$3000 for 24' x 35' garage logless log cabin

[terracore]

I ran across this (to me) new technique of building on another forum.

Basically it involves using three pieces of lumber per "log" with the middle piece offset by 2 inches creating a tongue-in-groove and chinked with construction adhesive:

https://tinyhouseblog.com/log-constructi...log-cabin/

[microage97]

What a waste of money.

[MarkP]

My gripe is that there is nothing particularly wonderful about a solid wood wall. Frontier people did it because it required the minimum amount of processing of the wood and they often covered up the log walls with clapboards when it became an option because log cabins weren't cool back when people built them for real.

I often get it in my head that an A-frame would be cool but they really don't solve any problems and actually present a few of their own.

[terracore]

To me the benefit of an A frame is that the roof is also the exterior walls. Outside an area with heavy snowfall I'm not sure I can think of any others. Maybe they are easier to build? I've always thought of it kind of like a really long teepee.

[MarkP]

Everybody talks about handling snow well but there are snowy areas in europe where the more snow they get the flatter they make the roofs. You can't build a roof that'll shed snow and just walk away. People die that way. So you make a roof that won't hold snow then turn around and put snow fences and brackets on the roof to keep the snow there. Also snow is free insulation. There is also no way that an architect or engineer can derate the snow load on a roof because it is steep. They can't count on the snow sliding off when they need it to. It is just one of those human foibles that we all have that tend to cause us trouble to assume that something can happen and does happen that it will happen in a useful way. The one thing that can be said of a steep roof is that a roof truss that is deep from bottom chord to roof peak is simply a deep beam and hence stronger. A thicker wing is stronger too. It could hold as much snow if you turned it over with the flat part up and the peak sticking down into your living room.

About easier to build, maybe if they are small but I read a story about a family building one who switched over to building a conventional cabin when they tried to lift up the first frame and dropped it. You are sort of limited to 1 or 1 1/2 stories tall. I can't imagine standing 3 story frames up without a crane or without them bending like a 35' long 2 x 12 the flat way.

There is an inherent benefit to presenting two entire facets of the building to the weather that have no windows and shield the house all the way to the ground. Given the availability of Simpson brackets, milled lumber, and plywood you can build a house arbitrarily strong so the whole triangles are strong thing goes away. Made a huge difference when we were leaning tree trunks together and lashing them with vines though.

I agree about the teepee similarity.

[randomq]

Seems like it'd be easier to use larger lumber for a fake log cabin, 4x12s with or without grooves, and lots of construction adhesive...

There is also "silo" construction, where you build the walls with flat 2x4s, like how you do top plates in platform construction, but the whole wall. Very strong, but would use a ton of fasteners, and you still would want to seal or use siding to keep bugs and moisture from getting in.


I'd like to see someone do plantation style single wall but with 2x12 vertical wallboards. I think that'd be pretty sturdy!

[MarkP]

At this point if I were cool with using brute force in the application of large amounts of materials I would go with concrete block construction. I just got done building a small blockhouse with a single door out of 6" CMUs with vertical 1/2" rebar in each cell and horizontal rebar around the top, fully grouted solid. It was hard work and there are some things I would do differently but I would do the basic concept again in a heartbeat. It didn't even cost all that much and I was able to do all the work myself at my own pace. Add enough windows and it would look like a real house but the basic structure would otherwise be bomb-proof.

[1voyager1]

Haven't read the whole thread, just tc's OP.
My first though is that using that much finished lumber would probably not be very economical.
I would also be suspicious of its durability in our climate, water getting in between the boards.

In AK I lived for a while in a small, maybe 20'X12', 1 room cabin that was built from tongue and groove 2x6 lumber.

The boards were set on their side and were interlocked like logs would be at the corners.
There was no internal framing.
It was built just like a log cabin.
I lived in it during a winter.
It was surprisingly warm and not all that expensive to heat with an oil stove.
I was so impressed with that cabin that I still think of it in amazement.

EDIT:
I had to haul all my water in jugs from somewhere else.
I kept a big spaghetti pot on the stove for hot water and to humidify the cabin's air.
No running water meant that I had to use a growler out a path through the snow.
Now that I think about it, it was a bit rustic.
Still, I was impressed with the tongue and groove 2x6 walls.

[MarkP]

Somewhere in my travels around the net researching alternative building methods I came across houses being built of sawn boards but otherwise like a log cabin. The boards overlapped and were notched at the corners like in a log cabin. I don't recall them being tongue and groove. My vague recollection was that this was somewhere in asia or the pacific (not North America) and that it was "native" architecture updated to accommodate sawn lumber.

Didn't the early people of the PNW build houses out of planks? I think they did and were able to do so without sawn lumber because of the kind of trees they had which they were able to split into giant shakes. I remember that the doorway was typically a roundish hole that a person could fit through but not a bear. If my recollections are accurate, I wonder how they attached the planks. Stands to reason it would be log cabin style.

[MarkP]

Scattered throughout the countryside in Central New York are stately old brick buildings that must have been a b***h to heat. If my life had gone differently I might have bought one and tried to renovate it. That would mean insulating it decently, but how to do so and still show off the ornate brick that old industrial tycoon money, long since gone, had payed for as a form of conspicuous consumption? It is a real dilemma. Those old multi-wythe weight bearing brick walls worked OK as long as ungodly amounts of heat were pumped through them keeping everything dry and unfrozen. The proper way to insulate them is to put the insulation on the outside but then it might as well not be a brick building. There are ways to insulate on the inside as long as heroic efforts are made to minimize wetting of the exterior bricks. The primary problem is freeze-thaw damage of the exposed masonry and if the bricks are not wet then it doesn't matter how cold they get.

Whether old brick or less old concrete block construction, I would usually come across the same complaint, that of losing interior space if they built up the walls on the interior. Now granted we are usually talking about different camps here but using myself as an example I have often cruised both tiny house websites and old masonry house websites during the same sessions. I also have visited small-cabin.com where people go on about building cabins that are, well, small, which need to be heated so they spend quite a bit of time talking about stoves, wood-burning or otherwise. The consensus is often that with a cabin this small and a stove this big insulation is not a problem.

The intersection of all these is that if you build your living space small enough it gets much easier to heat. The folks worried about losing space from insulating on the interior should remember that the day before they were dreaming about living in a tiny house, so build the tiny house INSIDE the old stone house which will now serve as an elaborate rain-screen.

Boats are often built by gluing strips of wood together and I doubt you could get a more weather-tight envelope than that but you would have to encapsulate the wood with epoxy like they do in boat building. Otherwise the concerns with water getting between the boards is valid. Lots of details to think about. However if you had a big supply of cut-off 2x4s for free then I can see going down that road.

The original builders of log cabins had a wealth of trees that we can only dream of but no sawn lumber so not surprisingly they piled them up in the way that cost them the least in terms of labor. Log cabins today are pretty much examples of the tail wagging the dog.