Sponges

B and I are sponges right now.  We can't get our hands on enough information about cordwood or "stackwall" building as they call it around here.

We have done a drive-by of the 4 cordwood houses around in the country near to our property and have noticed that they all use round log ends.  Through our research, we have found out that round log ends tend to expand and shrink slightly and have more of a risk of splitting in the walls which creates an open draft into the house.  If you split the log end, then you reduce the risk of the log splitting because it is already split, and it dries out a lot quicker than round log ends.  We wonder if there have been any issues with drafts in the homes we have looked at.  We need to contact the homeowners to ask questions!

In at least 2 cases, we know that the cordwood homes were built a very long time ago, so the builders probably didn't know the risk in using round log ends.

I have a great book written by Rob Roy called Cordwood Building: State of the Art that discusses the new technologies in building cordwood.  I am happy about this book, because it seems like most of the research we have done is dated back at least 30 years ago!  I would feel more confident with recent research and information.

We're just about to sign up for a cordwood building workshop at Rob Roy's Earthwood Building School in upstate New York.  In the meantime we're just sponges absorbing as much information about cordwood building as we can.