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!