At Last! Log Work.

Here we are posing with our first sill log...oh what a happy occasion!

While it seemed that we would never get to this point, we are thrilled to say that "we are stacking logs". Everything that we have done up to this point has been necessary, but tedious, because we were so ready to be stacking logs. Finally, at long last, we are placing our sill logs on the foundation.  A few days ago we selected the 3 logs that would be required to make our half sills. We took these logs to the mill and carefully aligned them to insure a near perfect half log. For many people the next step is to draw knife the log to remove the bark; we are fortunate that the bark falls off of dried Yellow Pine extremely easy. These logs were cut last year and there is virtually no bark left on them, and what is there falls off with little effort (no draw knife required).

For size reference, the log on the mill in this image is 17 inches at the butt and 13.5 inches at the tip and measures 31 feet long. (the tip end is nearest the camera)

 

With the half sills in place, tonight we fitted our first 3/4 sill log.  This means that we were able to scribe and notch for the first time in a while.  It was an extremely exciting evening for us, and our visitors. If you ever decide to take on a project like this, be aware upfront that you will have a lot of folks that want to come and watch the scribing and notching. You will also run into a lot of nay-sayers along the way too. Until they watch it in person they will have a hard time believing that it will fit together so well.

As you can see in this image our first notch fit nice and tight just like it is supposed to and once we tighten it down to the all-thread anchor rods it will be an amazing fit. After cutting the notches we put it in place for an initial fit and found that it was nearly perfect. After a very small amount of tweaking, we made a second attempt and it slid on perfectly.

We are tired but very happy to have this first cross log in place. Tomorrow will find us in the log pile finding the perfect log to for the opposite wall; just a few more sills and we will be going UP.