Log-stripping: Less Exciting Than It Sounds, But More Exciting Than Shingling

One of the most miserable experiences that we’ve had while building this house was the infamous clearing of the septic field, detailed in this July 2006 entry. Ridiculously hot weather, high humidity, hoards of ravenous mosquitoes, branches that seemed determined to bruise or scratch us wherever they could, stubborn trees that refused to fall in the correct direction and threatened to take out power to the whole road…it was a grueling few weeks that, unfortunately, we will never forget.

The only positive outcome of this time of misery was that we ended up with a good amount of usable wood.  Although the soft, fairly useless spruce tree dominates in our little corner of the world, we also had a good number of red oak and poplar that we were forced to cut down.  Many of those are large enough to mill down for use as downstairs interior trim and built-ins for the house.  (The upstairs trim will be painted, so there’s no sense using the good wood for that.)

In the purist, most ideal interpretation of the Arts and Crafts philosophy, every material that we used to build our house would have been salvaged like this from the surrounding land.  But let’s be reasonable.  We are only working with 3.5 acres of land, most of which is covered with half-dead spruce.  We don’t have any trees big enough to serve as beams and we don’t have 20 years to wait. 

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t want to use what we can.  The trees were cut down last summer.  They have already aged a year and if we get them milled into boards now, then they should be dry and ready to be used by next summer.  Yes, it would be nice if we had plans to get trim up before next summer but, again, let’s be reasonable.  This is us we are talking about. We understand the realities of our work ethic.

We’ve got a nearby sawmill that’s willing to cut the logs into boards for us for us; we just need to get them there.  An acquaintance is, luckily, also running a load of logs to the same mill and has offered us space on his pulp truck so we don’t have to rent our own.  Each 8-foot log–and we’ve got about 25 of them–weighs between 150-250 pounds, which is too much for us to load on and off of Michael’s truck by human power alone.

But before we send them off to the big buzz saw in the sky, we first need to strip the bark.  Because the majority of these logs were on the septic field, a spot which cannot hold the weight of a pulp truck, they needed to be dragged up to a more accessible location.  Meaning our front yard.  Most of the logs were moved several weeks ago, although we didn’t write an entry then because there wasn’t much excitement to it.  Just two humans, one truck, a winch, a log choker, and a bit of bickering about directional hand signals.  (Michael believes shouting, "THIS WAY" while circling a hand wildly in the air counts as sufficient direction.  Cherie disagrees.)

Dragging was effective to get them where they needed to be, but unfortunately it caused the bark of the logs to get encrusted with dirt.  We can’t send them off to the mill this way because the dirt will clog up the machinery.  Machinery that could very well cost more than all of our possessions combined.  We prefer to not do that.

So we need to strip off the bark.  Because the logs are a year old, most of the wood has already shrunk away from the bark, making this a pretty easy procedure.  Observe:

Here’s what the logs look like before.  Note how the bark has helpfully separated from the wood.

Step 1: Slide the edge of a spade underneath a section of bark and lift up.

Step 2: Grab the loosened bark and peel it back.  If, like Cherie, you have a sick fascination with picking at scabs and peeling off sunburned skin, you will love this job.

Step 3: Keep using your spade to loosen and lift all the way down the log.  This log is nearly done on the one side.

Step 4: Roll the log over, using whatever means are necessarily.  Cherie is using our breaker bar to flip this beast.  And she would also like credit for posting this picture, even though it may well be the most unflattering photo ever taken of her, and not just because she is wearing shorts.

Step 5: Start all over on the other side and then keep going until you have a pile of naked, dirt-free logs.  (Any remaining dirt can be easily brushed off before they are loaded.)

We found that this method worked better on the oak than the poplar.  The poplar bark doesn’t come free as easily.  We are debating other dirt-removal methods for the poplar, including borrowing a power-washer.

This is a lot of work, but we should end up with close to 1,000 board feet of high quality wood harvested from our own lot.  And we think that’s pretty cool.

What happens to the wood that isn’t big enough to mill down?  That ends up here:

Where, should we ever get the woodstove installed, it will help keep us warm this winter.

Right.  Woodstove.  We still need to do that, don’t we?