Living the Dream: Rough Home Building

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In 1987 Herb's wife died. In memory of their old dreams he had me build a gazebo on the point of Round Island that faces across to Loon Island. A few seasons after I built the gazebo, we decided to design a summer cabin 30 yards or so inshore from the gazebo. We would keep it simple and primitive, with no power lines from the utility company and made of local roughsawed lumber.

First Steps

In spring I went up with a mason friend from Lodi and we chose the building site up on a flat area between the gazebo and the ridge-back and marked the locations for each of nine stone piers. I returned alone on another weekend and excavated each of the pier locations. It was mostly a matter of sweeping away pine needles, though there was one dirt-filled crevice, a sort of drain in the rock, that I shoveled out and filled with rubble.

On another visit, the mason and I brought stone from the rich talus slope of the cliff behind to add to the loose stone already on the site, including a few big ones already naturally in place. The piers we then laid up with mortar were typically about as wide as a bushel at the base and at least 12 inches at the top.

The main idea with the foundation was to put the weight on bedrock. Had the bedrock not been mostly exposed, we would have had to dig until we got to it or at least four feet down to be below where the ground freezes in winter. Otherwise ice would get under the stones and heave them up, which is why New England farmers heave a new crop of rocks every spring. A foundation of rubble bears ultimately on the ground below the frost line and allows water to drain through it.

At one time I had planned to saw our lumber out of Round Island pines, using a chain-saw mill attachment. That would have taken a few summers by itself and made the island a lot less attractive to us in the process. But we wanted roughsawed, unplaned lumber anyway, for the natural look and feel of it. It will usually be cheaper than the standard kiln-dried and planed lumberyard product and it will be stronger too, because an unplaned two by four is actually around 2" x 4" instead of 1 1/2' x 3 1/2". Because it is unplaned, roughsawed lumber is not uniform, however, which makes it slow to work with. It is also much slower to sheathe a building with boards instead of with plywood. For that reason, but also to provide a perfectly flat surface under the shingles, we chose 1/2" plywood for the roof deck.

Our neighbor Ken Weeks had a portable sawmill (though not as portable as lumber is), so the winter before we started construction, we had him saw pine for most of our framing and sheathing, and hemlock for our rafters. Hemlock is a little stronger than pine and the rafters would have to carry a heavy load of snow. If we had been building on a site accessible to a truck and with enough standing timber to spare, we would have saved by having him bring in his equipment and saw it on the spot. As it was, Ken delivered the lumber and stacked it in ventilating lapped triangles to dry in the lake breeze for several months.

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