Saurkraut at Home

Sauerkraut ingredients lining up.

We have been reading  a lot about fermented food, and decided last week to jump in with a small batch of sauerkraut. Here's why. A: Fermented food keeps much more of the nutrients intact than canning or freezing. B: "Probiotics" is a fancy word for the stuff that is good to have in your belly that comes from things like yogurt, pickles, sour cream, raw vegetables, etc. Rather than buy probiotics, eat raw and fermented for for the same benefit! C: We both really love sauerkraut. D: you save money making stuff like this from scratch!

Okay, so what we did was thinly slice a head of cabbage, two apples, and a couple of carrots. Then we laced the resulting salad with sea salt, put it under a plate with a big weight on it ( 4-litre wine jug full of water), and waited for the salt to draw the moisture out of the vegetables, making a brine. After one day, we didn't have enough brine, so we made some with sea salt and water, adding it until the vegetables were submerged. We left it to sit and pickle in the brine, with the naturally occurring enzymes doing their thing, for several days. Yesterday we tasted it, and it was really yummy! The idea now is that we will save it in jars, making sure to have an inch or so of brine above the contents, in our cellar. It is supposed to last for many months that way, but I don't think we'll have any left after the first two weeks, so I think we should start another batch.

Sauerkraut in process!

We look forward to having a crock stewing in its own juices all the time, and a decent supply of jarred sauerkraut so we can grab some as a side-dish at a moment's notice, much the same way as we do with our mead brewing. The cost is almost zero, and the flavor (and health) rewards are enormous.

One link we like for this is Nourishing Days, which has a non-intimidating how-to for making sauerkraut, among other great things. The next thing we will likely try is pickled carrots. When we feel really emboldened, we'll try kimchee, which is a big step for me. The last time I made something that I had only ever heard of, but never tasted, it began a lifelong passion for mead-brewing, which provides the ultimate fermented food, goes without saying...

Make Mead part 3

Mead Label sample, front and back

By now you'll have read parts one and two, and I hope started a batch of your own mead. If not, maybe you're collecting tools and ingredients, and will begin soon? The sooner you begin, the sooner you can have that well-stocked mead-cellar you've always dreamed about...

I've heard meaders describe many ways of dealing with the end of fermentation, settling, bottling, etc. A lot of those ways will work, so don't worry if you hear conflicting advice. I'm just going to describe how I do it, a method worked out for small-batch brewing through over a hundred batches during the last twenty-five years.

When you add fruit, spices, leaves, or any other solids to your mead, you have the option of removing what's left of the solids partway through the process, or leaving it all in until you pour it off. Some people add flavorings, particularly extracts and spices, after the fermentation is all finished. What I like to do is take out most of the solids, pretty much anything that's still floating, after three or four weeks. Then I close it back up, bubbler and all, and wait, without opening it again, until it's completely finished bubbling, usually at least another three or four weeks. This varies a lot, so don't worry if it's slower, as long as it's bubbling.

Bottled and ready for corks, Photo by Honey

When it's all done, it's usually cloudy with a couple of inches of sediment, made up mostly of dead yeast cells. I use a siphon hose, and carefully transfer the liquid into glass jugs, one-gallon wine bottles or something similar. I loosen the lids momentarily every day after that until there is no hiss from pressure-release, then I leave them alone in a cool, dark room to settle out. Depending on your recipe, this can take a
couple of weeks or a couple of months. Fair warning, some meads never really settle out. You can get additives to help with this, but I prefer to drink it as is, on the rare occasions that this happens.

Simple corker. Photo by Honey.

When you are ready to bottle your mead, line up enough wine bottles, use a funnel, and fill each bottle to the base of the neck, tipping the jug carefully so as not to stir up the sediment. fill bottles carefully until you start to pour sediment along with the mead, then set that jug aside and move on to the next. When all of the jugs are empty except for a bit of cloudy mead with sediment, pour them all together into one jug, and save it. It's not waste, honest! I'll come back to that.

Standard wine bottles take a "#8" cork, but a #9 will fit, just much more tightly. Of all the cork-setters out there, I prefer the simplest, which is hand-held, a plastic plunger through a guide that you just balance on top of the bottle, which is best braced on the floor between your shins. Soak the corks in warm water for at least five minutes, and they will work better.

Corking is this easy! Photo by Honey.

Making labels is fun, now that you can get full-sheet sticker paper, and color printing is affordable. I usually use a painting or photo that I like, add text over that, sometimes in a framed space, and fit six or eight labels to a sheet. Remember that the bottles should be stored in a cool, dark place, on their sides, and that ten-year-old mead should be re-corked if you want to keep it safely for even longer. 

Back to that jug of mostly sediment. Hang onto that, and when you bottle your next batch, add the clear top part of that jug to the sediment and cloudy part of the second batch. Same thing with your third batch, and after a while you'll have a big jug of Plonk, which is what we call the blend of settled-out dregs from several batches. It makes a fine table mead, or cooking mead. My Plonk label usually says something like, "A fine artisanal blend of meads, expertly concocted in our sink just last Tuesday."

More on the girls' room

I wrote already about the girls' room, how it started as a "library" filled with boxes of books, bookshelves, assorted household spare stuff, etc. How I decided to make it into a bedroom for Honey's girls, using reclaimed lumber, with built-in bunks, hemlock door-trim, and so on.

Since then, the family has come together. Honey is moving in, bringing the kids, the boys into the Quest Room, and one girl for now into the Library. I already knew that the boys loved the Quest Room, and still have plans to make it even more awesome for them, but I had been holding my breath for the girl's response to the converted Library. When they called me, with the sound-track of thumping up and down stairs, the shouts, of, "Mom, it's so cool, there's even..." I could just feel my heart swell too big for my chest. Kids in the middle of major life-changes are so sensitive, so fragile, that I was just hoping against hope that she would just like her space enough to accept moving fairly well.  I'm all choked up right now, days later, just remembering the sound of her voice when she first saw her new room. Life is built around these moments; don't ever doubt it.

Anyway...I just wanted to add a post here with a couple of pictures of the room right before she moved in. Not shown is the second bed for whichever sister or friend might want to be here for a time, or the inevitable teen posters, or all the stuff that makes a teenage girl's room personal. If you're parents, you can imagine, and I hope the thought makes you smile...

You can see the bunk, no longer looking like a two-by-four and scrap project, made up pretty, the colors (my sister the florist tells me these are the big colors for weddings this summer), and the chalkboard panels.The pictures were taken in the middle of the night, because that's when we finally put the finishing touches to it, the painted balcony floor being the final step.

The last view is the doorway showing the main hall, with the recently-added balcony railing, and the deck-painted floor that was a last-minute marathon, just before the kids got to see where they were moving. I will never forget that phone call, when she first saw the room, loved the colors, loved the bunk, the balcony view, and made me, once again, a very, very happy man.

The natural building/frugality content here is that these walls are entirely made from reclaimed lumber, the whole room being finished for just the cost of the screws, nails, and paint. Home renovations can be affordable and still give beautiful results. The emotional content is that money doesn't build a family; love does. It takes time to do work like this, but if you turn off the TV, put down your cell-phone, stay off facebook, and choose to do something meaningful, you can have as many moments like this in your life as you can handle.

Hemlock Balcony and Stair Railing

The balcony before the railing.

I've alluded to this already, and there are already one or two photos of the railing that I've been working on, but I want to review the whole project in one post, to show how it all fits together, and how you can do it. I received a great compliment a few days ago, when Kissy from Dragonfly Acres, who will be building a cordwood masonry house with Ben not far away over the next couple of years, took one look at it and said, "I'm totally stealing that idea!" It was really easy to put together, and used a lot of material from the land, instead of from the store, so read on...

Hemlock logs for stair support.

What I had for years was a balcony with a temporary railing screwed together from three-inch strapping, draped with fabric to cover the scrap-lumber storage that had taken the space over, and stairs quickly knocked together from scrap two-by-sixes. (The photo above left shows what I had after taking down the "temporary" railing.) Then last year I scrapped the temporary stairs and made extremely heavy-duty stairs from two large hemlock logs (my best free-hand chainsaw work to date) with oak risers and treads.

This spring I cut and peeled about a hundred small hemlock trees, leaving the +/_ four-foot lengths to dry for a few weeks. A good thing about hemlock is that in spring and summer you can easily peel it with no tools at all, and the sap is not sticky, unlike pine or spruce. It's also remarkably hard and strong for a softwood, so is especially suited to uses like joists, stringers, studs, sub-floor planks, and stair-railings. It is hard enough that you'll want to drill a pilot-hole for everything, to avoid snapping screws, bending nails, or splitting the wood. (Side note, and maybe a future post: hemlock bark is really nice for basket-weaving. You can easily cut strips of a needed size out of your peelings, and they remain flexible for an hour or two without soaking. They dry hard, like wood. With age it becomes brittle, but is very pretty for decorative uses.

Scooby likes the new work.

Milled overlap, and bungees.

 After VERY carefully trimming the knots on a tablesaw, then hand-sanding with a sanding sponge, I organized the pieces by diameter, and cut a flat segment into the bottom eight inches or so of all of the ones I wanted for the balcony railing. The pieces for the stairs didn't need a flat surface. Then, going with about a five-inch on-center spacing, I attached them to the balcony with two screws apiece. They started out sticking up at all angles, but roughly vertical. That didn't worry me; I had a plan!

This ragged look cleans up nice...

Here I have to confess that I bought the boards for the top of the railing. If I hadn't been in such an all-fired hurry to make things ready for Honey and the kids to  be able to use the space, I would have taken a little more time, used reclaimed wood, and just spent more time sanding and fitting it. So yes, I bought a few running feet of pine board in three and four inch sizes, milled an overlap for them, as seen in the photo on the left here, and got to work with screws and glue, using bungies to hold the boards in place while I worked. One of these days, I may do a post about the crazy things I've done in the name of not asking for help...

  
I really like the natural look of these uprights, much more than store-bought straight pieces, especially in a rustic space like Ironwood Hollow. It looks more like live stuff, and so much more individual and interesting! Once the balcony was finished, I spent a few days in a staring contest with the stairs. It's hard to describe all the variables that I was debating with myself, but in short, I wanted to turn the corner neatly, go down the stairs, have it be sturdy to lean against, and just look neat and clean. What I ended up doing was having two uprights per tread, with every second one being screwed to the riser on the tread above it. I used a one-inch forstner bit for really neat holes for each of these, and shaved each upright carefully to fit just right. Okay, here's my confession (don't tell the kids); I was a little concerned about the strength of all of this, and leaning hard against it didn't completely reassure me. After all, I now have teenagers. Athletic ones. Show-offs. Who have friends. They do things like hand-stand push-ups ans back-flip dives, so a guy like me can barely keep up... You can see where I'm going, right? One of these days, I come home to find my quaint hemlock railing in pieces, and one of the kids' friends being picked up by upset parents after they've crashed into the lower level followed by a bunch of toothpicks that used to be an artistic railing...

The final product, no sliding allowed!

So, don't tell the kids, but I stood on the balcony railing, and actually jumped up and down. And I slid down the railing. Several times, because it was so much fun. Er, I mean, just to make sure it's safe for the kids. But still, there'll be a house rule, can't have them thinking it's a jungle gym around here, right? Oh, and then I hand-sanded some more, not going to elaborate on that.

As a last note, you may note the remaining railing mounted to the cordwood wall. That's just a cedar board with spacers for your right hand going up, and next year, when I can cut and peel more hemlocks, I'll replace that with a railing to match the one in the foreground. Since I use our property as a firewood lot, every small softwood that I can use productively opens up the lot for more usable hardwood, so I'm always looking for new uses for hemlock, cedar, spruce, and pine, which are my local non-firewood species. The added benefit is that this railing would have cost hundreds and hundred of dollars if I had bought all of the materials. Built this way, I have the benefit of clearing some softwoods from my woodlot, and managed to build a unique part of our home at a total expense of about eighty dollars.

The full railing with a view of the main floor.

Ramblings and a Tip

Carrying wood without wrestling with it!

As you know, I have been using peeled and hand-sanded hemlock for the uprights of the balcony railing. The stair railing is up next, using similar methods, but in the interest of giving myself time to figure out how to do that well, I confess that I am finding other things to do with my renovating time. I turned a bookshelf into a shelved door for the pantry. I walled over an opening in the main bedroom (more on that later). I did some awesome locavore cooking with a jar of barbecue sauce made by the incomparable Craig Hickman at Annabessacook Farm (probably more on that later). I wrote another song, spent lots of time polishing up my enunciation to get ready for my big audio recording effort (definitely more on that later).

The last thing I could thing of to do is to trim out the upstairs bedroom door, on the outside where it shows to the main living space. I wanted to do something that would match the balcony work,  so I went out and cut some more hemlock, peeled it, and took it up to the family workshop.

Okay, here's a bit of a reveal. I have a utility room that has all my motorcycle gear, the cats' stuff, and all the assorted hand-tools necessary for minor work: a hand-saw, a cordless set of tools, hammers, pliers, chainsaw, a bit of electrical and plumbing gear, and so on. What I do not have is a workshop. I have sawhorses in the yard. When I need to use a tablesaw, a drill press, dado blades, or anything of that nature, I take whatever I'm working on and trudge up to the neighbor's house, where there is a workshop that I can use.

The family workshop

Hah! Okay, got you feeling sorry for me, right? Here's the workshop:

Trudging a couple of hundred yards next door to my father's home (for sure, more on him later!) to use his beautiful stone workshop, is a pure pleasure. It's outside of the home I grew up in, a slipform stone structure that could teach Ozymandias a thing or two. One of Dad's numerous remarkable achievements, it is very satisfying to work in.The hike adds time to my work, particularly when I'm fine-tuning one piece of wood at a time, but on the other hand it gets me out in the air, or else forces me to do things with simpler tools more often. It's amazing what can be done with a hand-saw and a hammer if you don't need to rush.

Don't be this poor guy!

So anyway, I have some large pieces of hemlock peeled, dried, and ready to become door-trim. Also have sixteen pieces of smaller hemlock ready to become stair railing uprights once I figure out how to turn a corner with the railing, and how it will be supported. Got them all in a pile, and realize that I'm going to look like the tarot card, ten of wands in a minute. Falling all over a lazy-man's load of wood is an old pattern with me, but I have a brainstorm. If I take a piece of rope, loop it like a firewood carrier, I can actually carry all these pieces without fetching up on every stair tread, doorway, and tree along the way!

This is so much easier...

Problem solved, I take all of my hemlock up to the workshop, and spend some time carefully carving the knots off of it, and halving each of the larger pieces lengthwise. This gives me, in just a few minutes, a good bundle of usable sticks that only need a minute or so apiece of hand-sanding with a sanding sponge before they are ready.

I have to say a couple of things here. My photos show me working on  a bare blade, working each piece of hemlock by hand without much in the way of protection. A table-saw can do sudden and irreparable damage to your fingers, so please exercise all due caution. I have a lot of experience with this, and am so aware of the dangers involved that I have never been within a country mile of an accident. Don't be casual or complacent with power tools!

The other thing about this is that, after handling almost twenty pieces of hemlock, free-handing them around a high-speed blade, I promptly went back to Ironwood Hollow and cut myself badly with a handsaw. So here's your second warning; hand tools are dangerous too! I managed to hit my thumb hard enough with a handsaw to make cuts that bled for an hour, and made the tendon on the palm side of my thumb really really tender. This reminds me of the times when I have been meticulously careful with a chainsaw, cutting cord after cord of firewood, wearing all the right protective gear, without incident, and then, right away, flattened my thumb with the limbing axe or splitting maul. So please, people, be careful even with the manually powered tools.

Long story short, I got the trim halved, the various pieces cleaned up on the table-saw, and had enough time left in my evening to start in on the stair railing.  That will be another post or two, and I am thinking I had better talk a bit about my Dad, the genius behind the workshop, his garden that provides beautifully for so many friends and family, and the way he instilled in me values that have evolved into my love of alternative and natural building, living frugally, and taking Nature as a partner in so much of life.

Reclaiming

The price of milled wood is high, and not only in dollars. It is easy for me, deep in the woods of Maine, to forget how much of the world's once-forested land is now bare of tree-cover, but it's worth remembering. The effect of clearing a forest is enormous. The streams, once shaded, heat up and even dry up, changing or eliminating the habitat for insects, fish, and other life that depends on that water. The trees themselves, food and habitat for a complex network of life, are no longer there to support that life. 

A large wall done in all reclaimed wood...

So yes, the price is high, whether we can afford that truckload of two-by-fours and inch board or not. When I go to my local transfer station, there's a large pile of scrap wood, destined to be burned for electricity production, that accumulates all week and is then trucked away. Frugal and green-thinking people like myself are always watching that pile for useful wood, and much of it gets a second life. Today I found two two-by-sixes nailed together, covered with staples and box-nails, but fresh, solid, and straight. That's something like fifteen dollars, maybe more, that I will save by taking them home, extracting the nails, and storing them for future use. I have a doorway that I want to close off, and they will be just what I need.

For weeks I have been watching for discarded hardwood boards, taking any that are about 3/4 inch thick and at least 39 inches long. They will be slats for a couple of twin-sized bed platforms that I'm building. Oak flooring is perfect, and I keep finding some, only needing to take a few minutes to pry out the old flooring nails and cut the boards to size. 

Re-used doors, oak flooring for bed-slats...

In the same room, I started with unfinished walls, just the studs and insulation in place, three months ago. In that time I have been able to finish the walls with mismatched inch-boards of all kinds, along with cupboard doors, a couple of closet doors, and even an old store-front sign. Most of this wood came from the transfer station, and only required a few minutes per piece of nail-removal and some light hand-sanding. It's not fine and neat in the way that drywall is, but it IS classy in a rustic way, more solid, and completely free except for the nails! In fact, many of the nails used came from the reclaimed boards in the first place. I saved the planet the cost of either drywall manufacture or tree-cutting and milling, which pairs well with my satisfaction at getting more done with less. 

There's another positive aspect to this kind of re-use that is hard to put into words, but I'll try. Each board that I bring home and clean up has its own history, and I can guess at that history while I work on it, and thereafter whenever I notice that particular board on a wall in our home. I think that may be hard to imagine for people who live in pre-made homes, but picture this...

Oh, the history in those boards!

In the kitchen, one of the logs in the cordwood masonry wall above the range is a piece of my grandmother's apple tree, from a branch that fell. That tree shows in photos from the civil war era, it is so old, and touching the wood reminds me of my grandmother, a fine woman who raised my remarkable mother. That's one piece of wood that I know very well. Among these reclaimed boards are sweet mysteries; a piece that was part of a very large packing crate, holding what, I have no idea,  one that held old square nails and showed signs of decades of paint and wear, that I imagine was on someone's living room floor through generations of good life, one that looks like it was used in a lath-and-plaster wall, so was part of a very old house that is now being remodeled. One that is wide, mellowed into a lovely deep amber with age, may have been on a living room wall of someone's summer camp through many seasons of canoeing and fishing...the clues in the wood are intriguing, and give the walls so much more character than they would have if I had simply plastered together some mass-produced drywall.

A sneak peak at the girls' room in process...

In the converted library, I'm painting those boards a daring teal color. In the main bedroom I'm leaving them in their natural rustic glory. I'm going to love looking around and seeing the mill-marks, the re-used old square nails, the paint edges that hint at each board's history, the texture and color differences between the pine, the hemlock, the spruce, that oak, the inevitable dents from pulling out old nails. The best thing, though? We get to give all of those boards a whole new life; they will witness generations of life in our home, soak up the cooking smells, take the dents of life being lived, shelter us from the cold and the sun for decades to come, instead of being sent off to be rendered into a moment's power supply.

How to Pull a Nail

Pulling nails is an important part of reclaiming used boards. You can start with a porcupine of pine and finishing nails, and with a bit of patience end up with a perfectly good ten-dollar board. Sure, it'll have nail holes and hammer-marks in it, but those just add character. When I use these boards, I give them a light once-over with a sanding sponge, so no splinters are threatening, and use them as-is, aside than that. The slight variations, the evident history of the boards, and the marks from removing nails, screws, and staples, all add charm to the finished project. 

Add a couple of screwdrivers, and you's set!

I know that a lot of people know how to clean up a board, but I bet some don't, and there are a few tips that can help. Here's how I do it. First, some tools...I like to use a pair of sawhorses to work on instead of a workbench or the floor. With nails sticking out of both sides of a board, it's easier to hold it flat on the sawhorses, and they are a good working height. Other tools are a claw-hammer, a cat's paw, a splitting wedge if boards are nailed together, a small board for a fulcrum, and for larger nails, a wrecking bar. For removing staples, flat scredrivers and an assortment of pliers are handy, and for removing screws, a screwdriver, cordless if you like, with the appropriate working tip.

Finish, twist, ring-shank, common.

Nails come in many types, but basically you have a couple of variables. There are plain shanks and twisted- or ring-shanked nails. Flooring nails are an example of ring-shanked, and there are a number of twisted nails, which are designed to stay in place without backing out. What this means to you, in removing them, is that they need to be pulled harder! Plain nails pull out much more easily.  The old-fashioned rectangular nails, called cut nails, come out very easily too, as they are tapered. Once they get started, they are loose immediately. 

The other variable is the head of the nail. Common nails are the ones with a head that is like a tiny coin shape. Those are easier to get a grip on for removing. Finishing nails are the ones with just a little dimpled bump on the top, and they are harder to get a grip on. Sometimes a large pair of pliers work better than a hammer on those. 

Let's say we have a board with three nails in it. One is partly hammered in, with the top end sticking out some. The second is hammered all the way in, and sticks out the other side. The third is hammered all the way in, but isn't long enough to stick out the other side.

The first one is the easiest. All you need to do is slide the claw of the hammer under the nail head, put a board under the hammerhead if there is room, and if you want to avoid denting your board, and pry out the nail. Easy-peasy!

Some nails to pull

A scrap board helps

The second one takes two steps. First, turn the board over, bend the pointed end of the nail with your hammer until it is straight, and pound on the point, driving the head back out the other side. Then turn the board back over and pry it out like the first nail. 

The third one is where the cat's paw comes in. There's no way to hammer the pointy end, and the head is flat or buried so you can't get the hammer claw under it. The cat's paw is designed for this; line it up against the nail-head, and bang it with the hammer right on the curve of the paw, driving its claw under the nail-head. Then pry until the nail comes up a little, and then you can use the hammer on it as above.

Hammer it under the head, then pull

Pound it back through

Once you have all of the nails, screws, and staples removed from the board, you have a usable piece of wood to be proud of, and some nails that you can straighten out and use again. Nails are expensive, and re-using them saves you money as well as the environment. The two basic ways to straighten a nail are to either lay it down on scrap-wood and nail out the bends, or to unbend it with one or two pairs of pliers. It's easy, and doesn't take long.

Channel-locks work as a lever

One last caution for you; if you are planning to cut the board, or rip it to a different size on a table-saw, be VERY thorough about looking for nails. Recently I missed a couple of nail ends that had been cut off with a reciprocating saw during someone's demolition work, so there were no points or nail-heads showing. When I was putting that two-by-four through a table-saw to make a pair of 3 1/2 inch boards, I hit them, making a dramatic shower of sparks, and dulling my thirty-dollar blade terribly.

Now that you know how, I hope you go out there and scrounge up some good usable boards from scrap-piles, transfer stations, collapsed barns, any number of sources, and that you take pride in giving that wood new life in your own projects!

Cordwood Masonry

Having built my own cordwood masonry house and lived in it for over ten years so far, I have quite a bit of expertise, experience, knowledge, dare I say wisdom, about the topic. Some of it comes from quickly having learned how to do it well, and some of it is from having learned over time what I wish I had done differently. Put more simply, some of it I got right, and some of it I learned from by getting it wrong.  Finally, I have a chance to share that experience; my long-time friends Ben and Kissy over in Appleton have decided to build their own very ambitious cordwood masonry house!

The home at Ironwood Hollow

Cordwood masonry is a little-known alternative building method in which you lay up short pieces of cordwood (16-inch long cedar in my case), with a specially-designed mortar. the ends of each piece show on both sides of a wall, so the effect is something like a stone and mortar wall, both inside and out. It has a number of advantages, which I'll go into in more detail later, but the two primary ones are that it is very affordable if you have the right wood available to you, and it is environmentally very sound. Using wood from my property that I harvested myself, and mortar, sand, and sawdust produced very nearby, the impact on the environment was very little. Oh, okay, a third advantage is that it is so beautiful. Most of the house goes up without nails, spikes, screws, foam, plastic, tarpaper, siding, and so on. The walls are beautiful, and last better, if you don't treat them with anything, inside or out, and don't cover them. This means, at least for the perimeter of the house, no drywall, no paint, no shingles, no siding, no foam or fiberglass insulation.

Adding details is just so much fun!

It also allows you to express yourself in your building, to include elements for style, sentiment, or utility, from stone and brick and broken pottery to drawers, reclaimed parts from other buildings, shelves, bottles, really there is no limit. The walls can be straight or curved (from side to side, not top to bottom), and can include some variety of wood types. Something that will show over time as we get into some projects inside is that my own style is quite guy-like. Light on color, heavy on things matching and being well lined-up. I am hopeful that my Honey will bring her touch to the place, and bring some by-God color to the predominantly grey and brown space. If so, soon the improvements and changes to the house will reflect her sense of style and beauty too.

My house is unusual, even for a cordwood masonry house, since I built on a hillside, on a block foundation instead of a slab, without a framework of timber, and have some sections of cordwood as tall as eighteen feet. The floor-plan is three-sided, with two long curved walls and one straight one, and three corners. From above, it looks a bit like an ark that grounded itself into Mellow Hill, and there are four different floor levels.

An oil lamp casts a cozy light on the cordwood.

I'll be coming back to cordwood masonry as a topic from time to time, as I annoy Ben and Kissy with my experience and advice, as I enjoy watching a new project of this scope take shape, as new puzzles remind me of old solutions, any time I think I have a useful bit of advice to send out into the world of cordwood masonry building. For now, I'll just say that I love my house as though it is an extension of myself, and wish for Ben and Kissy that they may find the same satisfaction as their dream home takes shape literally in their hands.