Cordwood homes

Cordwood offers the imagination a chance to play, cordwood homes. Random patterning, special features, bottle bricks and designs are all popular ways to make your cordwood home special.

This is a 4 part blog post series about incredible cordwood homes, cabins, and cottages with pictures of the outside and the inside. It is 12 sided with a full post and beam log framework. This is a masterpiece of good construction and design. Albert Norris built this beautiful cordwood cabin with double doors in Alberta, Canada. Cordwood and blue windows with bottle bricks in Alberta, Canada.

Cordwood homes

Disclosure: I sometimes earn products or commissions from affiliate links or partnerships on my blog. I only recommend products and services I trust to serve you. Learn more. It is quite common for us to get questions about just what cordwood masonry is. While it is a centuries-old building method, it is not widely known compared to standard construction techniques. I hope you understand and appreciate it a bit better by the end of these FAQ pages. Cordwood masonry is a method of log building that is NOT like standard log home construction. Instead of using long logs that run the length of the walls, this style uses short logs of a uniform length typically from inches, though it can be more or less laid with the end grain facing out like this:. The result? Walls that are much thicker than standard walls. Ours are 16 inches built within a post and beam frame as an infill. It plays nicely with other building methods including strawbale and stud-framing.

Q : We are building an experimental shelter using a number of alternative building techniques.

Cordwood homes, or even cordwood buildings at larger scale are outstanding green building solutions that are aesthetically unique, while they also look pretty damn cool! Cordwood masonry is a term used for a natural building method that uses cordwood or short pieces of debarked tree logs. The wood is laid up crosswise, bound with mortar mixtures creating an unusual, but functional, durable, and attractive wall design. Such eco-homes and buildings are charming and have a distinctive, especially unique visual appeal. The ease of sourcing the necessary materials, simple construction process, as well as design flexibility offers significant interior space maximisation. This is achieved through curved wall layouts making cordwood homes ideal for low cost, environmentally sound and space-efficient building solutions. Cordwood walls are 12 to 24 inches thick, while in colder regions they can even reach a thickness of up to 36 inches.

Cordwood homes and barns: Also known as stack wall, log end, stovewood or cordwood masonry. If you do the labor yourself, and use wood from your property, this is a very inexpensive and environmentally friendly way to own a home. All the walls are load bearing. Great Stuff foam was used for insulation. Looks like stone from afar, originally via midcoast. True arches around many doors and windows.

Cordwood homes

There are many reasons that building with cordwood just makes sense! The environmentally friendly nature of cordwood houses is a major pull for me. I try to be as energy efficient as possible whenever I build something new. What Is A Cordwood House? A cordwood house is a home made up of horizontally stacked logs and putty-like mortar. In rural, off-grid areas , people will often express the amount of firewood needed to heat their homes for the winter in cords. A full cord of wood is cubic feet. In some locations you can get by on two cords of wood, while other places with frigid winters might need 10 or more cords of wood. A cordwood home uses these smaller firewood logs to build an entire house. Cordwood homes are highly durable and environmentally friendly dwellings.

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However, here are some considerations that come to mind: 1. Earthwood has produced a 3. Some owners have coated their ends with linseed oil, or set the outside log ends flush with the mortar for further weatherproofing. But do not fear. Read the post on preventing rot to learn more in-depth about this. As is well-known, wood is a completely renewable resource. How do you guarantee that each log will not crack and split? Softwoods, being less dense, typically have a higher R-value than hardwoods. The cordwood goes right up to the ceiling on the interior, the last mortar joint finished as per the paragraph above about finishing to the underside of girts. Do you have any ideas on this, or do you think this could be a reasonable plan and any ideas on how to access the suitable sizes of bamboo and modifications which would be needed? Take a workshop at home! If you live in an arid area or the high plains with few trees, probably not. Retrieved

In the realm of natural building, you have many different options. From rammed earth to straw bale to adobe, there is a building method suitable for almost any situation within the United States. In this article, we will be taking a look at a method that is perfect for the many forested areas of North America, cordwood construction.

Both are available in a wide range of colors to match your mortar type. People will often express the amount of wood required to heat their homes for a year in cords; in some areas you can get by on 2 cords while other areas with particularly cold and long winters might require 8 to This seem to me like a good way to protect the first coarse in a cordwood wall. Your email address will not be published. This will ultimately expedite the building process and provide more satisfying results. Cordwood construction also called cordwood masonry or cordwood building , alternatively stackwall or stovewood is a term used for a natural building method in which short logs are piled crosswise to build a wall, using mortar or cob to permanently secure them. A: Stackwall corners are okay if done well on a good foundation. However, the inherent energy contained in the wood through the sourcing process cutting the trees, logs etc , combined with any distance that the wood must travel to the site, can impact its embodied carbon drastically. Website looks good. Personally, I would go for four more internal posts down the middle, corresponding to the location of the posts on the foot sides. You have the basic idea. Please help rewrite the content so that it is more encyclopedic or move it to Wikiversity , Wikibooks , or Wikivoyage. It should be noted that we installed a post at the center of both of our buildings described above.