Everything but cordwood

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!

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

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"

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

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

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

(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.