What a crew of six can accomplish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"