A Child-built Cordwood Clubhouse

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Pointing is easily done with an old kitchen knife that has had the last inch of its blade bent back about 30°. It's used to cut away protruding mortar, to push this excess material into any recesses, and to smooth the joints to both tighten the bond between wood and mortar and improve the appearance of the wall. Children get bored quickly with the pointing process, but they love to lay up mud and wood, so it's best not to expect them to be too fastidious.

I taught Rohan how to read my 4' level, which he used to keep the walls plumb. However, it's a good idea for an adult to look in on the project fairly regularly to make sure that the growing wall is still in harmony with the planet's prevailing gravity. Little ones can't mix their own mortar anyway — so a parent will have to stay pretty close at hand.

When Rohan and his friends — we dubbed them the Termite Construction Company — had built the walls up to window height, the autumn weather turned, and little fingers in thin rubber gloves soon got too cold. (This sort of project would be better suited to summertime.) Jaki and I finished the cordwood up to roof height in two afternoons, with Rohan helping after school as much as conditions allowed.

DESIGN FEATURES

The door (which faces east away from prevailing winds) and three windows are the sole light sources in the building, one of which looks out upon each compass point. The window frames were set in the cordwood masonry in such a way that the tops of the frames would be level with the top of the doorframe.

I built the octagonal roof in one piece, using recycled 2 X 6 tongue-in-groove silo boards, as shown in the illustration. The roof is tremendously strong and, naturally, quite heavy, as Jaki, a neighbor, and I discovered when we carried it through the early November snow to Littlewood.

The roof keyed into the top of a 6" by 6" door lintel and the western window frame (see illustration), establishing a 6" in 7' roof pitch from east to west. We shimmed over the north and south window frames with log-ends to steady the- roof octagon. Later, I filled in the space between the top of the wall and the underside of the roof with log-ends and mortar.

Prior to its installation, we had covered the roof with two layers of 6-mil, black polyethylene — a stopgap measure, of course, because of plastic's poor resistance to the sun's ultraviolet rays. We'll cover the plastic — or recover the roof — later this year . . . probably with heavy, half-lapped roll roofing.

The door, simple and rustic, is in harmony with the cordwood style of building and the concept of a child's clubhouse. For windows, we just screwed plexiglass onto the outside of the frames, leaving the inside sills to serve as little shelves.

Other "design features" were incorporated right into the walls, such as covered jars for storage, marbles for fun, and spy holes made of 5-1/2" lengths of various scraps of PVC and ABS pipe, each fitted with removable log-end plugs. (Cordwood masonry brings out the child in all of us, evidence of which shows up even in houses built by adults.) By using recycled and leftover materials, we kept the total expenditure to less than $10, most of which was spent on lime and cement.

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