Woodland framing

4 days of precision lumberjacking and design-as-we-go carpentry has built this humble woodland-styled hermit's hut in the woods near CAIRO, NY. I spent about 20 hours actively working on this project with Dada Gananathananda, a very dear mentor and monk friend of mine. Much of that time involved gathering materials from the woods, locust trees for posts, small saplings to temporarily brace them on their stone foundations, maples for the permanent 'knee braces', and finally plenty of pine trees for rafters, beams and 3 collar-ties. All the tools we needed were fairly primitive--in the absence of electricity on the site. Handsaws, machete, hatchet, home-made plumb-bob, hammer and chisel (plus a chainsaw -- not pictured). we used a level only twice, to cut off the rafter ends and level the tops of the posts. The Ridgebeam was hewn from a larger 13" pine cut on-site and incredibly, is dead-level ! :^D 

  Overall, this was a very fun project and gave full scope to test my increasingly intuitive carpentry skills using unconventional roundwood. Then, of course, the athleticism of putting on boots and playing lumber-jack is always a joy. I'm working with Dada from a distance to help him arrange rough-cut materials from a sawmill for a wooden roof. For the in-fill around posts (also called walls), he may do 1/2 the way up shale stones and mortar and the rest some kind of wooden latticework like wattle-and daub (wiki click here). At any rate, i look forward to seeing his rustic retreat develop, wishing him all the best !