Build a Six-Sided Oak Cabin For Just $120

By The Mother Earth News Editors
Published on September 1, 1977
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Diagram 1: Building a six-sided oak cabin.
Diagram 1: Building a six-sided oak cabin.
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Diagram 2: Building a six-sided oak cabin.
Diagram 2: Building a six-sided oak cabin.
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Diagram 3: Building a six-sided oak cabin.
Diagram 3: Building a six-sided oak cabin.
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Diagram 4: Building a six-sided oak cabin.
Diagram 4: Building a six-sided oak cabin.
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Diagram 5: Building a six-sided oak cabin.
Diagram 5: Building a six-sided oak cabin.
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Learn how to build a six-sided oak cabin for pennies on the dollar.
Learn how to build a six-sided oak cabin for pennies on the dollar.

Learn how to build a six-sided oak cabin using these helpful homesteader tips.

Build a Six-Sided Oak Cabin

Cheryl and I are lucky,” says Bushrod James of Witter, Arkansas. “We’ve not only been able to move back to the land . . . we’ve also managed — with a little help from our friends — to build the kind of home we’ve always dreamed about: a beautiful, comfortable, multi-sided log cabin made entirely of Quercus alba . . . white oak! And the whole house cost us just 17¢ a square foot!”

It’s a gray and rainy day today in the “holler”. Everything — including the moss-covered fieldstones, the mist that hangs like a blanket over the trees, and the slumbering, silent forest itself — is gray and wet and quiet. And we’re viewing it all from within our warm, comfortable log cabin fortress . . . the cabin that Cheryl and I and our two sons built ourselves using that superlative all-purpose construction material of the Ozarks, white oak.

As a cabin log, oak has no superior: I know of several oak cabins close by that are well over 100 years old, and their logs are still in perfect condition. (If anything, the lodges are more stone-like now than they were when they were built.) The oldtimers in this area have a saying about oak logs: “Keep ’em dry and they’ll last ya forever!”

Perhaps when you move to the country you’ll find (as we did) that you have oak on your property. If so, rejoice! It means that you, too, can construct a solid oak fortress in the wilderness.

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