As I mentioned in the last issue. The Mrs. and I were going to select are logs for the house. Also previously mentioned the timber frame pole barn style house was eventually termed Plan A. This implies that there was a Plan B., and there was. Just not at that time. Plan B arose when we realized that having the corner poles run from the ground all the way up to the roof line was not only a major pain in the uh.. Neck. When dragging logs, but also was very difficult in joining to the house walls.

Although this is a very old type of building , and presumably only requires basic construction skills to make sturdy. This type of pole construction was even accomplished by early humans barely out of the caves.

The first problem was moving the poles out of the woods. As I don’t have a wooly mammoth handy to drag them out I had to rely on brute strength and a little ingenuity in the form of rollers made from short sections of logs and a good nylon rope. Nylon is good because it actually helps pull. When it reaches a certain amount of stretch it it tries to return to its original length and gives a little added yank. However when your dragging an 800 pound log it’s hardly noticeable.

You can drag a log a pretty good ways like this but there are some drawbacks. First. Rocks. Rocks don’t allow your rollers to roll worth a darned. The second is that if your going along the side of a hill your log will keep rolling off it’s rollers. Requiring you to constantly be lifting one end to slide them back under. So after getting nowhere fast. We decided to change the plan in the interest of getting this house built in this century.

This was the birth of Plan B. Which is where we would use the logs to make piers and build a more modern style wood frame house on top of them. This sped up construction considerably. I now only had to drag an 8 foot log out of the woods instead of a 20 foot log.

Just for the record. I counted the piers under the house including the four corner poles in the first section. The grand total was 40 piers. This is on a 24 by 32 foot house with a 12 by 18 ell. Some would say that this amount was excessive , and in fact many have. But it seems like just the right amount to me.

We chose cedars to use as our piers because they are very rot resistant, and we have thousands of them on the property. The only other kind of tree that we have more of is our locusts. Which are our thorn trees.

Ironically the Locusts grow all around the cedars so that we had to cut 3 locusts to get to almost every cedar. Even more ironically we found out that locusts are even more rot resistant than the cedars and so we were able to short cut the process by cutting up some of the locusts we already fell.

You cannot appreciate the fun involved in working with a tree that’s covered in 8 inch needle sharp thorns that are tips with a natural poison that makes you swell up and ooze at every prick point for days. Until you’ve had the pleasure of messing with them yourself. On the upside. I found that if you struck the log with a big hammer the bark just falls right off in big chunks. I wont mention how I came about that discovery of course..

Anyway. My point of all this is that. Just because something was accomplished by what we would consider a pretty ignorant population. 100,000 years ago doesn’t necessarily make it easy to figure out or do. It turns out those cave monkeys built some pretty ingenious dwellings. And they did it without screws which I find just baffling.