ground layers

The crawl space is insulated - including the ground. Starting at the bottom, we have (1) native soil (mostly clay), (2) about 3" of sand, (3) a black poly vapor barrier, (4) 2" thick rigid, pink insulation and (5) about 3" of a mix of sand (trucked in) and clay (from the site excavation).

tools of the trade

We peeled all the bark by hand using these tools: gloves, safety glasses, peavey (for turning logs), hard plastic tree-falling wedges, axe (mainly for occasionally hammering the wedge), knife (for sharpening the wedges), homemade long-handle de-bark tools (made from those hard plastic tree-falling wedges, wood handles and tennis racket tape) ... and, of course, Burt's Bees Hand Salve.

70 peeled logs!

We peeled a total of 70 logs in about 3 weeks. (These are for rafters only - the logs for girders and posts will come later.) We actually don't need all 70 ... the house takes 28, the garage (currently "on the back burner") takes another 22 and the rest are spares so we have plenty to choose from.

final piece of bark (for the rafters) comes off in this sequence!

half-peeled log in cradle

We made a couple of "cradles" to hold the log off the ground and to keep them from rolling while we're trying to peel them. Here, Kelly is about to turn the log with the peavey so we can peel another side.

ground-breaking - June 6, '05

start peeling bark off logs for rafters

This is the first picture we have of the house project. It's early June '05 and our neighbor has hauled the logs for the rafters up from the wooded area of our property to the open area near where the house will be built. The logs had been sitting in the woods in the shade since we cut them down (a couple months earlier). Now, they're out in the open and we have to keep the bark from drying out before we can peel it all off. After every couple of logs or so, we take a break and hose down the logs waiting to be peeled. This is Kelly watering the logs.