I read an interesting article on the “earthlodges” of Native Americans in the Dakotas the other day. I’d learned early in my life when the family moved from New York to “Indian Territory” – Oklahoma – that not all Native Americans lived in those portable teepee tents so prevalent on the plains. I knew the ‘civilized’ tribes of the southeastern United States were able constructors of log cabins for their permanent villages, and of course knew about those spectacular adobe pueblos in the southwest. And while I learned in junior high Oklahoma history about the sod-roofed shanties built by white settlers (and for which Oklahoma was famous), I’d never heard of earthlodges.

Earthlodges are large round structures from 20 to 50 feet in diameter which are built to be much more permanent than the yurts that basically amount to a Mongolian version of teepee for migratory people. Lots of people these days have deck-mounted yurts that are popular as camp cabins or gazebos, but they’re not really something stable or well-insulated enough to live in full time.

In contrast, the earthlodge is dug into the ground and framed with logs, covered with woven willow mats and then covered completely (except for a smoke hole in the middle of the roof) with mud and sod. Your basic hobbit house, but as its own hill rather than dug into a pre-existing hill. Of course, there are some modern earthlodge designs that combine aspects of natural landscaping and lodge building, which are actually quite nice if you don’t care much about windows. It would be quite easy to engineer one of these with skylights, so interior darkness can be alleviated.

Dakota State Historical Society

The original earthlodges were built communally, often housing between 15 and 25 people. They provided solid, very well-insulated shelter for harsh Dakota winters, and stayed naturally cool in hot Dakota summers. They lasted only as long as the palisade poles and main support logs lasted in the ground, about 7 to 10 years before they’d rotted enough to need replacing. Since it took only about a week for a group to construct an earthlodge from scratch, the old one would simply be torn down and a new one erected in its place. The old logs recycled into firewood made this village system quite efficient given that the Dakotas do not enjoy the thick, lush forests of the American southeast.

For a new homesteader looking for cheap, eco-friendly housing on a tract of raw land, it’s not difficult to see how the problem of ground-rot could be simply eliminated by seating the anchor and palisade logs in concrete. The thermal mass of palisade logs plus dirt/sod can be nearly warm in winter and cool in summer as 3-foot thick adobe walls. More modern – and fully waterproof – coverings take the place of those woven willow mats, and fewer palisade poles would allow for regular insulated walls or an opportunity to place windows and/or exits to porticos, or to build storage rooms or closets off the main structure. For a truly permanent structure, some research on new under-sod waterproof roofing material would probably be a good idea.

The niftiest thing about this kind of permanent shelter is that if your land is raw enough to need some clearing, the logs and poles can be taken as part of your clearing plans. These will have to be de-barked and dried above the ground, there are many good Do It Yourself books and plans out there for site-built log homes that have clear instructions on how to do this. If you’re planning to grow crops, the sod shouldn’t be hard to come by. Rather than a big central fire pit and large hole in the roof, a central wood stove with just a pipe running up through the roof will protect from the elements much better than the wicker baskets the Mandan people used to cover their smoke holes when it rained.

It also strikes me that the side walls could be constructed of straw bales and covered with mesh and stucco or adobe instead of mud and sod and still be as easy to heat and cool. Some may consider rock as well, if the land has an overabundance of those that need removing before crops can be grown. Any of these alternatives for some or all of the side walls would make for a very handsome home. The sod roof does have great appeal, I’ve always envisioned a hobbit house with wildflowers instead of just more grass to have to mow.

The interior, once you’ve got the central roof supports and planned your walls, can of course be framed and subdivided as you please for cooking sleeping and living areas, bathrooms and utility as you wish. The Dream Green link above also offers a plan for a ‘multi-lodge’ made up of several octagonal earthlodges connected to a front portico area. This idea offers the possibility for future expansion as the family grows.

So chalk this up as yet another eco-friendly green construction to think about if you’re new to homesteading or are planning to build more structures on your homestead than you’ve already got. A far less modern (more true to origin) version of earthlodge would make a very serviceable combo barn, root/wine cellar and tool/vehicle storage shed. For as long as you can keep the livestock from eating the walls and roof, that is.

Links:

Indians 101: The Earthlodge
Dream Green Homes Earth Lodge
Blue Ridge Yurts

A friend left a little 16-foot travel trailer in our back yard a couple of years ago when he had to sell his land and move east to tend his aging parents. The plumbing got wrecked because he forgot to unhook it before pulling it out, but the electricity’s still fine, and I’m presuming the stove, fridge and heat would work if we cared to replace the propane bottles. We’ve been using it as a combination storage shed and guest bedroom, but had to drape a tarp over the roof to stop leaks in the corners that led to a nasty accumulation of mildew.

What I’d most like to do is convert it into an actual camp-cabin style “Tiny House” that would blend in with the forest scenery better than white with turquoise trim on your basic aluminum trailer siding. Maybe build a Tiny House shed while we’re at it as well. Tiny houses are often built on wheels to get around local building codes, and of course this trailer is already on wheels. But that’s not really necessary here because there are no building codes out in the wilderness – unless you wish to obtain insurance, that is.

Of course, we could probably do better by selling it cheap just to get it hauled out of here, and then building a little camp cabin instead. By building from scratch we could get more width and height out of the space, which goes a long way in the ‘tiny house’ realm toward making the space usable and comfortable at the same time. Wish some help from our grandsons we could probably supply all the logs necessary from right here on the land, though I’d still need that mule I’ve been meaning to get in order to get them transported from where we cut to where we want to build.

Our primary problem is the fact that we don’t have much accessible flat land. What is accessible is already in use for our 28 x 28 cabin (with half basement and loft) built into the side of the mountain a hundred years ago, and about an eighth of an acre of back yard. Where that ugly travel trailer is parked using up way too much of it. There is flat land down at the creeks on both sides of the ridge, but it’s not accessible by road, only by trail. And the climb uphill to the driveway and house cabin is darned rugged no matter which creek you start from. But what we do have is what’s left of an old logging road that goes to the top of the ridge, which we could grade a little less steep and gravel to a parking area that would provide good access to that ridgetop.

And while we could build up foundations on that ridgetop for camp-sized cabins (about 14 x 16 plus porch), I’d rather leave that land as is because it’s part of our trailway from the top of the knob to the access route for the old Mount Mitchell trail. Over which one of these days I’d really like to take guests on two-day nature hikes during the spring, summer and fall. They could rent the cabins for a week at a time, we’d make a little money, and a good time could be had by all.

So what I’m thinking about are bridge timber decks going off the far end of the ridge, onto which we could build the camp cabins. We camped at a state park on a lake in Tennessee once where all the campsights were on this sort of extended deck, with hookups and big enough to host several tents or a big Winnebego and still leave room for the truck-wheel campfire and a nice built-in charcoal grill on a pole. Sort of a do-it-yourself flatland. Our decks need be only 14 x 20 feet or so in order to comfortably host the cabins, which would then sit perched up amongst the trees and with lovely picturesque views of the highest Black Mountains peaks beyond.

We could supply water by tapping a spring on the other side’s creek and doing another ram jet to a raised cistern farther up the ridge (again for gravity feed), but we can’t provide flush toilets with septic tank and drain field. Way too expensive. I have, however, been doing a bit of research into your basic waterless composting toilet systems. Which should work fine for short-termers, and if we get long-termers they can do the emptying maintenance themselves. Thus there could be showers – grey water can be piped back down the mountain with no environmental damage so long as the soaps are degradable – and toilet facilities as well as water for drinking and cooking in the kitchenettes.

Or, I suppose, if we wanted to have several camp cabins up there, we could just build another one as a shower and toilet station for all to use – using your basic composting outhouse technology. This arrangement would have the added advantage of being useful to players on the top 10 holes of the disc golf course, thus keep them out of the main house.

My goal is of course to have a way to make some extra money off the place, tap a few of those 10 million tourists that pass through this region annually in search of mountain air, grand scenery and wilderness adventures. And also to have available space not in my own very small house for friends and family who love to visit but can crowd me out quickly when the weather’s less than fine. Besides, there’s nothing I hate more than having to wait in line for our sole bathroom every time I need to use it.

But on an encouraging note, now that land prices have fallen so significantly that nobody’s making any real money off that “real estate boom” that busted a few years ago, people in the city who have been harboring dreams of the homestead life could get started by going small. An acre of unimproved, forested land in my county is going for just a couple of thousand dollars these days if you’re willing to buy 5 or 10 acres at a time. An off-grid (solar, wind and/or hydro) site-built Tiny House or camp cabin can be a good investment on top of that while the work on clearing and planting a garden, learning and managing wilding crops, sheltering and fencing some livestock, etc. is being done. Better amenities and a larger home cabin can thus be not something needed immediately. Then the self-sufficient starter cabin is just a lovely added feature of your homestead – a private studio or workspace, a guest quarters, a rental cabin, a children’s play house, whatever.

It’s a thought. So think about it!

Useful Links:

Tiny House Blog
Tiny House Design
This Tiny House
Tiny Pallet House
Vermont Tiny Houses
Envirolet Composting Toilets
Sum-Mar Composting Toilets
Biolet Composting Toilets

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!