The Straw House Blog

July Update

Spring and summer have been busy around the house. The bench is complete except for finishing. I haven’t decided yet what kind of finish I want to use on the bench yet, though I’m leaning towards Tried and True Linseed Oil and Beeswax finish as I love the depth and glow it gives to wood. Danish oil seems to be the traditional choice.

I had to disassemble the twin screw vise and re-install it, but that was expected. It’s very finicky to install correctly even when you follow the instructions to the letter. There’s still a bit of stiffness in the last inch of travel but I’ll probably leave it as is for a while and see if any other problems develop before taking it apart again. The rear vise jaws are secured to the bench with 5” bolts threaded right into the bench top. The front jaw, just like the end vise chop, is a piece of spalted Maple from a tree off our land.

We also had the portable saw mill in to mill the logs that I mentioned back in April. Of the thirty-eight logs only two proved to be rotten so we got away pretty lucky with storing them for so long.

Unfortunately some of what we had thought was Maple when we cut it in the winter turned out to be Basswood. On the other hand some of the Bassword was very nice. In particular we flitch cut the crotch of the tree and found some gorgeous grain and colour which is uncommon in Basswood which is normally very clear and white.

We’ll stack and sticker the wood through the summer and hopefully the Ash will be dry enough to go into the kiln this fall. My goal for this fall/winter is to get the ceiling done.

Posted by: Glen

July, 24, 2008

Logging

We had quite a few logs ready for milling back in the fall and had even booked the sawyer. Then the first week of November the snow started. It has been a great winter for snow, not so much for milling logs. Most of the winter the logs were completely buried. So spring is here the snow is gone and Dad and I spent a good portion of the last two days cutting down trees and pulling them out of the bush.

Yesterday we took out a good sized ash tree, including one of the biggest logs that we have ever pulled. Today we dropped a dead butternut tree that fortunately was still solid. It yielded three good logs and one so-so log.

So at this point we have thirty-eight logs ready to be milled, including yellow birch (1), elm (1), ash (23), maple (3), cedar (5), butternut (3) and chestnut (2).

We’re planning on dropping some beech, poplar, ironwood, hickory, ash, black cherry, basswood and cedar this spring. We only drop trees that are in decline or dead, we try and get them before rot sets in, but it’s tricky, some species rot from within (like poplar) so by the time they look ready to take they’re already hollow. Our best guess is that in addition to the logs we’ll mill this spring we’ll have another thirty to forty to mill in the fall.

The logs are rolled up onto scrap wood to keep them off the ground, but this is a temporary storage solution. Hopefully we haven’t lost any logs to rot over the winter. We’re planning long term storage for air drying the lumber. Even with access to a kiln the wood should be air dried for at least six months. Some of the wood (mostly the ash) we’ll air dry for a couple of years so that we can use it for steam bending.

Posted by: Glen

April, 20, 2008

Logging

We had Rick Allen back with his sawmill this weekend. As you may recall we had a few logs to cut up. Well all those logs are gone. We don’t know how many logs we milled yesterday, but today we milled 18 logs. We managed to stack and sticker more than half of that as well.

We were lucky in having two very nice days to work. Neither too hot or too cold, sunny but cloudy enough to cool things off, and a nice breeze. It rained everywhere all around us, but except for 15 minutes on Saturday, never on us.

We started on Saturday with our Cedar - that’s a Cedar log on the mill in the picture above. We were looking to cut both 1” and 2” stock, one inch for panelling inside the house and 2” for decking outside. By our count we have more than enough wood for all of our new inside walls, and enough to build both the south and east decks. As I mentioned before, we’ll probably be building the south deck this year, and the east deck next year. 

The big news though is that we think we have enough wood to cover most, if not all, of the interior ceilings. Now the drawback is that unless we find a nearby kiln willing to rent space, or build our own, we won’t be able to use the wood for about two years. That’s how long it can take to air dry wood. That’s Dad sitting on one of our stickered stacks. He’s sitting on 1” ash, and his feet are on 2” Cedar. The bulk of the ceiling would be Ash, with borders of Black Cherry, Basswood, Butternut, and Yellow Birch.

Black Cherry on the left, and Basswood just behind. Black Cherry is very hard, has a beautiful grain, and smells fantastic when cut. It’s not a very common wood and we probably have fewer than fifty Black Cherry trees on the land. We only cut down dead trees.

Basswood is very soft, very white and has almost no grain. Most people consider it a garbage wood, and it’s primarily used by wood turners to make bowls and such. We took this tree because it had split in a wind storm and it was either harvest the tree or watch it rot where it stood. We only cut it up because it was very large.

This stack is mostly a mix of 1” Cedar and 1” Ash. We have a lot of Ash on the property and it’s time for some of the larger ones to be harvested. We have two more that we’ll be bringing down soon, both should yield about four logs. Ash is very strong, and has a nice grain. Some call it ‘the poor man’s Oak’, but I like it better than Oak.

This is Butternut, one of my favorite woods. We don’t have very much Butternut on the land at all, and by volume most of it is in three huge trees that are so old and decrepit that there’s no point in even dropping them. I like Butternut for it’s rich brown colour and pleasing grain.

From left to right, Eastern White Cedar, Maple (Spalted and Quilted), Yellow Birch, and Ash. This is the first Yellow Birch that Dad and I have ever cut, or even seen in board form. Rick says it’s pretty rare. I have a whole bunch of it, including several trees so large that I can’t even get my arms around them. The sap wood is a lovely yellow colour and the heartwood is very red. It is a beautiful wood and we have one more piece in the bush to pull out.

This is the slash pile. As the logs are squared, and when you hit rot all the scrap is thrown into this (actually these) pile(s). Because we hope to use as much of the tree as we possibly can we have three piles, softwoods and hardwoods are separated, hardwoods can be cut up and burned in our wood stove (to be installed this year, we seem to have agreed on Morso - well that’s the concensus right now anyway). Softwoods that have any scraps of dimensional lumber on them will be cut up and used for steps on bridges on trails, and the rest will go to neighbours to use in their maple syrup evaporators. Anything that is left will be tossed into the bush to rot.

     

Posted by: Glen

May, 29, 2005

What’s happening this summer - Outside

Did I mention that it’s going to be a busy summer?

Last fall Dad and I logged a bunch of cedar trees from the west and south parts of the land. We’re lucky, in that we have good cedar, it often rots from the inside out, so you can’t tell how good a tree is until the tree is on the ground. The other problems with cedar are that it tapers considerably from bottom to top, and that there are lots of small branches that sprout out directly from the trunk all the way up the tree. This usually means that you have to clear around the base of the tree first before dropping it, both to have space to cut, and to ensure an escape route. I drop the trees, so I’m damn careful about making sure I have lots of space to run if the tree doesn’t drop in the right direction!

What we want from the cedar is mostly 2” thick boards. I’m hoping to build some decks around the house this summer. We don’t bother drying the cedar first, it dries very quickly in place with minimal cupping, and we use screws rather than nails to make later adjustments easier. In two years when it’s dried out in place, we’ll rent a floor sander and get rid of any cupping/bowing. We did that on Dad’s deck and it seems to have worked out just fine.

Here’s a sketch of the proposed decking:

Clicking on the image will bring up a larger version. As an added bonus there is a bunch of extra info on the sketch for those of you interested in the interior changes.

The deck across the front is largely cosmetic, as you wouldn’t want to sit on it, it would be much to hot and sunny for most of the year (reflection from the windows). The 12’x12’ area to the west is a small deck for the BBQ, and to sit and look out over the forest, we may also screen in this deck. The large east deck is the main sitting portion as it has the best view, and is sheltered from most of the summer sun. We aren’t big fans of sitting out the sun. We’re also lucky in that we get a bit of a breeze around the house year-round, and that helps keep the bugs away in spring/summer.

At this point we have probably 1/4 of the wood that we will needs for these decks, and as a result, they may get built in stages. Over the next couple of weeks Dad and I will be dropping another six cedars (at least), as well as some more standing dead Black Cherry, and at least one standing dead Ash. The Black Cherry isn’t very large, it’s hard to get much more than 2 or 3 inch boards out of it, but it’s a very interesting wood, and I think I may use it to replace the cupboard and drawer faces in the kitchen.

The other big job I’d like to get started on this summer is the barn. The original barn collapsed a couple of decades ago, and we’ve pulled a great deal of the lumber, and farm machinery, and cow bones, and old straw, and…. Yep, it was pretty bad. Unfortunately once all that stuff was removed it allowed the weeds, shrubs, and even trees a chance to set roots. Something must be done. The plan is to bulldoze all of the old timbers into a hole on the other side of the driveway where they can continue to rot in piece. The part that is currently standing will be torn down and rebuilt as a shed. Cheap and cheerful, will be the name of the game. With a low roof line that matches the look of the house without obscuring the view. I’d also like to clean off the top of the walls and pour a new concrete cap to prevent further deterioration. Right now water is getting into the tops of the walls each fall, freezing in the winter and spalling off the top layers of stones. I don’t intend to re-point the whole walls, I have neither time nor inclination for that, I only hope to slow their inevitable collapse.

     

Posted by: Glen

April, 23, 2005

Logging

As much as possible we have tried to use wood off our own land inside the house. The inside and outside walls of the bathroom are cedar milled from trees on our land, as are the maple window and door frames.

Before we started the house we marked 102 trees and sold them to a logger. They had a big machine that carried out the logs, and that could navigate nearly anywhere. Before the job was over we traded them an additional ten maple trees in exchange for taking down and cutting into 12’ sections 6000 board feet of white cedar. White cedar are difficult trees to drop because their branches come directly off the trunk and run from the ground up. They can be very dangerous when they fall. The trees are also problematic because, unlike most hardwoods you can’t tell if the tree is any good until you’ve dropped it. White cedar, like Poplar, tend to rot from the inside out. We were very lucky, it turned out that most of the trees they cut were very good. The boards we got from those cedars built a deck on the back of Dad’s house, and most of the walls of his garage. It was the leftovers that went into our bathroom.

Over time, walking around the land, we started finding sections of trees that had been left in the bush. Good trees, on the sides of hills, in gullies, even out in the open. We pulled eleven oak and maple sections, all solid, at least 18” in diameter, and about 12’ long, out of the north west corner a couple of years ago. We had them milled and have just come to the end of the maple.

Recently Dad and I have managed to pull out two pieces of black cherry, five really nice pieces of ash, and a bunch of oak from the south east corner of the property. The main section of ash was 22’ long and 18” in diameter and had fallen across a small gully with a creek in the bottom. There were tracks from the logger’s big machine but they couldn’t seem to get close enough to grab the logs. We pulled them up from the other direction, up a very steep hill using a pulley and my truck. While we were down there we found two more pieces of ash and several sections of oak. We’re also going to drop a couple of cedars from the same area.

In addition to this wood we’ve also cut up and dragged out two poplar trees that were solid, but had blown down in a wind storm. We’ve also been marking and dropping cedars from other parts of the land. The various hardwoods we’re going to cut up into 1” planks, possibly for use on our ceilings. The cedar we’re going to cut into 2” stock that will be used to build decks on the south and east sides of the house.

Four of the cedar trees that we took down were just below the house near where we park the cars. They were taller than any of the trees around them and spoiled the view to the south east. With them gone the whole view from the front door is greatly improved. How much? Well check the pictures and see for yourself.

     

Posted by: Glen

May, 17, 2004