Sunday, April 25, 2010

This and That

We have been so busy peeling, cutting, and stacking wood, I have neglected to update the blog. So here's whats up. Since my last post a lot has happened. We picked up two more trailer loads from the log home builder. He has been an incredible resource for us. He has even hooked us up with more loggers that have hundreds of cords of dry cedar lying around!! This load of cedar on the left was a bit tough to peel. It probably took us about 6-8 hours. Which really isn't too bad except when you compare it to other loads from the guy that only took 1 or 2 hours. Here is video of me peeling the easy stuff. I love cedar that is 4 to 5 years dry.


These two extra loads put our cut and stacked pile at 140' long x 5' tall x 12" deep. Those numbers equal 5.4 cords. We think we will need about 6 cords plus a little extra to play it safe. So we called up a logger that was suggested and it turned out he had a lot of cedar lying around. This cedar is a dream come true for a
cordwood builder.

Another suggested place had the pieces we would be looking for next. In the corners of the house we will be using 4x4's stacked instead of posts. The 4x4 will be 18" and 24" in length. We will need about 80 of each, equaling 160 4x4s. This is a lot to mill with our little alaskan mill. We were planning on getting a hold of sound cedar or pine and milling it up ourselves, despite the high numbers. But, it just so happened that right next door to this logger, with the hundreds of cords of cedar, there was 4x4's already milled and dried for cheaper than we could do it ourselves!! We have been so lucky. Thanks to the log home builder for setting all this up for us, we really couldn't have had all this fall into place without him.

Here we are cutting the cedar to length. It can get really dusty, hence the face mask.



We also took a few days off to do some fishing and camping before the season closed.






























When we got back from our trip we had a local man come out to the land to witch for water. He showed up with this willow and walked around with it until it turned down. Bam water. Well we hope so because he found a vein 10' from our back door!!! Yeah and he says it's most likely only 30' down. He came well recommend and has found many other wells in the area. Looks like we will be trying for a sand point shallow well. Having a spigot right out our back door would really increase the quality of life. I am really keeping my fingers crossed on this one. By the way, behind the willow is our firewood, not cordwood material.

Lets see what else happened... The power company met us out on the land to discuss bringing in power. There is a pole about 150' away. They want to bring it in underground for the same price as overhead. So we will be going underground. We will be getting an easement from the neighbors and clearing the 20' wide pathway in the next couple of weeks My goal is to get power by the end of May.

We also are waiting on our building/outhouse permit. Tick tock tick tock. Hopefully that will come sooner than later. Then as soon as the road restrictions come off we can get heavy equipment onto the land for dirt work. "As soon as" is a frequently used phase by Cory and I ;)

1 comment:

  1. We just found your blog and have been so impressed by all the progress that you're making toward your home. You two are just amazing! Resourceful and hard working. It's going to be beautiful. We'll keep following. Thanks for documenting this wonderful process for us 'city slickers!'
    Uncle Gary and Aunt Susan

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