1. Genesis

We started Stackwood back in 1988.  I had fallen hopelessly in love with Kathleen, and had moved to Baltimore to be with her.  Baltimore was wonderful, but not the kind of place I wanted to spend my life.  Kathleen had been raised in the mountains of Virginia, and was willing to try a life on the land.  That meant we'd need a place to live.  We started reading everything we could get our hands on about owner built homes.

Growing up, my family suffered from the burden of a mountain of debt, which left a lasting impression on me.  Naturally, I paid rent when I went off to school, which felt like throwing money down the drain even with four roommates in one little house.  I spent a couple of summers between semesters loaded bicycle touring, spending months on the road, meeting all kinds of people and marveling at the wonders of our great nation.  That's how I met Kathleen.  Having the money and freedom to travel at will was a very appealing idea.  If we didn't have any debt, we wouldn't need much money.

My dad had subscribed to Mother Earth News since I was a kid.  He even bought the issues he'd missed so that he'd have a complete set.  I grew up reading them, and they were full of alternative ways to build, raise food, and make a living.  Building a house ourselves, paid for as we went, didn't seem outlandish at all.

We had land.  My dad had given me a portion of the farm years earlier in a blatant attempt to convince me to stick around.  It worked!  Having fifty-five acres to start with was a tremendous boost.  K and I quit our jobs in October, packed up everything we owned, and drove to Middle Tennessee.  We moved in with Dad and got to work.

All our reading had convinced us that building with indigenous materials was the key to affordable construction.  Ken Kern's Owner Built Home was the most influential book on our shelf.  Kern was an architect who had written extensively for Mother Earth News.  His was an idea book more than a how to manual.  We looked carefully at the resources we could use from our own land.  Most appealing was log construction, but we really didn't have suitable timber for a conventional log home due to our land being logged repeatedly for the last 150 years.  Kern's book, however, illustrated an alternative log construction known as cordwood or stackwood, wherein short logs are laid up like stacking firewood, with mortar in between.  It sounded perfect.  A little more investigation turned up Rob Roy's name as the current authority on stackwood construction.  We bought his book and read it over and over.

Turns out that eastern red cedar is the preferred wood for cordwood construction.  It is lightweight, extremely rot resistant, and has a high R-value relative to other woods.  We had second growth cedar in abundance, especially right around our homesite.  We'd found our method.  We started cutting cedar in October and immediately hit our first snag:  the sap was down, and the bark was tightly adhered to the sapwood.  We decided to hole up and wait for spring.

Where to build?  Our land is comprised of a hillside, most of it north facing, and a hilltop that's flattened a bit like a mesa, with about two acres of plowable land on top that's ringed by steeply sloping woods.  Although the view from the north side of the hill was beautiful, everything I'd learned about home siting said that it would otherwise be a miserable place to live, blasted by winter winds, the winter sun blocked by trees and the slope.  In summer, that same slope would keep southern summer breezes from reaching us.  Building on a sloping site would be harder and more expensive, not just for the house but for anything else we built.  Erosion would be a constant threat to our farming and gardening efforts.  Building on the hillside made no sense, so we decided to go on top.

We've never regretted our decision.  Living up here is a little like living on a sky island.  When the wind blows hard, it sounds s like the sea as it moans through the trees.  In summer there's most always a breeze to be found.  We left some thick cedar trees to the north and west of our house to blunt winter winds.  We have room enough to garden and raise livestock, but, it's a long way from the road.

We didn't want to blow our meager cash reserves on having a road built, so we cut a track up the hillside and hauled stuff up by tractor and by hand.  What can I say?  We were young.

Spring came around and we started cutting cedar.  We found that the sooner we got the bark off after felling, the easier it was to do.  We'd drop a few trees, limb them up, and then peel the bark off with a square ended spade, a roofer's shingle ripper (looks like a straightened out hoe) and an assortment of knives.  Once they were peeled, we bucked the logs down to 4' lengths and stacked them up under cover to dry.  We ended up cutting about four cords.

Back to the house.  Its design was very simple: a 20 x 36 rectangle with a single gable roof and a loft on one end.  The layout was open, with a kitchen and bath under the twelve foot deep loft and a 20 x24 main room that had a cathedral ceiling; just right for a couple of kids starting out.

With such difficult access to the site, a conventional, continuous foundation wasn't very feasible, so we turned to a pole foundation.  We dug holes three feet deep with the tractor and auger, then put in pressure treated corner fence posts set in concrete.  Because cordwood construction is heavy, we spaced the posts close together at 4 feet on center down the two eave walls of the house, and used three 2x10s ganged together for the main girders.  Two lighter weight girders supported the interior.   The girders set on notches in the posts.  We used an old fashioned water level to keep it all even.

(The deck starts to take shape.)

Our neighbors, the Betancourts, had given us an old, framed farmhouse that they were going to demolish and burn.  We held a house "razing", invited thirty friends over to take it apart, load it onto a borrowed hay wagon, and haul it up the hill.  From it we got lots of rough cut oak, pine flooring, and various kinds of wood siding.  The house used 2x6 oak joists, which we used for our first floor joists.  The oak was bent and twisted, but we took the best of it and made it work.  Back then there was no such thing as a cheap generator.  The power line was nearly a mile away, so we cut and nailed everything by hand.

In addition to the recycled wood, we bought $2000 worth of lumber and decking calculated to get us under roof.  Our plan was to build a deck, then set box columns made out of dimensional lumber along the two long sides of the house.  2x10 beams would tie the columns together and form plates for the loft joists and rafters to sit on.  We put in temporary diagonal bracing to keep it square and plumb.  The cordwood would be used as infill between the posts, doors, and windows.

We'll take up the next steps in the next installment.