Dairy March 2003 Logging with the Team

 

This week, after a long break, Glenn got back to work building our house. The foundation was poured last spring, but the summer and fall were so busy, Glenn didn’t have time to work on it. That is one reason we are considering selling some cows.
The house will be a log house. Glenn will make it full-scribe, a method used by log-builders in Finland and Sweden, and by some builders in the U.S. Many log homes that you see are “chinkers,” which are built with spaces between the logs that are filled in with chinking. Full-scribed logs are nestled into each other as the house is built, without any spaces between. Full-scribed homes are harder to build, requiring more time to carefully craft the logs together, but require less building materials. Because chinking is very expensive, we decided to use the full-scribe method.
Our logs came from a stand of lodgepole pine on the Salmon National Forest. Lodgepole pine are excellent for log houses because the trees grow straight, with little change in the diameter of the trunk (taper) until the top of the tree. The foresters designed a special logging unit that could only be logged using horses. They marked trees that could be taken without harming the stand, and specified the low-impact techniques that required horses. We spent a few weeks 3 summers ago camping in the mountains and logging with our team of Belgians Pat and Pet. Now the logs are dry and ready to start stacking onto a house. (Trivia question: in what famous book did the father own a team by the same names, Pat and Pet? Email us the correct answer and we’ll give your folks 10% off on a 20lb pack of our grass fed beef).
Each wall will require 12 logs to stack up to the correct height. The design of the house is a rectangle. How many logs do we need? That answer seems simple, but you actually need about 20% less than that to do the walls (Any ideas why? Can you figure the correct amount of logs needed for the walls?). Now, you also need to add the logs required for the floor joists that hold up the floor. Logs need to be spaced on 18 inch centers (with the middle of each log 18 inches from the next log), and the space to be filled is 42 feet by 30 feet, with the logs running end to end across the short span. How many floor joist logs do you need?