Using a Portable Sawmill to Make Homestead Necessities

Reader Contribution by Anneli Carter-Sundqvist
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A few years ago a major piece of our homesteading puzzle fell in place; we bought a Wood Mizer portable sawmill. Up to that point we’d been, as most people, dependent on the lumber yard and it’s supply, as well as friends and acquaintances with occasional stacks of lumber for us to rifle through or logs to mill somewhere else. We don’t have any heavy equipment to transport logs with so anything cut on our land had to be moved, by someone else, first to a mill, then back here. 

Now, on every first day of a new building project, we start where all building projects ought to start; in the woods. That tree and that tree for the frame, those for the walls, those for the roof. We fell them, haul them with our people powered log hauler and turn them into lumber right here in our yard. Last year we built a timber framed hut from a red oak that started to shade the garden; that entire frame didn’t travel more than 300 ft, from the stomp to the mill to the site.

But, not all logs have to come to our yard either; the mill isn’t bigger or heavier than it can be loaded onto our trailer and hauled behind our Subaru. This week we have the mill set up a couple of miles down the road at a friends place. He’s a tree feller and have stacked up a pile of cedar, black locust and spruce, real nice red spruce that’s all ours as a trade for milling the hardwood for him. We get the perfect lumber for our next project, interior work in the hostel building, and he gets the perfect match lumber for the sauna he’ll build at his place.

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