During this 2007 holiday season, it seems the children are all nestled asleep in their beds, with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads… oh, wait. You say the “children” are all teenagers now, terminally bored with Christmas and expecting a 10-gig iPod loaded with every album too objectionable to be played in public, plus keys to your a car and $400 worth of “Prison Chic” pants that hang somewhere around the thighs and show off their underwear?

Did the fudge never set, so you had to run to the store to buy enough ice cream to disguise the un-set fudge as super chocolate syrup? Were those tollhouse cookies hard as a rock, breaking grandpa’s dentures with the first bite? Did cousin Jim finish off the entire bottle of rum you’d brought for eggnog before passing out under the tree? Did the dog eat that perfect glazed ham before you could get it into the oven to heat? Did it snow during the night and hide all the firewood you’d stacked somewhere in the yard for the Christmas Eve fire? Are the in-laws insisting on watching Enemy of the State as a “Christmas Movie” instead of It’s a Wonderful Life for the 16th time?

Be of good cheer, enjoy yourself anyway, and…

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

In my last post I started talking about building your home, and introduced the subject of log and timber frame housing. These homes are becoming more and more popular all over the country, and offer some rather large advantages for homesteaders in a number of ways.

First and foremost, log and timber frame homes are environmentally friendly. There are companies producing “kit” homes in various parts of the country from farmed pine logs, and there are even a few specializing in ‘salvage’ timber. Those are standing dead or down trees, usually from large forest tracts (publicly or privately owned), harvested at little or no cost to the harvester because harvesting is part of the forest management strategy.

In my southern Appalachians, for instance, we have large stands of southern pine and hemlocks that have succumbed to pine bark beetles and wooly adelgid infestations. These insects get underneath the outer bark and kill the trees by destroying that thin layer of inner bark that the tree depends upon to transport water and nutrients from the roots to the limbs and needles. While treatments have been developed and are now available to landholders like us, it will only save the young trees. The older trees have already succumbed, and local environmental regulations even demand that landholders take down dead stands (or burn them).

The logs from such harvests are fine for building. Bark infestations do not damage the inner wood at all, and the logs are often naturally dried and easy to de-bark, ready for work. Homes made from such logs, or farmed logs, or timber derived from such sources helps to manage forests, lessen fire dangers, and make good use of what would normally rot or be chipped for fake fireplace logs. No need to feel guilty!

Homes can be a hybrid of these styles of homebuilding, depending on the lay of your land, your design requirements, and your budget. A friend of mine has built a hybrid home on a semi-steep grade of lakefront property. The foundation is cinderblock faced with flat rock. On the ‘tall’ side facing the lake (and sporting a full-length screened deck) whole logs are used. They’ve been flattened on their meeting edges and pre-notched to fit without chinking. On the ‘short’ front facing the uphill driveway timber framing was used. These are very sturdy 10×10 rough timbers used to frame the front and its roof beams. This was faced with tongue and groove half-log siding to match the real logs, and it looks great.

Actually, this half-log and quarter-log siding could be used to refurbish an older cabin like mine, where the rustic chestnut boards have warped and hosted too many carpenter bees over the past century. We’re seriously considering that option, once we replace the roof!

Log homes are also energy efficient, naturally insulated from the cold, the heat, and all variations in between. If you’re careful to install only double-paned insulated glass in your windows, heating and cooling shouldn’t be very expensive at all. Wood furnaces and smokeless wood stove technologies are available these days as well, which puts the homesteader in charge of that aspect of life. One more thing to contribute to prideful independence!

My husband has always told me – every year this time, when we’re working hard to get the winter’s wood supply cut, split and stacked – that wood is the only fuel that “warms you twice.” It makes you sweat when you cut, split and stack it, and it warms you again when you burn it on a cold winter’s day. That’s a two-fer any homesteader should readily appreciate!

There are some great resources and helpful hints out there on the internet, including full instructions on how to build your own log home from timber harvested from your own property! Our ancestors used to do this as a matter of course, so a modern homesteader can do the same thing – even better with some rented equipment to do the heavy lifting! Definitely something to look into if you’re planning to build.

The links below are particularly good, so spend a little time with them and see if perhaps renovating that falling-down fixer-upper might be less satisfying than building something new. Or, you could do both if you’re planning on sharing your homestead with your grown children when the time comes!

Links:

Log Homes Journal

Natural Log Siding

An Environmentalist’s Guide to Responsible Wood Heating

Log Home Builders Association

Build Your Own Log Cabin!