The 57 acres that comprise Cedar Ridge Farm are located in the beautiful rolling hills of South Central Kentucky. My wife, our four children, and I are on a homesteading adventure as we work toward increased self-sufficiency. We grow much of our own food and enjoy being in touch with the agrarian roots of our lives.
One of the major projects we have undertaken is the building of our own home. The house we're building has three major distinguishing features: 1. we're building it without incurring any debt; 2. it is a timber frame structure; and 3. the exterior walls will be plastered straw bales. We live debt and mortgage free, and building our house with that approach makes perfect sense. Large timbers in a home possess a beauty and project a sense of strength, stability, and warmth that we want in our home. Straw bale walls provide insulation and make ecological sense. This blog is a record of our home-building project.
I just put together a video of our frame raising, or parts of it anyway. This video uses digital still photos that my parents took. They used a continuous function on their camera that made it possible to create an animation rather than a regular slide show. I have a time-lapse video of the raising that I would like to share, too, but it's still in VHS format (I used an old video camera). I'll see about getting it converted to digital format and sharing it before too many more moons pass.
