Introduction
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.
On Monday, Jon and I coated the kitchen crawl space wall with surface bonding cement. We also coated the small section inside the root cellar that I didn’t take care of last summer. I also finished stuccoing the piers for the porch at the back of the house. We had these jobs finished by lunchtime. So after lunch, we started milling boards for the sill plates. That didn’t go so well because my Husqvarna 3120xp chainsaw (the powerhead for the sawmill) wasn’t running properly. After milling one log, we completed a couple of other jobs unrelated to the house.
This morning, we returned to milling. I checked out the saw yesterday in preparation, cleaning the air filter, fuel filter, and muffler. It ran better, but still doesn’t have the power it should. I believe the fuel filter is the culprit. I’ll be ordering a new one.
After we had several of the boards milled, we hauled them to the house to begin bolting them to the foundation and to see what we still needed to mill. There are four different thicknesses which we’re milling. All of the sill plates are cedar.
We put down aluminum flashing on top of the block wall and then bolt the cedar board on top of that. We were able to complete the sill plates around the root cellar and on the west side of the house. We put flashing across the front before we had to quit today. We’ll work on it again Friday.
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