Log (building)

“ Vertical grain and flat grain may be had in both softwood and hardwood, but the vertical grain shrinks and swells less than the flat, is more uniform in texture, wears more evenly, and the joints open much less. Finished flooring consists or tongue-and-groove material of various thicknesses and widths.
Despite a slight tendency to splinter and wear irregularly over a period of years, plain wide planking of random-width boards makes an appropriate floor for a log building. ”

“ The opening is now cut out, the sill fashioned, the vertical spline slot framed, and the head jamb log cut out to fit over the opening. At this point, the amount of settlement resulting from the shrinkage of the wall logs, as they dry out, must be determined and a corresponding allowance provided in the opening. This allowance is made between the upper side of the headpiece of the frame and the bottom of the log directly over the opening, and should be from 21⁄2 to 4 inches for a door 6 feet 8 inches to 7 feet in height, or 11⁄2 to 3 inches for an ordinary double hung window. ”

“ Upon the strength of such an inducement to the one who should put the finishing stroke to the building, Plante, Pillon, and Manaigre, whom the waggish Plante persisted in calling "mon nègre," whenever he felt himself out of the reach of the other's arm, all went vigorously to work.
Building a log house is a somewhat curious process. First, as will be conceived, the logs are laid one upon another and jointed at the corners, until the walls have reached the required height. The chimney is formed by four poles of the proper length, interlaced with a wicker-work of small branches. ”

“ If the logs are reasonably dry, from 3 to 4 inches should be left at each corner for settlement due to shrinkage; otherwise, more or less space should be allowed, as conditions require. In about 6 months the cap log will come down and close this gap. Similar provisions should be made for settlement over door and window openings.
FLOOR JOISTS
As soon as the first round or tier of logs is laid, the floor joists should be set in place, notching them into the bottom side logs. If the building has a continuous masonry foundation, the joists may be set on top of it, as in a frame building. ”

“ One and another of his friends he would persuade to haul a load of logs from the hills, and with good-natured persistence he would get a day's work now and again from the young fellows who frequently had more time on their hands than they knew how to reasonably make use of, with the result that before they were well aware of what was being done a log building stood ready for the roofing and plaster. ”

“ No log residence is complete without furniture for storing clothes. A combination chest and buffet suitable for log cabins can be made from well-seasoned lodgepole or eastern pine, tamarack, or birch (fig. 42) . The ends, doors, shelves, and drawer fronts should be cut from No. 2 tongue-and-groove commercial pine lumber.
Settee
A settee can be made from well-seasoned pine or birch (fig. 43) . Join the corner poles to the slab frame and rail with mortise-and-tenon joints; then anchor the joints by means of 3⁄8- by 6 -inch lag screws. ”

“ Primarily, in its Canadian and original sense, the term means a log-house—a hut made of rough squared logs, built up upon each other. Such log-huts are not common in this country, though they may be seen here and there. The mild climate does not require such a style of building. The labour of cutting and squaring logs for the purpose is great. The native wharè of thatch is quickly and easily raised, serves all requirements, and lasts for years. ”

“ Now that we know how to make doors and door-latches, locks, bolts, and bars, we may busy ourselves with building an American log cabin. It is all well enough to build our shacks and shanties and camps of logs with the bark on them, but, when one wishes to build a log cabin, one wants a house that will last. ”

“ It should be installed in conformity with the manufacturer’s directions, taking care to select a stock-size unit suitable for the dimensions of the fireplace opening and to erect the surrounding masonry accordingly.
OILING AND PAINTING
After all the openings have been properly calked and the logs brushed clean, it is often desirable, although not absolutely necessary, to treat the log surfaces with some sort of preservative material. Logwood oil is excellent for the exterior. ”

“ When the chinking has been completed, the openings will have been reduced sufficiently in width to allow the calking material to be applied successfully.
It is always a serious problem in log construction to devise a practical method for permanently fastening the plaster daubing in place on both inside and outside walls. In some instances, shingle nails may be driven into the logs 2 to 3 inches apart for the full length of the opening or 2-inch wide strips of metal lath may be used and the plaster applied to fill it. ”

“ A roof of thin shingles, lacking sufficient scale, is never as effective as a rough textured one, using 3⁄4- to 11⁄4-inch thick shakes, to harmonize with the sturdy appearance of the log walls. The width, normally 6 to 8 inches, is governed by the size of the blocks of wood and varies accordingly, while the length is governed by the spacing of the roof logs or purlins. Shakes are always laid on the purlins in single courses, lapping the sides 11⁄2 to 2 inches and over-lapping the ends at least 6 inches, as illustrated in figure 19. ”

“ The masonry of the fireplace and its chimney should always start on solid earth, below the frost line, like the foundations of the building itself. Masonry does not settle, unlike the surrounding log construction. Consequently, it is recommended that a self-supporting log framing be built around and entirely free of the masonry of the fireplace and chimney, as illustrated in figure 31. ”

“ The remains of human handicraft, in the form of log-houses or lake-dwellings, have been found buried under each and all these peat growths: a depth of 25 feet had overgrown the log-house discovered at Inver, Co. Donegal, and on the floor-level, outside the building, were traces of the corkers of the great oak forest age. ”

“ Having stooped under this wall you are confronted by a low matting partition, surmounted by a huge log, the whole some 3 feet high, over which you scramble and find yourself in a large bare room varying from 15 to 50 feet long and 15 to 30 feet wide, according to the size of the village, with a square earthen hearth in the centre on which a few logs are always smouldering, and at the far end is a raised sleeping platform extending the whole width of the building. ”

“ Unless an ex [Pg 213] terior scene calls for a log cabin, church front, or some building of special construction other than such real buildings as may be easily found in the neighborhood of, or within a reasonably short distance from, the producing plant, he does not have to draw a special diagram-plot for the scene. Even when a new building is needed, it is only necessary to instruct the carpenters to build, say, a log cabin of a certain size on the location he points out, with a door, windows, etc., as determined by him for the requirements of the scene. ”

“ I recommend the brethren in this Valley to erect saw-mills and prepare to build with lumber. They are the cheapest and best houses I can think of, under your circumstances. I do not wish the brethren to cut all the timber to put it into log-houses. Erect saw-mills and make lumber, which will be far better than building log-houses. We have no timber to waste. We should save our timber, and make buildings that will look better than log-houses, and at the same time be easier and quicker built. ”

“ A good plastic compound will adhere to the logs under all conditions and can be patched easily by simply applying more material. A black fiber seal is not objectionable and, at the same time, gives a practical finish. The seal should be applied to both sides of the exterior and interior log walls, producing an almost hermetically sealed building. When applied with a pressure gun having a 3⁄8-inch nozzle, 1 gallon will fill about 300 linear feet of opening. ”

“ The pencil point of the upper leg makes a mark on the surface of the upper log which will be the intersection of the surfaces of the two logs when the notch has been cut from the upper one. Repeat this operation four times to mark all four sides of the corner. A little practice will make you adept at keeping the points of the divider perpendicular to each other. ”

“ Then remove the two sighting sticks. As a timepiece, this dial will be found roughly correct for that latitude. The angle of the pointer, or style, must be changed for each latitude.
Building a Log Cabin
(From Country Life in America. May, 1905 )
There are as many different kinds of log cabins as of any other architecture. It is best to begin with the simplest. The tools needed are a sharp ax, a crosscut saw, an inch auger, and a spade. It is possible to get along with nothing but an ax (many settlers had no other tool) , but the spade, saw, and auger save much work. ”

“ Just a glance at a pile of ordinary every-day kindling wood could hardly suggest to one the possibilities existing in the crude material for building all sorts of interesting and realistic things for the little folks, but experiment and you will find that Klondike log-houses, rail-fences and lumber camps, bridges, and substantial little rafts which will float on water in laundry or bath tub, pond or stream, can be easily and readily built from the little sticks we use to start our fires. ”

“ These logs were posts, studs, boards, clapboards, laths, plaster, and nails, all in one. Where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the pioneer uses the whole trunk of a tree. The house had large stone chimneys, and was roofed with spruce-bark. The windows were imported, all but the casings. One end was a regular logger's camp, for the boarders, with the usual fir floor and log benches. Thus this house was but a slight departure from the hollow tree, which the bear still inhabits,—being a hollow made with trees piled up, with a coating of bark like its original. ”

“ Then other men piled them by means of long steel chains and horses, just as they would have skidded them in the woods. Only now the logs mounted up and up until the skidways were thirty or forty feet high. Eventually the pile of logs would fill the banking ground utterly, burying the landing under a nearly continuous carpet of timber as thick as a two-story house is tall. The work is dangerous. A saw log containing six hundred board feet weighs about one ton. This is the weight of an ordinary iron safe. When one of them rolls or falls from even a moderate height, its force is irresistible. ”

“ Small-sized logs save much labor in chopping, sawing, rolling, and “snaking” to camp; besides all this, logs of small diameter look best for a house of small dimensions.
Therefore, in selecting the material for your proposed house, choose only such trees as are best suited to the strength of the builders. There is no rule which fixes the diameter of a log or pole, so a log-house is a log-house, no matter whether the diameter of the log from which it is built be four inches or four feet. When a log is hauled by men, horses, or oxen, through the woods, it is called “snaking.” ”

“ In handling logs, lumbermen have tools made for that purpose—cant-hooks, peevy irons, lannigans, and numerous other implements with names as peculiar as their looks—but the old backwoodsmen and pioneers who lived in log houses owned no tools but their tomahawks, their axes, and their rifles, and the logs of most of their houses were rolled in place by the men themselves pushing them up the skids laid against the cabin wall for that purpose ”

“ When the troughs are steep, the logs rush down at more than railroad speed, leaving behind them a trail of fire and smoke. Such log-ways are generally to be seen about the lakes, and are so contrived that the logs leap from them into water of great depth, as otherwise they would be shivered to pieces and spoiled for use in the manufacture of lumber. ”

“ The cleats will hold the ends of the logs in place until the boards U (Fig. 232) for the door-jambs, window-frames, or the framework over the fireplace can be nailed to the ends of the logs and thus hold them permanently in place. If your house is a "mudsill," wet the floor until it becomes spongy, then [166] with the butt end of a log ram the dirt down hard until you have an even, hard floor—such a floor as some of the greatest men of this nation first crept over when they were babies. But if you want a board floor, you must necessarily have floor-joists ”

“ The immersion of logs in water also improves the quality of the lumber, as the action of the water upon the sap prevents to some degree the tendency to decay, and also facilitates the seasoning of the manufactured product. If the log is left in the water until it becomes water-logged, it will sink, and while it is not injured for many purposes, the wood loses some of the strength which it is supposed to have. In many localities, the salvage of sunken logs has become an industry. ”

“ Furthermore, the continuous foundation wall has the additional advantage of preventing rodents from getting under the building. In no case should the logs be placed directly upon the ground since wood tends to decay when in contact with the earth. ”

“ At the banking grounds, which lie in and about the bed of the river, the logs are piled in a gigantic skidway to await the spring freshets, which will carry them down stream to the “boom.” In that enclosure they remain until sawed in the mill.
Such is the drama of the saw log, a story of grit, resourcefulness, adaptability, fortitude and ingenuity hard to match. Conditions never repeat themselves in the woods as they do in the factory. The wilderness offers ever new complications to solve, difficulties to overcome. ”