessity now is to make the inside of the house livable, we find ourselves working inside during the time of year when good light is rarest. On cloudy days we can lose good inside working light as early as 3 p.m., even with our southern glazing. Some days we are often working under generator-powered drop lights for four or more hours. I keep thinking about the sensibility of our dogs, who accept seasonal rhythms. Ciara, our big Newf, has begun barking for her evening walk as early as 3:30---something she might not do till 8 p.m. in June. If she had it her way this time of year, she'd come in at 4, eat dinner, and bed down for the night. But we must push to make this house livable so that we can get on with life, and hopefully be in a position to let Sunnywood Farm begin to live up to its name by spring.

We are still without electricity, having prioritized interior walls and closets---and firewood!--- for the time being. And while we were prepared to be without running water for the winter, we'd planned on a fully functonal Bison hand pump, which we don't really have. As far as we can tell, there is a break/leak in our line from the well, so the pump doesn't hold its vacuum, and needs one or two hundred strokes to prime. We have developed workaround systems, filling lots of vessels for washing and bathing while it's primed, but it's another complication we hadn't expected.

Yet nothing can convince me that we don't have so many unexpected things to be thankful for this season, and we are very glad to be where we are and where we're headed. Happy Solstice and happy holidays!

Posting reduced till we have power

2009-12-07T10:19:00.001-05:00

(Not that I don't have plenty of places to charge my laptop.) In fact, we have an Internet connection---DSL via our phone line, which is at present running tenuously on top of the ground from the nearest utility pole in to Sunnywood. However the darned DSL modem is useless without electricity. In a pinch we can get service with the generator, but who wants to do that? And since the town library only gives patrons an hour of Internet access at a time, posting may be limited for a couple of weeks until our solar system is in place (we are still awaiting shipping of one part). I will try to post some photos and a more complete update this weekend.

The cordwood was the easy part

2009-11-22T21:35:00.004-05:00

We are here to tell all of you intrepid folks who sweated along with us over the summer, mixing mortar by hand a wheelbarrowful at a time, cleaning logs, screening sand, and building cordwood masonry walls . . . that THAT was easy! Physically grueling, yes, but creative and satisfying. Getting the inside of the house livable has been another story.

Every task is a learning curve, and learning curves involve mistakes. Some of which can be rectified/redone, and some of which we will have to live with.

Take the plumbing. Somehow, when we were divvying up tasks, I got the plumbing. (I am still deeply suspicious about how this happened.) We have a simple graywater system, no blackwater or septic---how hard can that be? I guess I imagined that we could replicate camp setups from the old days and run black hose into a hole in the ground. However in organized townships there are plumbing inspectors who require schedule 40 traps and vent pipes and sanitary tees and cleanouts. But, for goodness sake, with a graywater system we're only allowed to have three drains. Two sinks and a bath; count 'em, THREE.

Jerry at the hardware store lent me his plumbing book, complete with plumbing diagrams and color photos of all of the parts. The plumbing inspector reviewed the system I drew out and said it was great. So I bought the parts, cut the pipe, and assembled everything (kind of like tinker toys with really stupid rules). I asked the plumbing inspector to come look at it before I glued the PVC. "This is fine," he said. "But what you could do," he said, looking at the ugly PVC running up, down, and across our walls, "is run those vent pipes under the floor next to the waste pipes."

"We're allowed to do that?," I screeched, wondering why on earth he hadn't mentioned this when he looked at my schematic.

So I dissassembled everything, bought new parts and started over. The under-the-floor parallel vent system was much harder. Everything was so rigid that the gluing was nearly impossible. You've got about ten seconds after applying the glue and joining the parts to get things aligned right. I hit my head on the sink about twenty times and knocked the pipe glue all over our newly oiled floor boards. I am not sure Joe had ever heard such a colorful combination of northern NJ and backwoods Maine. The plumbing inspector arrived to inspect our system just as our test bucket of water was leaking out of the trap connection.

I had also volunteered to build the kitchen counters, even though I had no clue how to do this. Two and a half weeks later, let's just say that that the sink only fits into the hole before you've screwed everything down; not after. And that I probably won't be finding any work as a carpenter.

Even Joe, who is proficient at just about everything, has had his share of issues. Just ask him how long it took, and how many specialized drill bits were consumed, to drill a hole through one of the logs for the propane connection (and why we weren't using the piece of PVC we'd laid into the wall for this purpose)? And what happened when he set the Bison water pump into its carefully prepared platform on the completed countertop (and why we don't have water yet)?

By the way, the plumbing inspector mentioned that when Maine adopts the uniform building code in 2012, a person won't be able to build a house like ours. "The average new home will require 8 to 10 inspections, and all home designs will have to be approved by an engineer," he said. Even without a mortgage, you won't be able to build what you want on your own land with your own money.

More neighbor love

2009-11-13T21:15:00.001-05:00

I forgot to mention that our neighbor Richard---who has been very good to us but is clearly having a hard time getting his head around our project---graced us with two more of his neighborisms the other day.
"Startin' to look almost home-like," he smiled, walking in. Then, frowning, "Well, camp-like, maybe." He smiled again, reassuring us. "I've seen worse!"

Countdown to move-in

2009-11-13T20:54:00.002-05:00

It has suddenly occurred to us that it is November 13, and we must move out of the trailer we are renting by the end of November. Well, considering that we packed and emptied an entire household/family's worth of stuff in four days when we left our old house at the end of August---and that anything we are keeping is already in the Sunnywood barn---then this move, with associated cleaning, should be a half-day job.

We are doing what we can to make Sunnywood livable as fast as possible, but it's clear that conditions will be rough for a while. The dog run suddenly rose to the top of the list. Do the pictures hint as to the reason? (For once, I am not to blame for bringing an animal into our house!) We have prioritized the bathroom walls over others, for obvious reasons, as well as kitchen counters for food prep and to house the sink and the oh-so-vital Bison pump. Oh, and the greywater plumbing has been completed by yours truly, and is definitely NOT guaranteed not to leak---but that's an entirely separate post.

Bottle ends

2009-11-01T21:15:00.008-05:00

Many people have asked us about the pretty splashes of colored light in some of the photos of our cordwood walls. These are bottle ends (as opposed to log ends), created by inserting a colored bottle into a clear glass jar, and laying the unit into the cordwood wall in place of a log end.

Adapting Rob and Jaki Roy's technique somewhat to our available materials, we inserted the neck of a colored bottle into a clear mason- or mayonnaise-type jar, adjusting them until, from end to end, they formed a bottle end slightly longer than the 18-inch width of our cordwood walls (so that it would protrude a bit). To hold this width, we wrapped the bottle/jar unit with aluminum flashing and secured the flashing to the bottles with duct tape. (The flashing is necessary because if you were to push the neck of the colored bottle all the way into the jar and tape them directly together, the resulting bottle end would be too short for our 18-inch thick walls.) We punctured the duct tape in a number of places to enable the bottle end to breath.

Joe had searched diligently last year for unusually colored bottles, and found, in addition to the usual greens and browns, some lovely blue and aqua bottles. While our compressed building schedule prevented us from using a lot of bottle ends or designing elaborate patterns with them, we used them to nice effect in the south and east walls, where the angle of the sun makes them quite magical at certain times of day.

Solar panels from space

2009-10-25T21:40:00.004-04:00

So after we had consulted with solar-electric professionals as well as solar-electric DIYers, and realized that hiring the professionals would require three to four times what we have budgeted for a solar electric system, synchronicity prevailed. Thanks to some very fine friends, we were able to buy two brand new 205-watt, 12-volt photo voltaic panels with a 20-year guarantee well below cost, and they are now in our barn. It was nice to see the power of common interest and community at work! And I have to say that the pickup-bed to pickup-bed transfer at Great Maine Apple Day in the pouring rain lent a delightfully wicked blackmarket air to the transaction.
NOTE: This is what cordwood guru Rob Roy would deem the result of "cultivating coincidences," which you do by putting the word out that you need something. As Roy put it in his book, Timber Framing for the Rest of Us, "the more tentacles you send out into the world, the better the chances of latching onto something."

Remaining cordwood walls uncovered; temporary wall complete

2009-10-24T21:39:00.005-04:00

How soon will we be able to move in to Sunnywood? That is the question. As the weather gets colder, the furnace in our rented mobile home runs more and more constantly. The structure doesn't breath, so even with all of the hot air from the forced-air furnace, moisture and mold build up and the air quality is really bad. Quite an incentive to move things along!

We removed the remaining tarps covering Sunnywood's cordwood walls, as they had been curing for the requisite month. Here is the north-facing wall. The only windows are the egress windows mandated by fire code.

Here are the east and south walls. The south wall has the most glazing of any wall, but is still insufficiently glazed for signficant solar gain.

Part of the balancing act we are struggling with concerns the small size of our house, and the fact that we need to maximize productive space. This means making use of wall space for things other than windows.

There remains the possibility that when we complete the last "wing" next year and fill in the last four cordwood panels, the remaining south-facing panel could be filled mostly with glass, making that corner of the greatroom a kind of sunspace. Proper placing of light-colored tile could act as thermal mass to moderate temperatures and reflect light and heat into the rest of the greatroom.
The temporary wall to close us in for winter is complete, except for the installation of the door. We were able to reuse the flakeboard that we'd used as a working surface over the floor joists while we built cordwood. When we build permanent interior walls, we will use wood planking instead, and put the flakeboard in service in an outbuilding, perhaps a wood shed.

The insulation that we've put in the temporary wall for winter will come in handy somewhere else when this wall comes down in the spring. You can also see the one-inch foam board insulation in the ceiling, which, in addition to the batting and wood above it, gives us about R-38 in the ceilings. Not quite the R-40 to -50 usually advised for passive solar, but close.

We have heat!

2009-10-12T21:00:00.008-04:00

The woodstoves are installed! This is the only work, besides the excavating for the foundation, that we have hired out. The installers from Rocky's (really---would I make that up?) did, in four hours, what would probably have taken us about three days, given our usual learning curve. Plus, their installation meets state fire codes, and if the roof leaks, we have people to blame it on. They were nice guys, even though they chipped our new tile. The markup on parts seemed a tad exhorbitant (but this is from the perspective of people who almost never hire out home improvement/construction work).

Joe had picked up a wood cookstove a year or so ago through an ad in Uncle Henry's. It was manufactured by Magee Furnace Company, which operated in Boston in the late 1800s. We sanded off some rust, applied furnace cement here and there, replaced a few stove bolts, and painted it. We fired it up today. The oven stays warm for a long time after the fire dies out.

Our big purchase, though, was a brand new Jotul woodstove. I have heated with wood for more than 20 years, but never with a new stove. We opted for a Black Bear 118, which looks small, but has an 8-hour burn and is rated for 1800 sq ft: more than double our area. It may well chase us out, but we were reluctant to go with the parlor-sized stove, as this is our only heat source.

So let's see: our windows are in, and we have heat. A temporary wall and a couple of doors are all that's standing in the way of getting out of our rented trailer. And interior walls.

After last night's HARD frost, we decided that it was time to disconnect the Bison hand pump from its outdoor setup and keep it safe and warm till we can install it next to our kitchen sink. Which will require the construction of counters. And plumbing. Pesky details.

Floor and hearth half done

2009-10-11T21:10:00.009-04:00

We have more than half of the floor boards installed, and the hearth is complete (half a hearth in the photo below). We ended up using ceramic tile for the hearth, because it provided a lower profile than brick and seemed easier to keep clean. State fire codes mandated the use of cement board under the tile. All of the windows are installed (well, those in the finished cordwood walls, anyway). The wood cookstove and Jotul wood stove get installed tomorrow.

We have done pretty well, doing all of this work together, while living out of boxes in a rented trailer, only getting slightly annoyed with each other now and then. We were warned that cordwood (and other) building projects can take their toll on relationships, but for the most part the process has been surprisingly satisfying. Lately, we have discovered the art of parallel play. That is, projects that require two people, we do together. Projects that can be done by one person, we assign. So we've been laying floor boards together, because they're big and heavy and need one person compressing while another is securing--- but I built the hearth while Joe installed windows. Parallel play. :)

Regarding the photos below: if you remember, we built a rubble-trench foundation. Which means that the three courses of hemlock grade beams you see sit atop a well-tamped crushed-rock berm that fills a drained trench (which sits on ledge). Any water that finds its way to the grade beams (very little because of the site grading and the roof overhangs) drains away. On the outside, the grade beams are surrounded by an insulated apron (rigid foam at about 35 degrees) to keep the ground around the outside of the house warm and dry. Inside the grade beam, we put some foam and bubble-wrap barriers for a bit of extra protection from any drafts that might find their way through 18 inches of hemlock. We covered the ground under the house with gravel, to act as a capillary break for moisture. The floor joists are 16" on center, and we added mid-joist support in the form of bricks with shims, and large blocks where heavy items such as woodstoves and water tanks would be installed.

Passive-Solar, or Sun-Tempered?

2009-10-07T20:23:00.011-04:00

One of our goals in building this house was to be able to live in something easy and inexpensive to heat---an important consideration in Maine. This naturally led us to try to incorporate passive-solar features.

The basic features of passive-solar house design include south-facing orientation, overhangs/shading, thermal mass, sufficient insulation, and energy-efficient windows. Now that the house is coming together, we can see that we have been more successful in incorporating some of these features than others.

We sited the house really well. To take advantage of the sun's heat, a house should be longer than wide, with the long axis east-west, and a long south-facing wall, fitted with lots of window glass situated to absorb the heat from the low winter sun.

Now that the windows are in, we think that we have under-glazed. Since the south wall fronts on a contiguous great-room space that is fairly shallow, we were afraid of overheating, so we were cautious about glazing. We also neglected to consider that the installed windows would actually lose a full two inches in each direction to the frame, so that the actual glass area is 4 inches narrower and 4 inches shorter than we had planned on each window.

On the other hand, we paid really close attention to the angle of the sun and where it hit the south wall in the winter and the summer, and put our glazing high enough to catch the winter sun and avoid most of the summer sun. Our 2.5-foot roof overhangs, also a key passive-solar feature, are integral to making this happen.

Regarding thermal mass: our external walls, with 18 inches of mortar and wood, supply a huge amount of ambient thermal mass. What we are missing is thermal mass specifically located to absorb and moderate the sun's rays. We can still add some in the future, but for now we have decided to forgo extra thermal mass in our internal walls and floors. (We had also decided against a concrete pad foundation, which is a feature of many passive-solar designs.)

Insulation: Our 18" walls contain an average of 8 inches of sawdust insulation. However the value of cordwood lies in the combination of insulation and thermal mass, even more so than in log homes. Nevertheless, I would guess that the insulation alone probably meets the standard for walls, even without considering the mass factor. Our ceiling has standard materials (batts and rigid foam) but at R35, is a somewhat lower R-value than the new super-efficient standards.

Energy-efficient windows: here's where we could have used a bit more education. We thought we had done well, and I was excited at the prospect of new, "Low-e" windows that reduce heat loss through the glass. However, we didn't realize that the windows that were sold to us as energy-efficient were actually "LoE-2" (the "2" is superscripted so you don't really notice it). LoE-2 windows, as it turns out, are manufactured and offered as the "standard" by the major window manufacturers as an attempt to meet the energy efficiency needs of all 50 states. In addition to reducing heat loss through the glass, they also limit solar heat gain by blocking passage of infrared and some ultraviolet rays---a feature helpful in hot-weather climates, but detrimental to a passive-solar design.

So, in the end, our house may end up functioning more as what Dan Chiras terms a "sun-tempered" design than a true passive-solar spacing-heating system. Even so, according to Chiras, a sun-tempered design can take care of 20 to 30 percent of the annual heating load. We'll report back after we've lived there for a while.

Cordwood Commentary

2009-10-04T21:29:00.007-04:00

It's worth remembering some of the comments people have made about our cordwood house, while helping us build, seeing finished walls, or watching us work:

"This is . . . different . . . "
"This is awesome!"
"Looks awfully tedious." (our neighbor)
"Won't it shift?"
"Won't it heave?"
"How do you keep the bugs out?"
"How long will something like this last?"
"So . . . you're not going to sheetrock inside?"
"You guys are out of your minds!"
"Pretty zen."
"This is really laborious."
"This is crazy!"
"Looks awfully tedious." (our neighbor again)
"This is so cool!"
"I'm happy for you guys, but I'm not really diggin this cordwood thing."
"It's like a fortess!"
"Me, I like to throw up some plywood, some vinyl, and call it good."
"You'll be able to heat it with a candle."
"Looks awfully tedious.' (neighbor---still)
"When I look at that wall, I think of 101 Dalmatians."

And the best one: "I'd say it looks pretty Zombie-proof."

Tarp House starts to become Sunnywood

2009-09-24T22:19:00.009-04:00

Because it's important for the lime-putty mortar not to cure too quickly, we had tarped each panel as it was completed, to protect it from sun wind. So as far as the neighbors could tell, despite all of our building efforts, we still had just a tarp house.

Today we removed the tarps from the panels that we had completed 30 or more days ago (time enough for initial curing): a total of 5 panels. Even though these earlier panels, as the "learning walls," incorporate all of everyone's mistakes, they are still awesome. I can't wait to live in this house.

10th panel is done!!!

2009-09-21T09:13:00.004-04:00

As of 5:30 yesterday (Sunday, 9/20) eve. This panel took 16 batches and 3 days for Joe and me, with Heidi working with us for about half of that time. We had our first real frost Saturday night, so we'll have to wait and see if and how that affected the fresh mortar. All of the panels are now tarped and curing. Stay tuned for details and photos about mixing lime putty and mortar, setting window frames, using bottles and other decorative features, techniques for top work, comments people have made, and more.

Going for 10!

2009-09-17T21:53:00.002-04:00

Okay, due to popular demand (i.e., both Joe and I think it's a good idea), we have completed panel 9 and begun #10! We have been very lucky to have Heidi back to help us. It took 19 batches and 4 and a half days for panel 9, but the big window frame took a lot more preparation and handling than the smaller frames (that will be another post: how 2 people lift and set these massive frames). Our plan is to be done with the 10th panel, if we push it, by the end of the day on Sunday. Or Monday.

We had a light frost in some spots last night, but covered the new work with tarp.

Trapped in cordwood

2009-09-14T13:09:00.009-04:00

Our long silence does not mean that we've finally mortared ourselves into our walls! We're just in a building frenzy, trying to complete as much wall area as possible before the calendar puts an end to it. After that we'll update this blog with detail and process notes and photos.

We finished the 8th panel on Saturday the 12th. We could move in for the winter with 8 panels, as that would give us three "bays" closed in, if we install a temporary wall at the west end of the completed panels. But we made so much progress on the 9th panel yesterday (we're getting better at this, and faster*), that we are now considering the possibility of a 10th, which would give us 4 bays---all of our living area except the utility and project rooms.

See the rough floor plan below. The gray exterior border represents the 18" cordwood wall. The small black rectangles are posts; there are a total of 14 cordwood panels between the posts. We have completed the panels bracketed with red: three on the north, three on the south, and the two large east panels. As of yesterday, we had about a third of the cordwood done on the 9th panel (the next south-facing panel). If we complete another north panel, making 10, we can move our temporary wall west by an entire set of posts.

We've extended our "stop" date to the 19th, which is surely pushing it in terms of approaching frosts. What do you think: is it worth taking a chance that frost might affect the set of the lime mortar?

*Joe and I, working alone, mixed and laid up six batches of mortar, in addition to cleaning some logs and sifting some sand.

Working on panel 6!

2009-08-20T21:42:00.009-04:00

Heidi, beginning the sixth panel:

Our post and beam, shed-roofed, 43' x 25' design has 14 infilled cordwood panels between the posts. The minimum number of filled panels we need to be able to live there during this winter is eight: this would give us the kitchen, bath, one bedroom, and a bit of living area. But we can only lay cordwood until about mid-September, because lime-putty mortar doesn't set up well in really hard frosts. So our goal has been 8 panels by mid-September. Looks pretty doable at this point (maybe we can fill 10 panels, which would give us more living area and the other bedroom!).
The following pictures show the fifth panel, which is actually the center panel of the three well-glazed south-facing living-room panels. This went fast because the window frame took up so much room.
Here are Isaac and Heather, completing the top of the center panel. Note Joe's homemade scaffolding:

Check out Isaac's under-the-window cordwood pattern!

Laying a bottle end:

Joe is sitting in the window well. 18-inch-thick walls make window frames with a lot of options! (You can see one particularly bright turquoise bottle end as well.)

What a crew of six can accomplish

2009-08-05T23:03:00.009-04:00

TWELVE batches of lime-putty mortar. That's what Isaac, Heather, Joe, Ian, Heidi, and Holly mixed and laid up today.

Wha' da ya know? It's raining! Boy, we really needed that!!!

Isaac, Ian, and Joe built and set the front kitchen window frame while waiting inside behind the tarp for the monsoon to end.

Working around (or out of) the rain---and cordwood heros

2009-07-31T22:48:00.008-04:00

You can see a bit of how Joe has rigged the tarps that cover the wall openings as awnings to work under in this season's never-ending rain (of course, the sun came out for these photos). Isaac and Heather are our cordwood heros! Before long, they'll be teaching us what to do.
This picture of how neatly the cordwood wall meets the ceiling/roof belies how difficult and time-consuming that piece of the work really is.

Life can sure change all in a moment

2009-07-30T22:01:00.004-04:00

So . . . we've lived in our current house for almost exactly a decade: longer than either of us has lived anywhere else in our adult lives. It's where our youngest daughter spent her high school years, and where our youngest son has lived since he was nine. We had planned to try to sell it, when our cordwood house was nearly ready to move into. But life has a funny habit of not working out as planned. Our house has been---unexpectedly---sold, to the satisfaction of both seller and buyer. Now all we need is a place to live!

We had planned to start laying cordwood last spring. We worked on painting and repairs in our current house, so that when we were ready to sell it, it would be ready to sell. We enjoyed the activities of our youngest child's senior year in high school, and concentrated on college preparations for him.

We were ready to start laying cordwood. Then the rains hit. As I write, it has been raining pretty steadily, with few breaks, for about two months. No one around here has ever seen anything like it.

We have 14 panels to fill in with cordwood---although we could probably move in with just eight panels and a temporary wall. But we have to stop laying cordwood no later than mid-September, because the lime-putty mortar won't set up properly in a hard frost.

We have already been blessed by "help from the sky." Isaac and Heather have been awesome!!! Karen and Clive!!! Ian!!! However we are here to say that if any of our readers have the slightest interest in learning how to build with cordwood, NOW IS YOUR TIME!!! We stand ready and waiting to teach you everything you would ever want to know (as well as stuff you wouldn't). Come on out and experience the zen of cordwood . . .

Friends---and first complete panel

2009-07-28T22:28:00.015-04:00

Friends Karen and Clive joined us for a day of cordwood, and were initiated into all of the mysteries. We have decided that they are the best new pointers of cordwood mortar EVER---even Jaki Roy of Earthwood would approve, I think! Their section of wall will stand out when the house is done, to be sure.

We also filled in the top of one of the two nearly complete panels, making our first complete panel! Fitting and filling in at the top is very time-consuming, and uses a LOT of mortar.

30 batches of mortar later

2009-07-21T21:50:00.005-04:00

We had our two days of summer, and it's raining again. We have managed to make a bit of progress, though.

Laying cordwood at last

2009-07-02T23:55:00.008-04:00

Rain be damned---we are laying cordwood! And very glad that we decided to build a timber frame with cordwood infilling, rather than building load-bearing cordwood, because we have a roof to work under. The folks in the Daycreek forum---particularly Bruce and Nancy---have been most helpful and we have achieved very good LPM (lime-putty mortar) mixes, with the help of some bagged dry sand. When the mix is good, you can feel it and hear it while you're mixing.

We are using 18" log ends, and following Rob Roy's suggestion, going with approximate MIM (mortar-insulation-mortar) widths of 5"---7.5"---5" (to leave a half inch for log-end relief when pointing).

The corners around the posts are kind of funky: we use 6" log ends on alternate courses. From the outside there is no difference: we just need to remember to leave room for insulation on the inside.

Splooty mortar, and the cordwood learning curve

2009-06-24T21:11:00.011-04:00

You can read all you want about something---and trust me, we have---and you can try to learn from the example of others---we took Rob Roy's cordwood course---but nothing can prepare you for actually doing something, other than . . . DOING it.

We have opted to use lime-putty mortar rather than a Portland cement mix. It is time-tested (the Romans used it) and doesn't have the embodied energy of Portland (cement manufacture produces huge amounts of carbon dioxide). So last week we cracked open some of the 100 bags of Type S builders lime we'd purchased, and hydrated it to make a lime putty, using a recipe from New York cordwood builders extraordinaire Bruce and Nancy: 13.5 gallons of water, 3 50-lb bags of lime, and 1/2 cup of dish soap. This mixture is WORK to mix, even with a paddle mixer attached to a power drill. We covered the putty with a film of water and plastic, and let it sit for a bit more than the required 3 days.

Yesterday we tried our first mortar mix: 2 1/2 parts sand to one part lime putty. However, here in Maine we have had a freakishly wet spring---we had five inches of rain just between June 19 and 21, and it's been raining all month---and our sand, despite our best efforts, is pretty moist.

The resulting mortar was overly moist. Cordwood guru Rob Roy says that a ball of mortar, when tossed three feet in the air, should NOT go "sploot" when it lands. All I can say is that ours was pretty splooty.

We tried laying up our first bit of cordwood with our too-wet mortar, rolling up one of our tarp "walls," but the rain and wind began again as soon as the tarp was up. We were forced to give up after half a batch of mortar, which is probably just as well. We were in a hurry to lay our first cordwood after all of the preparation, and forgot everything we'd read about technique and "mortar, insulation, wood" cadence. Looks like we'll need to wait out the weather, settle down, and try again.

"Pretty splooty"

Everything but cordwood

2009-05-21T21:36:00.008-04:00

While we haven't started on the cordwood walls yet, we have been busy getting everything in place so that we can. This has involved going to Houlton to research and buy our Bison hand water pump, taking delivery of and storing fifty 50-pound bags of hydrated lime for our lime putty mortar (once again our son Isaac has provided invaluable help), having a truckload of sand brought in, and trying to locate a supply of dry sawdust, which will be the insulation between the exterior and interior mortar joints in our cordwood wall (see photo of cordwood wall in progress from our Earthwood Building School workshop). How could we know that dry sawdust is dear as gold in this part of the state, prized by dairy farms as bedding?

We have also taken the time to plant some fruit and nut trees, as well as pine trees for wind breaks/privacy, spread hay and wood chips on the bare dirt of our much-loved berm, and lay down loam, cow manure, compost, and wood chips as the foundation for next year's vegetable garden. The truckload of cow manure was a mothers day gift from Molly and Ian: one of the best ever! (The gift that keeps on giving, as I said.) Actually Joe has been doing most of the hard labor, while I sit in my cell---whoops!, office---every day and think up annoying questions to ask and things to remind him of.

I take the liberty of sharing this recent Facebook post of Joe's:

"You work sixteen tons, and whaddaya get? Another day older, and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don't you call me, my life's too hard. I owe my soul to the credit card... Yup, Kyle and I hand shoveled 10 tons of loam, a ton of manure and five tons of mulch. Sixteen tons, and whaddaya get? A garden that's 750 square feet, compared to a house that's going to be only 660 square feet!!"

He's not kidding: we kept expanding our vegetable garden plot, worrying that it wasn't big enough, until we realized that it had exceeded the square footage of the non-shop portion of our house! It's all about priorities . . .

Foundation & drainage design passes winter/spring test!

2009-04-23T21:28:00.010-04:00

Swale behind house drains to left/east

Swale designed to catch rain & roof runoff

Berm catches slope runoff on north (back) side

When we were planning the rubble trench foundation and the grading around the house, we were working with good, time-tested ideas (Frank Lloyd Wright and others), but many people were skeptical. One friend was concerned that we weren't tying our grade beams into the bedrock below. Another thought we should insert waterproofing between the grade beams and the crushed stone. Someone else was convinced that since parts of our rubble trench extend only a foot down---where it meets ledge---that our grade beams would heave (below-frost standard is four feet in Maine).

Me, I was concerned that the swale we designed to carry water around and away from the house wasn't deep or wide enough. It looks like a dent---not the ditch I expected. But the ground is graded gently toward the swale, which goes around the side and back of the house and then extends down to the site's natural drainage area.

The snow has melted and we have had our share of spring rains. We took the opportunity presented by the soft spring ground to fine-tune the grading. But it didn't need much: we are pleased to report that the swale scheme, combined with Nick-the-excavator's marvelous berm, worked. The berm, in addition to providing some protection on the north side of the house, stops/diverts water from the north slope before it can reach the house. The swale takes care of water that falls around the house. Our shed-style roof sheds most of the water behind the house, where the gentle swale channels it down the slope to the property's natural drainage.
We are very pleased---okay, pretty damned excited---to see it working so well.

The other design features that are working really well, drainage-wise, are the extended (2.5-foot) roof overhangs and the compacted gravel berm that our grade beams sit on. High and absolutely dry. No water, no frost, no heave, no trapped moisture.

Moving cordwood: don't underestimate the tortoise principle

2009-02-18T21:38:00.015-05:00

Joe has been hauling the cordwood from the cutting site to the building site. Via rather small tote sleds, without the help of a snowmobile, horse, or even our Newfie. Why? Here is how our decision process went:

We want to begin the cordwood infilling as soon as possible in the spring. Cool, we thought; we'll order sand and lime and be ready to roll as soon as hard frosts have passed. We'll have to allow time to bring the wood over from the cutting site . . . which will mean driving the truck to the cutting areas where the wood is stacked . . . the access roads to which are not likely to be dry enough to drive over till June . . . aarrrgghhh, another flaw in the plan. Better to get the wood out now, while the ground is frozen and snow-covered.

Our first idea was to get the wood out with a borrowed snowmobile and tote sled. Sounded good, but not a viable option for the landowners, since our snowmobile tracks would very likely have had the effect of quickly incorporating their land into the ITS system and attracting every sled for miles around. We finally decided that we'd try the long slow route of hauling wood out with hand-pulled sleds, one small load at a time. When we made the decision, we figured that we might only get a third of the wood out before spring, but that would still give us a jump on building and Joe had some time this winter.

What we didn't expect was the progress that can be made with slow, steady effort. With a good pair of snowshoes, as well as some much-appreciated help from Isaac, Joe has already moved two-thirds of the cordwood from the cutting site to the building site five miles away---including setting up wood racks inside the Sunnywood frame---with a plastic sled, a homemade wooden sled, and an small pickup. This has been a lesson in the value of incremental but consistent expenditure of energy (and way cheaper than a membership at the gym). We have also learned that low-tech solutions can sometimes be very effective: having done this, Joe doesn't believe that using a snowmobile would have been any faster, or that much easier. It does help that the wood has already been drying for a year, so it is considerably lighter than the first time we handled it.
Loading sleds:

Working against gravity:

Working with gravity!:

To Sunnywood:

Inside to stay good and dry:

"You'll be able to heat this place with a candle"

2009-02-03T09:16:00.010-05:00

We tarped (does this qualify us for bailout funds?) Sunnywood for the winter back in November, since the post and beam structure currently has no infilling. Here it is, complete with the nifty tarp door Joe built into the east side. So the silver tarp, on the high side, is facing magnetic south,* more or less: this is where most of the glazing will go. More than one person has said to us, upon hearing the details of our design, (particularly the 18-inch-thick cordwood walls), "You'll be able to heat the place with a candle!" Well, we have been inside the house when it was slightly above zero and extremely windy, but sunny. And even with only tarps for walls, it was comfortable enough inside to shed gloves, hats, and an outer layer or two, and eat lunch comfortably. (And also cheerfully bright!) So when I think about adding 18 inches of cordword, mortar, and sawdust insulation, I think maybe those people were right. It appears that our siting and orientation will prove very effective. I also think the earth berm that Nick-the-excavator decided to build behind the house, on the north side, was a wonderful idea. It helps block the north wind tumbling down the slope. There's this wonderful little microclimate around the house, in part because of the berm.

*Wrong: we actually corrected for the magnetic declination and so used "true south." Thanks to my good friend Steve for questioning me on this.

Timber framing: how and why

2009-01-10T21:54:00.015-05:00

We were so busy during the fall that we didn't have time to post pictures and explanations of the finer details of the Sunnywood design. As we are now stalled in our building process until spring, we will try to remedy that.
The timber framing process we used was modeled after that described by Rob Roy in Timber Framing for the Rest of Us. Roy contends that while timber framing lends itself to the thick walls necessary for many natural/alternative building methods, most books talk about the craft and art of old-fashioned mortise-and-tenon timber framing. However with inexpensive mechanical fasteners such as brackets, plates, and bolts, "regular" (read, "inexperienced") people can build strong timber frame structures.
Cordwood structures don't require a timber frame. But cordwood is a slow, labor-intensive building method. We finally decided that infilling a timber frame with cordwood, as opposed to building a load-bearing cordwood walls, would allow us to get the roof up on top of the timber frame and lay cordwood under its protection as we had time.
Here are photos of some of the very basic hardware we used to build our "everyperson-style" timber frame. Below, our son Isaac uses a plate to join two beams over a post.

Another thing that Rob Roy advised for a low-pitch (1:12) roof like ours, and which we highly recommend, is to shim the rafters over the beams, rather than cut birds mouths into the rafters. The shims are easy, require less precision, and accomplish the same goal, which is to transfer the vertical load straight down onto the beam. Gravity and friction will hold them in place.
Shims under rafters:

Laying the floor joists

2008-12-27T15:52:00.005-05:00

Here's a brief update on how I did the floor joists. We decided to do it before laying the walls for a couple of reasons. First, it got the material inside and under the roof, and second, since we also decided not to lay the floor just yet, it gave us a place to stack the lumber for the floor, also inside and under the roof. We decided not to lay the floor in order to keep the floor boards from getting dirty and having mortar dropped on them while we were doing the walls.

As with so many of the segments of this project, I had to decide how to manage the work in ways I could physically handle the materials, since I worked alone most of the time. The house is 40 ' long x 22' wide on the inside with a central grade beam on an 11.5' center. We decided to use 2x6s for the floor joists on 16" centers. This worked out to one joist nailed to the east and west grade beams on each short side, and 30 joists hung from Timberlock joist hangers between the center grade beam and the long grade beams.

What worked for me was to lay the joists in groups of 6 each. First, I'd measure and mark the 16" centers on the grade beams, then I'd nail in the joist hangers. After the hangers were mounted, I'd measure the the length between the centers of each set of two hangers. I did this because with the rough cut hemlock grade beams there were slight bows and slight differences in the actual widths of the grade beams. Once I had a set of six measurements, I'd cut the floor joists to length. Then I'd mount them in the hangers, check to make sure they were level across the span, and with the joists next to them, and finally toenail them in. I could do about 6 joists in an hour.

The above picture shows the north half of the house with all 32 joists laid. There's not much more to say about this, it's pretty basic stuff.

Cutting the cordwood for the walls

2008-11-03T21:05:00.004-05:00

(Joe here.) Obviously, this post is out of sequence for how things really happened. In January of 2007 we began discussing how to get the wood we'd need. We were contemplating buying our wood in tree lengths and then debarking and cutting to size. However, some friends of ours who live near our building site offered to let us cut wood from their land. It was a win-win situation all around, we got the wood for free, they got a lot of cleared space. All they asked was that we haul the brush to central spots so they could chip it.

In June of 2007 we started cutting the wood for our cordwood home. There's really not a lot I can discuss about cutting wood, whole books have been written about it to better effect than I can describe here. I did work out a sequence that worked for me since I was working by myself most days I was cutting wood.

The first thing I'd do is drop the tree, then limb it, and haul the brush. After the site was cleared away and I could see what I was working with, I'd buck it to size, (we are using 18" log ends), making sure to work around forks, bad spots on the trunk, crooks and other less than straight pieces. I'd also save parts of pretty big branches. Depending on how energetic (or tired!!) I was, I'd keep pieces all the way down to a couple of inches in diameter.

After bucking the tree to size, I'd move all the odds and ends of unusable pieces into piles, (some of which we've used in our woodstove), then I'd haul the cordwood to wherever I was going to stack it. Where possible, I tried to set up a stack between two trees in order to have support for the ends of the piles.

I was using a yard cart to move the wood from where I cut it to where I was stacking it. Obviously, the amount I could move depended on what diameter log end I was working with. I had some loads that were only two pieces, some had twenty!! Once I had the wood moved to the pile location, then I'd peel it. There is some discussion about the best way/time to peel the log ends. I tried peeling the entire tree, I tried cutting the trees into 54" sticks (which worked out to three 18" log ends per stick) and peeling those, but ultimately I ended up waiting until I had cut the tree into the 18" log ends. This way I didn't end up peeling forks, crooks and other pieces I wasn't going to use. I also peeled pretty much immediately after I cut the tree as it peeled a whole lot better that way. We used mostly white pine, and some spruce, both of which peeled pretty easily. The spruce was a bit harder because the branches come out in pretty random patterns, the white pine has branches in fairly regular spacing. I was able to peel for up to three days after I cut a tree without having to rely on a drawknife. My typical peeling tool was a putty knife. I could start a slit down the length of the log end and peel the bark away in strips. Sometimes I could get the bark to peel off in one piece, almost like pulling a single sheet off of a roll of paper towels!! One other advantage I found was that, except for the largest pieces, I could sit on a stool with a log end in my lap and peel it. It was nice to be able to work in the shade on hot days!! I was able to peel with no problems from June through about mid-September in our area. After that point I had to start using the drawknife on each piece. As it stands now, I still have about five face cords to peel. Our friends let us stack the wood on their property which saved me having to move all that water in the green wood. By the time we're ready to start the cordwood part of the project, the wood'll be nice and dry, and LIGHT!!

A couple of hints I'll pass on that I hope you'll find useful. I bought a lot of sacrifice clothes at the Good Will thrift shop for this part of the project. You get a lot of sap all over your clothes when you're working with green pine. Also, my friends suggested a pretty neat product called Citri-solv which is a non-toxic non-acidic citrus solution that really takes the sap off of pretty much everything. I used it to clean myself and my tools.

Here is a picture of one of the earlier stacks. Over all, I cut about 8 cords of log ends, which works out to about 21 face cords, which, if I calculated correctly should be enough to do the house we've designed.

Laying down the roof

2008-11-03T20:27:00.003-05:00

(Joe here.) We laid the roof down in several stages. The first step was the plywood sheathing. Prior to that much care was taken to make sure that the two outermost rafters were square when laying up the rafters. Nick Jose, who did the excavation work, used his bucket excavator to help me lift all 45 sheets of plywood up onto the roof so I didn't have to get them up there one at a time manually. If you're in a situation like I was where I was working alone a lot, that kind of mechanical help is worth the money.

Also as Kyle mentioned we had a few sheets of plywood where I had to either trim off a half inch or so or add a sister to the rafter to ensure the end of the plywood would have something to tie to. Mea culpa. I did not take the time to make sure to straighten out any bowed rafters and make sure that the rafters were on 16" centers for their entire length. I ended up having to trim 3 sheets of plywood and put down 4 sisters. Out of 45 sheets of plywood I suppose that wasn't too bad.

The second step was to tarp the roof due to the immanent arrival of Hannah. Working with two 50 x 24 tarps on a day when a hurricane was blowing in was no picnic. Step three involved waiting for an appropriately windy day to take the tarps off so we could start laying the roofing felt. Step four was to move the sixteen 30' 2" L x 39' W sheets onto the roof. That used muscles I forgot I had!! The day we moved them onto the roof, we only took enough time to tack down each sheet with screws on every other rib, at the top, in the center and at the bottom. Step five was to complete putting in all of the balance of the screws. About 1200 of them. Step six involved finishing up the trim on the sides and the top edge.

Some comments about working with metal roofing. First, knee pads are your friends, good knee pads are even better. The ones I was using were adequate, but even now, two weeks after I finished my knees are still feeling the after effects. Second, make sure to use a good string line to mark for your screws if having them line up is important to you. Eyeballing a straight line doesn't work all that well. The three rows of screws we put in to tack down the panels wander around a little bit. And last, be careful about trying to use standard products in ways they aren't really designed for. We wanted a shed roof, and there really wasn't a standard product in the manufacturer's catalog that would work for a drip edge on the lower end, and a cover for the ends of the panels at the upper end. I ended up using hip edge which comes with a standard 145 degree angle in it. We needed it to be about an 80 degree angle to line up with the fascia boards. I tried to hand bend it to the correct angle, but ended up putting kinks in the manufactured bend that were difficult to work out when screwing it down to the fascia boards. Plus one piece blew off the roof and bent in the middle and I couldn't quite get that kink out of it. What we've done will work and keep water out from under the panels, but it could look better. What I finally figured out when I was done, was that some sort of bending jig would have been useful.

One very pleasant surprise was that the roof was square to within 1/4 inch on the two diagonals and the metal panels fit just right, without one side being too short or the other being too long.

Oh, and if you're the praying type? You'll get plenty of opportunities to pray while you're on your knees doing roofing.

Roof is finished!

2008-10-25T17:20:00.010-04:00

Here is a summary of our roofing process (hopefully Joe will add some commentary, as he did most of it). As we said in a previous post, plywood was not the best choice for this rustic, inexact (okay, seat-of-the-pants) building method. But amazingly, when Joe measured the finished subroof, it was exactly the right dimensions, and exactly square. How that happened, we will never know.
We had originally planned to do a sod roof (just as we had originally planned to build a round house). In the end, metal roofing seemed to fulfill more---though definitely not all---of our often conflicting project goals. The advantages include ease and speed of installation, longevity and low maintenance of the material---and the fact that snow might tend to slide off a metal roof far more easily than other materials, even at our low 1:12 pitch. A sod roof, while it would moderate inside temperatures, use greener (so to speak) materials, and help the house blend with its surroundings, would have required us to engineer for a far heavier roof and snow load, and would have taken much longer to install.
Next step was to install fascia boards, eaves, and soffits.
Joe rigged a kind of cantilevered scaffolding out of 2X4s (Brian's idea, I believe?).

We used rough, bargain-grade hemlock boards for the eaves, leaving a center soffit opening for roof ventilation. Then Joe covered the opening with screening to keep out the varmints.

Then came drip edge.

It took some time to dislodge the tarp that we had so securely installed for tropical storm Hannah, and then apply roofing felt.

Then, the metal roofing panels arrived. Here they are, stored in what will eventually be bedrooms and part of the shop.

Now to get sixteen 30-foot panels onto the roof. Levers and pulleys would have helped---large mechanized equipment even more. As it was, we fortunately had the power of son Ian to help. Suffice it to say that it took a lot longer---and was far more painful---to get the panels onto the roof than it took to line them up and secure them. It was what you call a character-building experience. Screwing them down seemed easy after that.

The roofing came with these nifty foam inserts to plug up the peaks of the roofing panels.

The metal roofing hangs over the plywood substrate by a couple of inches. This is so gutters can be tucked under the sheathing, so that water will flow directly into them rather than down the fascia boards.

Buttoning up for Hannah

2008-09-06T21:07:00.011-04:00

With tropical storm Hannah on the way (which is expected to drop three to five inches of rain) we decided to cover the plywood roof sheathing with tarps until we are able to install metal roofing. Our thought was that tarps would be reasonably fast and easy, and we had other things in our lives to tend to. But it was windy, and the tarps were awkward and required more securing than we thought. As a result it took pretty much all day, and we could perhaps have applied roofing felt and drip edge in this time instead. Live and learn. We also took the time to spread hay on the fresh loam skirting the house and covering the septic, to try to keep it from washing away in the storm.

Finishing off the rubble trench

2008-09-05T22:12:00.005-04:00

During the building party, parts of the crushed stone berm, even though it had been compacted, got pushed away from the building by the Feet of the Many. Our foundation contractor, Nick Jose---who has done a wonderful job---tamped more stone in around the berm edges, installed insulation board over the outside of the crushed stone berm as we requested, and then backfilled with topsoil and crushed stone against the grade beam. See how nice and neat it looks?

Plywood Roof Sheathing

2008-09-05T21:44:00.006-04:00

We knew that we'd run into surprises---things we hadn't thought through, unexpected aspects, etc. There have been a number of them in the process of roofing. One mistake we made was to try to marry a rough, inexact, forgiving building style to standardized 4' x 8' plywood sheathing. The problem is that the edges of the plywood have to actually have a rafter underneath to nail to. And 4' x 8' is 4' x 8'. Always. But as thoroughly as we (actually more knowledgeable friends who were helping) tried to measure for, mark, and square the rafters, we forgot that the rafters and their measurements were based on a post and beam framework that was cut with a chainsaw.
In some places we have had to sister extra pieces to the rafters. If we were to do this again, we would recommend planking as a sheathing more suited to such an inexact building method.

House Raising!

2008-09-03T11:47:00.014-04:00

On Saturday, August 30, a wonderful and eclectic group of family, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances came together to help us raise the timber frame and rafters. What an amazing collection of knowledge, skill, sweat, and generosity!!! Here we have set rebar pins in the grade beam and drilled corresponding holes in the precut posts, and laid them out to be raised.
And as you can see, the house-raising crew took our plans and timbers---and raised the framework for a house!

The Rubble-Trench Foundation

2008-08-26T22:46:00.013-04:00

Rubble-trench foundations were used extensively by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the first half of the 20th century. They have fallen out of favor as concrete has become the norm and many code inspectors are unfamiliar with them. After finally deciding that a concrete slab was unacceptable to us in terms of meeting our project goals (because of extremely high embodied energy, high cost---and hard on feet and legs!), we decided that a rubble trench was time-tested and would provide a fairly simple, low-cost, environmentally friendly alternative. We also decided, after much deliberation, to use wooden grade beams (rot-resistant hemlock) on top of the trench, rather than concrete grade beams. We are betting the long-term soundness of these wooden grade beams on the steps we have taken to ensure that very little water ever touches the beams, that any moisture that comes in contact with them immediately drains away, and that, if for some strange reason water finds its way into the trench, it will not freeze before it drains away. A number of people have tried to persuade us to place a moisture barrier under the hemlock grade beams, but we feel that such a barrier would only serve to trap any moisture that found its way to the beams rather than allowing it to drain away. The following features of the foundation and house should keep the grade beams dry and sound:
> appropriately constructed trench dug all the way to ledge, with raised berm of washed stone and good bottom-of-the-trench drainage
> ground sloped away from the outside of the trench/house
> blueboard insulation angled over outside of trench and backfilled with washed stone
> a 2.5' roof overhang to keep water off the walls and grade beam
> a berm and a swale on the upslope side of the house to direct water away from house
(Excavating and filling the trench, and the graywater septic, is the only part of the construction for which we hired a professional contractor.)

Plan finalized

2008-08-25T21:02:00.002-04:00

Our final plan is for a 43' X 25' (40' X 22' interior dimensions), rectilinear house. This is 880 square feet. Take away 176 sq ft for the shop and cold storage, and that leaves 704 sq ft of living space. Modest by today's standards: some would even say that dreaded word, "small" (people who have perhaps never heard of the Small House Society or read The Not So Big House). The skeleton is post and beam (using the methods outlined in Rob Roy's Timber Framing for the Rest of Us), which we will fill in with 18" cordwood infilling. Here is the final model for the post and beam framework. The high side faces south and will hold most of the glazing, and most of the living space. A central cordwood wall will provide thermal mass for the solar radiation thus gained. The low/north side is where the bedrooms and cool storage will be located.

House plan

2008-08-24T13:48:00.011-04:00

Rob Roy's arguments about the maximum area of round structures make a lot of sense, and so our first house plan was round. Our second was 16-sided. After receiving foundation bids that nearly equaled our entire building budget, and realizing that a sixteen-sided roof would cost even more, we started over, working from these criteria:
> Simple enough for novices to build
> Passive solar
> Can incorporate standard-sized building materials
> Cheap enough to pay as we go
Most importantly, we reminded ourselves, the house is a means to an end---a different lifestyle---the house isn't the point. It's just a way to come up with a home that's easy/cheap to heat and power, is fairly "green" to build and healthful to live in, and easy/cheap enough to build to avoid debt.
The design elements flowed clearly and easily from these criteria. Our desire to take advantage of the sun and be able to use "off the shelf" building material meant that the house would have to be rectilinear. In order to be simple and cheap, it would also have to be single story. We decided upon a shed roof, since this is the simplest roof to build and lends itself to capturing southern sun. (Passive solar also meant that we couldn't tuck the house under the edge of the woods.) Here are our initial sketches for the resulting plans:

The back story

2008-08-23T22:27:00.011-04:00

The influences leading to this building project have been many and varied, coming from our diverse backgrounds: Extension work, back-woods businesses, building boats, gardening, metal working, studying and reenacting history, reading Jack Henstridge and Rob Roy, years of MOFGA's Common Ground Fair, reading James Howard Kunstler , Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Pollan . . . experiences that, over time, inexorably pointed us in a certain direction. Our growing awareness of the increasing global demands for limited resources such as oil, water, and food finally moved us from thinking to planning. After a long search, we found a piece of land big enough to farm, small enough to pay for, in a community with like-minded people.
One challenge was to figure out how to cut our expenses enough to change our lifestyle (or is it the other way around?)—keeping in mind that one of our four children still needs to be put through college. So we began the process of eliminating debt. If all goes well, we will end up without a mortgage.
The process of self-education has been a fascinating journey. We read a lot of books on alternative building and attended Rob and Jaki Roy's Earthwood building school. A deed restriction prevents us from tying into the electric grid, so we are learning about solar electric and gravity-fed water systems. In researching options for septic systems we stumbled upon Joe Jenkins' brilliant Humanure Handbook. In our search for an environmentally friendly house foundation, we discovered Frank Lloyd Wright's rubble trench concept. We will talk more about all of this later, but right now we have just broken ground and are VERY BUSY!!!