My brother is building an old-fashioned house the old-fashioned way: cheap!
He’s using free trees that he finds or salvages then cuts up with his portable sawmill.
He has a bunch of other cost-saving schemes going as well.
He’s built a spec house and reno’ed and GC’ed a couple others—based on this experience he declares that he can build his own 1800 sq ft for $30K total. Let’s see if he can!
So, for the past 2 days he and a crew have been hoisting up his two-story timberframe saltbox house. They’re almost done.
Oftentimes these days timberframing is part of fancy homebuilding. But Kelvin says it can also be part of cheap, scrappy homebuilding. You don’t have to be an expert to do it. There’s a lot of tolerance for amateur work which will still result in a strong house. –That’s why and how the mode developed.
His house has a very minimal basement and foundation. Just a root cellar and piers for the corners. He says the foundation is where people spend most of their money on a house these days. It’s far cheaper to add another story up, he says.
Most timberframes today are built using stress-skins, but again that’s the fancy way to go. Kelvin’s board’n’batten method is going to cost far less.
I helped him with the raising all day yesterday. We had quite a team. Two experienced barn-builders, a beat-up old borrowed crane-truck, my bro, our dad, a hippy artist neighbor and a don’t-tread-on-me warrant-out-for-him big ole mechanic neighbor. A motley crew! And yet none of us got flattened by the 300-pound beams that we were hoisting with ropes and pushsticks, nor did we fall off the beams that were thickly coated with ice and falling snow. It wasn’t your This Old House operation, that’s for sure! What fun!
His plan is to piece in the rest of the house in the next year or so with mostly found/salvaged/on-sale materials and things that he gets at auctions.
Can he do it?
Well, the barnbuilders said “Hey, we had to take this job coz you don’t ever get the chance to work rough and wild like this. This is a fun one. You don’t get go-for-it, let’s just get it done customers like Kelvin, so when you do, you gotta grab on and have some fun! Now, let’s throw those ramps up there and get this bent hoisted!”
Here’s a link to some pics.
And here’s Kelvin’s sawmill/farm website, Raven Farm. There’s lots of neat woodworking and farm stuff on his site—definitely check out the “Shrine of the Pines” link in his “Other Stuff” section. Well, heck, here it is direct: it’ll blow you away: a guy made tons of creative, worldclass furniture out of old white pine stumps with 6 small handtools and no nails.
Kelvin’s main service is that if you’re in the Michigan area, he’ll come to your house and take down and turn a tree into lumber and make it into something that you want or you can do that part. He’s a “tree-cycler.” People sometimes have heirloom trees that need to be cut down and they think it’s a great idea to use such trees in their house-additions or as furniture, as a way to keep the old tree in the family. The wood can be amazing, too. It often has nails/metal in it so that sawmills won’t process it, but Kelvin’s blades don’t cost much and keep it reasonable to save such wood instead of landfilling it.
