Ten Years After

Like the rest of the world even the House of Fallen Timbers is under quarantine. It's been ten years since I built the cabin and to my amazement it's still standing. I made a few upgrades since my last update. 

Installed a wood burning stove and replaced a couple of floor boards.

Built an outhouse and lined it with salvaged barn wood. 

Hope everyone is safe and warm.

Split Rail Fence

It's that time of year again. Time to clean up the dead fall of winter. Here's a forty foot elm that I was able to cut into three 12 foot lengths.

Once cut into lengths I split them into halves and some larger halves into quarters.

These are the kind of rails Abe Lincoln spent his youth splitting. 

This kind of fence was very common at one time. It's easy to assemble, easy to move and easy to re-purpose if you run low on firewood or rough lumber. Ours won't keep anything in or out, just give hunters a heads-up when crossing our property lines.

The rails are stacked one on top of another in a zig-zag pattern to help with stability. Typically the rails are between 10 and 12 feet long, the ends are overlapped to make the distance between 'points" roughly eight feet. The distance between the zigs or zags is an old measurement called a rod (roughly 16 feet). Old farms used to measure out acreage using rods and these fences helped people estimate the size of their fields.

Cordwood Masonry Home

I recently read an article about a beautiful home, hand-built by a couple I had the pleasure of meeting in person. Jessica Diemer-Eaton is an author, historian, educator, artist, and owner of Woodland Indian Educational Programs. I met her husband Mark in the fall of 2011 at an event I featured here. Mark and Jessica built the wigwam on the grounds of Prophet's Town State Park. Mark also helped me find some seed stock for my three sisters garden that day. Jessica and Mark are the proud owners/creators of a Cordwood Masonry home. I asked Jessica if she would write a guest post for the blog and send me some pictures to share with you. I'll turn things over to Jessica now. Please give her a warm welcome!

Building & Living In Our Cordwood Masonry Home

No it’s not stone masonry, although from a distance that is what our walls are mistaken for.  Our 16-sided home is built with cordwood masonry.  Cordwood construction, the building of walls by stacking cordwood using a mortar to bind, is an often overlooked construction style.  Most folks have yet to hear of it, even though it is a building style of antiquity.  But why cordwood masonry?  Why not just a log cabin?  Well, cordwood masonry is a great alternative for log home lovers who especially 1. Don’t have an ability to maneuver large logs and 2. Want the look of wood log walls inside and out, but don’t want to sacrifice interior temperature efficiency. 

Ease in BuildingBeing a woman under 5ft in height, I was able to build our cordwood house walls alone while my husband was at work.  Most construction methods will not allow for that, and those that do, such as other masonry materials like stone and brick, require a certain amount of skill that is usually acquired with experience.  Being a novice builder, never doing masonry before, I felt the learning curve was something that could be overcome in just a couple days work.  However, keep in mind that this ease of building does come with one larger setback - time.  If you chose cordwood, do so with the understanding that this construction is a long process.  The cordwood must be seasoned, laying it up is time consuming, and you can only build so high before the lower layers are dry.

An Efficient Home

The walls being 16” thick feature a hollow inside filled with cedar chips for insulation.  The mortar beads on the inside and outside are only 4” wide, leaving a hollow interior – the secret to insulation of the walls.  We don’t even have conventional heat, only wood heat provided by a Russian-style fire place in the middle of the home.  In a cold winter, after a few days of firing, we usually top out at 80-84 degrees in the living room.  We can stop for 3 to 5 days, and lose only 10 degrees of heat.  There is nothing more efficient than our cordwood walls.

Points of Light

Cordwood is a great canvas; many like to create images in the walls using the cordwood ends like mosaics, or put unconventional items into the mortar.  Usually, most cordwood builders will put a few bottles in their walls to bring in some beautiful spots of light.  Because the walls are 16” thick, each “bottle window” requires two bottles or jars, top ends put together, and rolled in aluminum flashing.  When stacked into the wall, only the bottoms of the bottles or jars are visible both inside and outside. 

A Round Floor Plan

Besides the look of a round home, one reason to pick this shape has to do with floor space; round buildings get more square footage for less money. However, what many people don’t talk about is that extra space lost due to an unusual floor plan.  Round homes don’t have the wasteful space of hallways, but we do still have space issues created by our round fireplace that sits in the middle of the house and holds up our roof.  So, no, we don’t have a hallway, we have a donut.  And just like a hallway, this doughnut shape can easily become underutilized.  We have counteracted that by placing an office behind the fireplace, two sitting areas on each side, and bar in front of the fireplace overlooking the kitchen.  Also, any money you saved by having a round floor plan may have to be put towards building custom furnishings.  As it turns out, most cabinetry is not made for walls that have angles more than 90 degrees, or have a little natural wave in them.  Cordwood walls are never straight, and our countertop’s width has a 2” inch difference between the middle and ends of the counter (one reason we used broken tiles for mosaics, as square tiles would have shown this variation in countertop width and the wave in the wall).  We chose to build our cabinets to get the style we wanted, and to save money.

It Comes Down To Cost In all, our home cost about $43,000 to build, including the tools needed to build the home.  We only paid for two jobs done through outside professionals: pouring the concrete foundation and applying the rubber membrane roof (which is a specialized process and warrantied through professional installation).  Friends and family helped us build some walls, construct the massive fireplace, wire the home for electricity, and install a new and efficient type of plumbing that utilizes plastic tubes that bend and expand, not ridged pipes prone to burst if it freezes.  For that price, we have almost 1,500 sq ft of living space divided between two bedrooms, bathroom, storage room/bathroom, kitchen, living room/dinning room, and the common room in the middle (aka the donut hallway that contains my office behind the fireplace).  It’s not large, but a great size for 2 people.

  Learn more about our cordwood home and cordwood construction at http://www.squidoo.com/living-in-a-cordwood-masonry-house

Eastern Woodland Lean-to

Over the summer I had the privilege of working on the reconstruction of a traditional Eastern Woodland Native American lean-to. Fort Ouiatenon park in Tippecanoe County Indiana is home to a reconstruction of an 18th century blockhouse which I featured earlier but, it is also home to a reconstructed Native Village which comes to life every fall at the Feast of the Hunters' Moon. Lean-to's provided protection from the sun, wind, and rain. In these sheltered spaces, women would weave mats from rushes and cattails, and make and decorate clothing and baskets. Lean-to's were also used to store extra food, wood, and clothing.

Over the winter the old lean-to collapsed and the members of the tribe reached out for volunteers who would be willing to help them rebuild the lean-to in time for the feast. Since I volunteer as a docent in the blockhouse it was no problem for me to lend a hand. As you can see the basic frame is built of poles that have been cut green and stripped of their bark. We were allowed to harvest trees from another county park property down the road from Ouiatenon. This assured the tribe that they would be using local, authentic materials. We cut down several Maple trees with an average butt diameter of about six inches. Fifteen of these were cut into lengths between nine and twelve feet. We buried the butt ends three feet deep to create the posts that would hold the roof.

Inside the lean-to are two fire pits which are used during the feast to boil large kettles of water for cooking and cleaning. These stones where also harvested from the riverbank just a few yards from the village. In this photo you can see that we incorporated a couple of live trees in the design. See the root base in the upper right hand corner. Cross pieces were loosely tied to these living trees so that they can be re-adjusted as the tree grows.

The cross pieces are made of the tops of the maples we harvested and stripped. Tied together and lashed to the uprights they make a very sturdy framework. The lean-to has a pitch of about two feet from front to back. The posts at the front are nine feet high, in the middle seven, and at the back six. This is done to prevent rain from collecting on the roof.

Here you can see the finished lean-to at the begining of this year's feast. The top and back sides have been covered with canvas which was used traditionally once trade had been established between Natives and Europeans. In more ancient times the covering would have been made of trees bark or woven mats made of cat-tail reeds.If you look closely you can see the kettles boiling over the fire-pits. The village has about six wigwams like the one you can see next to the lean-to.

During the feast the public is invited into the Native Village to learn more about how Eastern Woodland Native Americans lived in their traditional homeland.