Tuesday, May 29, 2018

One more in me? At least one more!

With retirement looming four days from now I have started considering my upcoming to-do-list.

While much of it consists of small and large project around the house, I have also started thinking about the bigger things I have been thinking about for a while.
Like, finishing the ladder to the tree house. Fixing the sailboat a friend gave us several years ago.
Remodeling the basement.
That sort of thing.

But I have also been wondering if I have one more, albeit small, cabin of my own in me.
The resounding answer was YES!
I don't want any big one, like the one in the photo (our main cabin). Something small and neat and tidy.

I will keep you posted.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

There is so much neat and sad about this photo all at the same time.
























It is a neat little place in all senses of the word.

Four rows of shingles to cover each side of the roof.

Log and mud fireplace. Up nice and high of the ground.

But can you imagine the much larger mansion not seen in this photo?

Would have loved to see this one. . . .


Monday, May 21, 2018

A neat little gem - one more for the Log Cabin life list.

 A weekend away for our anniversary found us driving past this little gem across a grassy field.


Will taken care of, up high off of the ground with a new tin roof.

Probably an old smoke house or something it is a very neat building.

It was across a gated field so I did not wonder out to it.

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Mysteries, Clues and exploration - It's more than just a pile of logs.

Well I haven't been able to explore any new old buildings lately, nor have I been able to work on any projects out at our places.
But I did get out there last night and took some fun pictures.

Taking down and working on old cabins is about more than just the logs and what it can look like when it is done. That is, if it is a passion, it's about everything to do with the old building, inside, outside and sometimes underneath.

It's also about the things you discover and find throughout the process. Some will confirm what you think you know about the place, while others will just add a little mystery.

 First off. I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I used a few of the old window jambs as hat and coat racks.

Here is a coat rack.
This one used for hats and other stuff.
















 In every log building I have worked on I have found holes in one or more logs that have no explanation for their purpose.
 The hole in the above photo is the hole on the left in this photo.
With a matching one way right just below the knot.

Both have wood pegs in them.
But when I took this cabin down these walls were covered with siding. So at that time these holes were not being used for anything.
Was it a shelf at one time.

This is just to the left of the front door.




In about the middle of this photo you can see another hole. This is in a second floor floor joist.

Again, what was it's purpose?
 This photo shows two circular saw cut boards on this beam.

I do know what these were for.

When I took down this building it had a ceiling of bead-board, which was also covering the walls.

These boards were nailed on to level out the ceiling before the bead-board was attached.






This is kind of related in that these notches do the same thing as the two boards above.

In this case these notches were made so furring strips could be added to attach clap-board siding to the outside. While the logs were pretty level, in places notches would have to be cut out of the logs, or boards used to build up spaces to make the furring strips level.





In this photo, from the take down, you can see the furring strips.

In the photo I have circled where wood has been placed under the strips if the log was either not as wide as the one above or below it, or had bowed a little.









I don't remember where this board came from, but I saved it because of the nice hand made mortises in it.
The wood is worn and weathered and has square nails in it.

















This is the an interior wall of the Pitts Blacksmith building.

In this photo you can see burn marks on the wall probably caused by the smithy leaning hot pieces of metal against the wall as he finished with them.










This piece, not displayed in it's original place, came out of the old building I call the slave's cabin.

After it was supposedly used as a dwelling it was then used as a small barn or grain crib.

This was used at the bottom of a grain chute to channel the grain into a bucket or something.
Somewhere I have the door to the chute also.
The chute was on an interior wall.
It looks like much of the work was done with a saw and chisel, instead of just by axe or draw knife.















This bricked in hole is on the back wall of the Pitt's building and I do not know what its purpose had been. It is a notch in the top of one log.

Was it also part of a grain chute?


















This photo is to show how you can even save a fairly bad notch if you brace the logs well around, above and below the notch.

This may not be something you want to do on a really large building or one that will become a full time home.

But on smaller less used building I have found that this works just fine.

Right next to the logs, before it is chinked you need to make sure the logs around the bad notch are supported with bricks or rocks, so that the weight is not carried by the damaged notch.

















 These next three are of some of the beautiful notches in various logs.

This one is the pin hole in a top plate log.
 This is a different kind of notch also in a top plate log.
All done by hand.






















If you really love working with these old buildings, or just being around them, you will develop a passion also for all the things associated with them. And you will make some wonderful discoveries.


Tuesday, May 15, 2018

A magnificent loss. The Boerding-Castlio house

St Charles is filled with all kinds of incredible history, if we have time to dig for it.

This house is called the Boerding - Castlio house.

The Castlio's have a long history in our part of the state.
My daughters school is named after one.
The last fort build in the area was built by them.

They had connections to the
Boone's, as in Daniel, in the area.

The stone part of this house has a lot in common with several Boone family homes in the area.

Part of the wood structure could be a log home. As you can see in the top photo, the front of the house is built very dog-trot style, and you can tell the building was added on to several times.

Two different people made the shingles on the porch. The replacements are much bigger than the others.

I just love the top photo!

Monday, May 14, 2018

Would love to know what it had been - Howell or Hamburg 1941

Another one from the ill fated TNT story. Would love to know what it had been. Was it a house? Or a business? At one time it had been chinked, you can see that on the left side of the photo. Most of the chinking has fallen out. At least one bad log, way left about half way up.
  Two stories. You can see the second floor joists.
An addition on the right. Was it a kitchen added on, or a stove to heat an office.

No large doors in view to indicate that it may have been a barn. Add normally you would not put nice windows like that in a barn.

Probably a home with a kitchen added later.

No firring strips to indicate that at one time the whole place could have been sided. But the front gable is sided with clap-board. And tar-paper covered the front.
The wide boards look like they cover a window, but don't look like they covered the whole front at one time.
While it probably had been used up until the time of the sale in 1941, it does not look like it was well maintained. But we will never know the whole story, only what the photo is willing to show us.

Friday, May 11, 2018

Would have loved to have seen it. . . .

 This old dog-trot cabin once stood on land that was taken over for the war effort. I have discussed that under the title Lost Valley in the labels on the right.

Many fine homes and businesses were lost when those towns disappeared.
Many log cabins also.

Would have loved to have seen them.
For the hundreds of old cabins saved over the years, thousands have been lost.

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

I never thought about it before. . .

I have always loved this door latch off of the old Pitts Blacksmith shop, which I saved and still use on the rebuilt building.
But as many times as I have used it, and indeed photographed it, I never really noticed that it is made with rough hand tools. Mostly made it looks like with an axe.

I will have to check next time to see if the notches the slide runs in have any saw marks in them or not.

It is still mounted on the door I took off the original building.

And it has lasted all these years.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

If you can see under the dirt and you have a little imagination . . . .

I first discovered this one about eight years ago on one of my drives.

A double pen cabin, probably 1860 to 1880.
Probably one of the first settlers to the valley I found it in.

I asked the owner if I could take pictures of it and he said yes.






Between getting married and having a kid it was a few years before I ever got back out that way again.

Just goes to show what you can do with a little imagination.

A few more photos and a bit more about the story can be found here.

Happy unions - joining two logs together.

Yesterday's image and post and all its varied notch work got me thinking about two hewn cabins I have seen in the last couple of years.

Why join logs together?

Joining logs together in an old log building could have happened for many reasons.











This log building not to far from my home (and featured on Barnwood Builders once) is one example.

Now I know for a fact that these logs are not configured in the way that the original building was built.
At one time it was a much larger two story building and the central home on this farm.
Over the years the family has made several attempts to save as many logs as possible to keep some family history alive where the farm use to be.
Way left you can see the logs that form an interior wall. You can just make out the ends of the logs.
These logs have a 'V' notch in them. You could not add a 'V' notch to make an interior wall after the cabin was built. So these logs were either in this configuration when it was first built (I doubt it) or were notched in to make a second room during one of its renovations (which I believe happened).
The project was either something the Barnwood people did not want to take on, or it was going to be to expensive for the home owners. There are three sides of good logs, but the right most ones in this photo are pretty bad.



 Two other reasons to join logs are;

You may not have had logs long enough to do the walls with long logs (rare).

Or you need to add another room at a later date.

This cabin is one county away from where I live, and not to far from our cabin.
At one time it had two stories as you can see the second floor joists above the door.

But you can also see where a second room was added and logs joined at the 'V' notchs.

None of these logs are especially long, so the lack of long enough logs would not have been the reason for joining two logs together. At the most that is a ten foot span, and those logs would have been easy to find.
At some time the builder needed to add another room.
Or after putting up a small house when he first started farming, eventually he had more time to work on his house and was able to make it bigger.

On the logs running left and right in the picture they alternate between having the top 'V' removed or the bottom one. So that at least everyother log remained attached to the original structure.
If added later, these notchs would no longer be very secure if your foundation started to shift.

We can not see the sill log to tell how or if it was joined to the main house or not.

Dog-trot cabins are fun to explore because some are built with no logs connecting the two cabins and some are built with joined notchs connecting the two pens or really long logs running the whole span of both pens. That is really neat to see.

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Making quite an entrance - doorway Sainte Genevieve Mo.

There is so much going on in this photo. And so much room for the imagination to roam.

Was this place built as a dog-trot cabin?
Was where the door is now perhaps a breeze-way at one time?

Nice doors like that would not have been built into early log homes.

At some point the entire outside was covered with some sort of plaster.

The dove-tail on the fourth log up on the right is very interesting. It seems to be either  one really think log with two dovetails, or two logs were hewn flat so they would fit tight together.  Indicating either bad planning or the use of different size logs.

And just above that course of logs the notching changes to a 'V' notch. While the notching on the right pen is hard to make out at all. Is it flat notching? 'V' notches?
Where first this would appear to be a well built nice log home with a fancy door.  It now looks more like it was built in stages over several years.

Today Sainte Genevieve is known more for its French style of building log homes with vertical logs.
But as different settlers headed west new methods or different methods of home building would have come with them.