Building a log cabin - Come make fun of the newfag as he screws it up.

[Blue Flying Leaf]

> Surrounded by construction and furniture wood that would fetch extremely high price on market
> Wants to build a cabin that used to be made from lowest grade parts

Chop that crap, sell it and build a proper home. F* around with wood is a waste of cash, time and resources.
Yes, it sure is "manly as f" to build one, but right until you get insects drilling into it that you will listen whole night long. Termites, roaches, mice etc. Reason you don't see wood laying around in forest is because it decomposes.

From utilities all you need is electrical power. If you can have a well you can have your own water. Clay ground means there's a clean water layer 10m deep.
Depends on what winters you have you can go by with a heat pump.
I'd rather build a proper shed with good insulating value that needs only few sticks to stay warm whole day.
For power, if you don't spend a lot of time there, solar for lights is probably gonna be cheaper than the grid connection + utility costs.

 

[Lucius Aelius]

I've actually been doing a lot of research, and I have realized that I'm going to have to go with a different plan. Building is quite doable, but the local conditions mean that exposed wood without nasty treatments is just generally doomed. Warm, wet, and humid conditions, with lots of decomposers active year round don't play well with this plan. I'm still building my own house, but now I'm harassing my civil engineer friends for different techniques. The most promising candidate so far on that front is a simple steel A frame construction. I might simply pay someone to put that up, and then spend my time finishing the interior.

 

[Artificer967]

Building is quite doable, but the local conditions mean that exposed wood without nasty treatments is just generally doomed.

Dissertation on wood, plus stream of consciousness shit:

"Doomed" - well, that depends. What kills wood isn't the wet. It's the wet/dry cycle. Wood from the heyday of the US logging industry that has lain submerged in rivers for decades - well over a century - have been pulled up and found to be completely viable and are so valuable the wood brings a very high premium.

Also, the type of wood is very important. Some woods resist rot and insects better than others, and you have to do your due diligence. (Example: A popular alternative to standard fence posts around here are cedar logs - either they plant the trees in a line where they want the fence, let the trees grow up, top them at an angle and then tack wire to it - or they hammer cedar logs into the ground.)

Regardless of whatever you do, please try to stay away from "yellawood" - peanut butter soft yellow pine. It is utter shit and worse than useless. You use it thinking it will last (sort of) but you are rugpulling yourself/setting yourself up for failure. There were very durable, quality species of pines in the US (longleaf was one, as I recall) but they were over-harvested generations ago and are no longer used for home construction. There are efforts to bring them back though.

This might be TMI, but what lumber companies do is log out an area, sell off the best lumber to overseas sources like the Chinese (everyone else gets B and C grade stuff) then replant with fast(ish) growing yellow pines. Then they overwater and overfertilize them so they are forced to grow faster, resulting in the annular rings being very widely spaced and the strength/durability of the wood is compromised. When they are barely big enough for harvest, they are slab-sawn, kiln dried (but not normalized) and then banded.

But, because wood is a living thing, once it has a shape it always wants to return to that shape. That is all it wants to be. Banded, palletized wood looks straight but it wants to be something else. Once unbanded and the wood dries and normalizes, it will return to it's original shape - which is "not straight". This is compounded by the technique of slab sawing/live sawing. Wood that is the most dimensionally stable over time will be quarter sawn, where the annular rings run perpendicular to the width of the wood.



Quarter sawing lumber is "the right way" to do things, but it is not the most profitable, and lumber companies are all about profit.

Also, a 2x4 is not a 2x4. The sawblade they use is 1/8" thick, and they don't give anyone anything for free, so double that for two cuts for each dimension, and then subtract it. Which means your 2x4 is actually a 1 3/4" x 3 3/4" which has a direct impact on overall strength in tension, compression and shear.

If there is a lumber mill near you, and I hope there is, you can contract with them for your lumber and can be specific as to what species you want, the quality, the finish (you won't be needing S4S for framing a house), and the physical dimensions. Sometimes, lumber mills will be called up after big storms because the municipalities they are located in have a lot of old hardwood trees down. This is like finding gold in your backyard.

If you are in the US, you can go to any Big Box store and go to their Pro counter. If you have working drawings/blueprints, you can pay them for a materials list. For a fee, they will send off your working drawings and run it through their proprietary software which will estimate pretty closely what you will need for your building, including how many board feet of lumber you will be needing, hardware, etc. It will be a couple hundred dollars US for this.

Once you know what you need, you can upgrade the components. Hope some of this has helped you.

 

[Lucius Aelius]

Regardless of whatever you do, please try to stay away from "yellawood" - peanut butter soft yellow pine. It is utter shit and worse than useless. You use it thinking it will last (sort of) but you are rugpulling yourself/setting yourself up for failure. There were very durable, quality species of pines in the US (longleaf was one, as I recall) but they were over-harvested generations ago and are no longer used for home construction. There are efforts to bring them back though.

This is enlightening. Most of the property is mixed, wild hardwood, but the zone I plan to build in is a former plantation of loblolly pine, which is precisely this kind of wood. I should probably get a forester to come out and evaluate if anything is worth specifically harvesting for wood. I know my tree species, but my personal focus is mostly on how edible something is (I live for wild mulberries, pawpaws, and persimmons), rather than its structural properties.

For example, there's an old tree on the site (I forget the species) that is at least seven feet in diameter at the base. It's mostly hollow, though, as the heartwood seems to have rotted out. From the research I did when digging up the title, it was part of a large farm until about 1910, before being split up as part of an inheritance. At that point the region shifted over to planting pines for lumber for the now absentee tenants (the previous owner lives in Minnesota). The hardwood zone was likely never used for farming, as it's next to a large creek, and regularly floods. All of the oldest trees are on the creek bank itself, and are generally quite twisty and curved. There are few, if any pines in this area, which is fairly normal for old growth in the area. My plan for the less useful timber was actually to just drop it a little at a time and leave it in place to rot. Trees are an incredible sink of local soil resources, and letting that work itself back into the ground will pay huge dividends once I start planting my own fruit trees.

 

[Artificer967]

Most of the property is mixed, wild hardwood, but the zone I plan to build in is a former plantation of loblolly pine, which is precisely this kind of wood.

Mixed deciduous. I probably missed what area of the country you are in, but from this my guess is below the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, but not far enough south for everything to be pine trees like in Georgia.

I should probably get a forester to come out and evaluate if anything is worth specifically harvesting for wood. I know my tree species, but my personal focus is mostly on how edible something is (I live for wild mulberries, pawpaws, and persimmons), rather than its structural properties.

This is a good idea. We are zoned AG 2 but I have some arable land.

I had the county extension send someone out to our place and look the land over, take soil samples. I recovered a horse pasture gone to weeds and planted an orchard - walnuts, almonds, dwarf apples and two kinds of plums. French and Italian. We will probably lose the French. The Italian plums are going gangbusters. The almond trees, we lost most of them but I planted a Hardy's All-In-One almond tree and it is over 20 feet tall now. I am going to plant more come Spring.

Most of the walnut trees were lost to Ambrosia Beetles, not poor soil - if you plant walnuts, paint the trunks and any roots you can see with white latex paint cut 50/50 with tap water. It helps. I despise predatory insects and went from live and let live to "I don't care if it's against the Geneva Convention". Bag worms, potato bugs, ambrosia beetles, japanese beetles... they are a plague.

Trying to figure out how to keep small creatures from predating my orchard. Shine a light out there on a summer night and it's just raccoon eyes in the trees beaming back at you. Probably something with livestock wire and battery on a solar cell.

 

[Lucius Aelius]

Mixed deciduous. I probably missed what area of the country you are in, but from this my guess is below the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, but not far enough south for everything to be pine trees like in Georgia

Somewhere in rural Mississippi/Alabama. I've included pictures from August that I took of the site. One in the pine zone, and one by the creek.

This is probably my last post in this thread, as I am no longer planning to build a log cabin.

 

[Нарру Саmреr]

I despise predatory insects and went from live and let live to "I don't care if it's against the Geneva Convention".

Spotted lantern flies made me genocidal. I used to have a weigela bush that bloomed the prettiest pink and white flowers, and those pests nearly killed it. They're an invasive insect not integrated into the ecosystem of America. I dropped a nymph onto an orb weaver's web to see if would be prey. The spider felt the rustling of the web, moved to the nymph, and posed as if to bite it, but went no further. After staring at the thing for a while, the orb weaver returned to rest at the center of its web and the spotted lantern nymph managed to wriggle itself free, falling into the grass to destroy nature another day.

This is probably my last post in this thread, as I am no longer planning to build a log cabin.

Change the title of your thread and post some self-sufficiency updates for us to learn from you whether you're building or going into the lumber business.