In March we peeled some smallish logs and with the help of my dad, who was visiting for a week, started putting up the experimental roundwood timber frame for our utility building.

It’ll house our electrical breaker box and power drop from BC Hydro and the pressure tank and controls for our water well which is located next to the building.

I started with a rough plan and then sort of made it up as I went along. The walls are five inches of light clay straw or ‘slip straw’ – clay blended with water to form a light slip that is tossed salad-style with straw and then packed between plywood forms. Karen and I spent a few days making mud and mixing a stuffing. In a few months we’ll natural plaster the building. The Douglas fir rafters and roof planks came out of our huge pile of site-cut lumber.

With no electricity on site, it was therapeutic 16th century build of handsaws, drawknives and the tap, tap, tap of a mallet on a chisel.

‘So, do you have much experience milling timber?’ I asked Nate the sawmill man.

He just looked at me.

‘Yeah, I’ve probably milled about two million board feet’ he replied, eyes coolly fixed.

Right then.

So three days later we had 9,500 board feet of site cut lumber from our downed trees.

Amongst the vast timber spoils are 16 massive 6X12 inch by 15 foot long joists that will support the upper storey of our house. Twenty-seven nine foot long standing grain slabs from the biggest Douglas fir we toppled, which are destined for an epic feasting table and elephant proof doors. And enough planks to build our micro library to house my thousands strong book collection.

Nate working on board feet 2,009,500

The off cut pile

Although we are all about the handcrafted life, we aren’t above using fossil fuels to save three years of pioneer toil such as cutting down a third of an acre of trees for our house site.

Our excavator man is ‘Thor,’ a hulking six-and-a-half foot bloke with hands like bear paws. One January day he arrived. One man, one Husqvarna chainsaw and one massive excavator. Eight hours later, a gaping hole in our forest, sixty trees lined up for the saw mill and a debris pile that burned for three days. There’s nothing subtle about being ‘Thorred’.

On the upside, we got to roast marsh mellows in January with the world’s longest marshmallow stick.

The Machine

The Man

The Condemned

The Aftermath

Karen roasting marshmellows

Yum

After twenty years of living in one bed apartments in Vancouver, tiny shared flats in London, a tent for five months and a van for the summer of 2013, it’s nice to have a place to swing a hammer.

Every day when we go down to our land to work we marvel at the beauty and tranquillity and bask in the bounty of ecosystems and resources that surround us.

Our plot is about three and a half acres of towering Douglas fir forest, perhaps two of red alder, a half-acre of open meadow that has been mowed and cultivated into our budding food garden and a secret rose enclosed wild forest garden where the deer bed down. Cutting across the south side is a seasonal stream and we are flanked by forest on three sides and to the south by the cornucopia of our neighbour’s organic farm.

What more can we say.

Our old home (the van) beside our new home

Home for nine weeks on the hunt for land

Our new forest

One of our largest Douglas firs

Our new neighbour mowing our meadow on our first day as landowners

Our future garden