Post 4 Locating appropriate trees

Wednesday, 1 July 2020
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.

So, began a process of locating appropriate sized trees that we could harvest. These trees fell into two categories:

  1. Those trees that we are going to saw into planks for the floor boards of our 105 square meters of flooring. We need about 30 of them.
  2. Those trees that we are going to use for the actual build. These needed to be between 30cm and 40 cm in diameter, and the use-able log about 12 meters in length. We need about 70 of them.

 We calculated that we needed about 1,5 km of planking to cover the flooring.  We factored in a 40% wastage ratio to ensure that we would have enough useable timber to process into appropriate floor boards.

We sourced the trees from four poplar groves. Two on our property and the other two on adjoining farms.  Before selecting the sites we did a recee considering the time, labour and transport implications for Bessie (our tractor) to transport the trees to our property.

We did a rough count and started marking the trees that were eligible. The main criteria for a suitable tree were length, straightness, diameter and accessibility (both for felling and then dragging it out of the forest).

We divided the felling process into three phases.

Phase 1 consisted of felling trees for producing flooring planks . This phase came first as we needed to stack the planks and leave enough time for drying (about a year)

Phase 2 was for felling trees for the actual build of the cabin up to loft height;

Phase 3 was for felling trees for the roof structure.  

Simon felling one of our first trees