Unfolding story

Jean and I have a 20 hectare plot of heaven in the middle of the Winterberg in the Eastern Cape. The dirt road between Adelaide and Tarkastad leads you there. On the plot we built a tiny, but cozy off-the-grid timber cabin where we have spent many weekends and extended periods of time to relax, attempting to grow cherries, and practice our stargazing and astro-photography. We have a well equipped home-made observatory. We also have a mountain stream fed by three springs that runs through the plot. Usually the stream flows quite strongly, but for the first time in decades the current drought has, hopefully only for the time being, put a stop to this. We love it there – it is a safe and beautiful place where we can escape to, away from a world that has gone crazy – it is a sanctuary that we yearn for more and more, particularly as suburban life becomes increasingly irritating and complex. We have outgrown our small timber cabin and, for many years now have dreamt of building a bigger off-the-grid house with local materials. A log cabin was the ultimate solution!

A good starting point for research on log cabins is of course literature and YouTube. I’ve listed some of the more interesting books and texts in the Resources tab. There you will also find references to some of the plethora of log cabins videos that we consulted and consumed on YouTube…..sometimes into the early hours of the morning. But first, very briefly, who are we?

Simon and I have spent (and still spend) many hours together planning, budgeting and designing the log cabin. The entire project is a huge experiment for all of us, and right from the start we bought into the notion that we needed to trust the process and embrace an organic approach to this build. This is no ordinary build – there will be few straight corners and the spirit level will only be a rough guide (except for phase 3 of the build). The trees that we will be harvesting are not straight and this log cabin will be different to the typical kit log cabins that you see on TV. As we were committed to harvesting material from the immediate surroundings we relied on the poplar groves on our plot for raw materials.

The first consideration before even thinking of building a log cabin is the source and availability of appropriate and sufficient trees. I have been thinking about this issue for a long time, so when the time came to commit to building a log cabin, the issue was resolved quite quickly.

An essential tool for planking is of course a sawmill. Simon acquired one from a farmer friend shortly before we began the log cabin project. Simon elaborates on the specs of our Green Mamba in the Tools and Jigs tab. We transported the Green Mamba from Makhanda/Grahamstown on Simon’s 6 meter trailer (which he built himself, by the way).

Once we had a good sense of the locations of the trees we identified an appropriate site for the Green Mamba, our sawmill. The site had to be level and we needed enough room around the sawmill to manoeuvre the tractor about. Simon bought the sawmill from a farmer friend he had – see details under Tools and Jigs.

Transporting our trees, logs and lumber was always going to be issue which we prepared for before we even felled our first tree.

In order to use our planks for the intended flooring and some cladding of the log cabin, they need to be dry and reasonably straight.

In order to ensure that no underground moisture and dampness is able to rise through the log cabin, we decided against pouring a foundation and a slab, but to build a set of pillars instead. The basic design of each pillar was a truncated pyramid.

I had cleared a meadow between our little cabin and observatory to construct a simple rectangular frame, about 50cm or so off the ground, to hoist our logs onto, and then debark them.