Todd has been intermittently working on his own cabin on a ranch in Oregon and occasionally posts updates here.
At first each year seemed to be greeted with a new design, but now inertia has given us a big assemblage of wood that seems irreversible. The basic concept is modeled on the traditional Nordic house: a central block is balanced on four corner stone supports and everything else is cantilevered beyond that: the wrap-around deck and the roof joists. The floor is supported by eight cut trees interlocked onto pylons of concrete and stone. Within the pylons are conduits for septic, water and electricity. All the timber used for the construction is all sourced out of our own forest and cut on the spot with a portable sawmill. Everything is off-grid and powered currently by a generator, but in the future there will be solar panels and propane.
The space created downstairs between the four pylons will become an outside living room with a moveable cooking island and a gas hearth. Eventually mosquito netting will make that space more liveable, as well as screening and netting around the porches upstairs.
