Cedar Log: Fill & Download for Free

Well, speaking for myself, the reason I went to Ireland was to build a Canadian cedar log home in County Tipperary - near Ballylooby to be precise. It turned out quite nicely, and I was able to incorporate a few tasty custom details that pleased both me and the owners.As for why I think Ireland good…. The people; almost everyone I met was friendly and easy to get along with. Really, I can't recall ever having a dispute at all in the six months that I was there. Even the simplest transaction seems to require a moment of genuine conversation. Buying a newspaper? A comment on the headline is in order. Grabbing a coffee? Yes, a hot cupful is a grand thing on a drizzly morning. This is out in the countryside now - things are a little faster paced in Dublin.I'm not a big fan of Guinness (and no, I won't apologize for that), but I certainly enjoy the Jameson. Pubs in the small towns are the original social network, and I never felt unwelcome at one.The food was mostly good, and some of it was truly excellent. I especially remember the sole in Waterford and hot smoked salmon in Kinsale. Of course, I like meat and potatoes, but I also found some decent Chinese and Indian food as well. I could also rave about the cheese - the variety and flavor is amazing.What else. Scenery is wonderful, especially if you like green. History. There's plenty of castles and ruins and stuff, and Dublin has lots to see if you like old things. Walking. Ireland is quite pedestrian friendly, and there are plenty of nice hills and seaside cliffs to hike. Weather. I enjoy it, and Ireland sure has a lot of it. Bring something waterproof and you can enjoy it too.I could go on. But I also realize that I'm a white English speaking male; although the Irish are generally too polite to be outright racist, a non-English speaking person of color might find things more difficult. But they'd be fine in the end, if they had the right attitude, because Ireland is really pretty good.

Apparently the British are more willing to tolerate small houses with smaller rooms than people in other countries, despite the fact that they have a lot more money than they had in the past, they are willing to put up with smaller houses. They just have to pay the same amount of money as people in other countries for much less space.A lot of it is due to spectacularly inefficient British building techniques which run up costs. I built my own house in Canada and have watched British workers in action - inaction being the operative word.The Brits have strange ideas about house construction, as they do about wiring, plumbing, and cars, and could build much bigger houses much faster out of wood. The Germans and Japanese taught them how to build cars faster since all the British manufacturers went out of business, but nobody has taught them how to build houses efficiently.The Brits underestimate the strength and staying power of wood. Wood is very fast and easy to build houses out of, but you can make them very substantial if you want. I saw 1000 year old wooden churches built out of oak in Norway. In Canada, we are now building 12 story buildings out of wood.The 18-storey timber Brock Commons tower in Vancouver, built out of woodCanadian wood buildings are much more fireproof than English concrete and steel ones. It’s all about building standards, and big wooden timbers are actually quite fire resistant compared to steel beams. Steel beams melt and bend in a fire, wood timbers just char.New College, Oxford, founded in 1379, is one of the oldest Oxford colleges. (I really liked the arrow slits in the walls so they could shoot trespassers.) It has a great dining hall with huge oak beams as large as two feet square, and forty-five feet long. Britain used to have oak trees that big, before they cut them all down to build ships and had to resort to inferior brick buildings.A century ago, they discovered that the beams in New College were developing beetles, and wondered what they could do about it. They called in the College Forester, and asked him if there were any oaks for possible use. Well, they were in luck.He pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.” When the College was founded 1379, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.” So, now there are all those 500 year old oak trees that the college can use to replace its oak beams.Now that the rest of the British oak trees are gone because they used them to build ships, Brits have nothing left but bricks left to build with. The huge buildings that Henry VIII built out of brick are all gone now because bricks don’t last forever.But back to American houses. During the 1905 San Francisco earthquake, all the brick houses disintegrated into a cloud of flying bricks and fell into the street, so you don’t see very many brick houses in California. A lot of the old houses in San Francisco are built out of redwood. Redwood will last 100 years with no maintenance at all, and if you paint and maintain it, it will last a lot longer.Western red cedar is a good second choice. I know a couple who built their house out of a cedar log that had been lost in a lake by a lumber company 60 years ago. They built their entire house out of one cedar log that had lain at the bottom of a lake for 60 years. It was practically as good as new. They fished it out, had it sawn up into lumber by a custom sawmill, and used it. They had their choice of logs at the bottom of that lake.Douglas fir is also a good building wood, but after a few decades it gets so hard you can’t drive nails into it. You have to drill holes with titanium bits and then drive the nails into the holes. It is very frustrating. I remember a TV show of some carpenters who were trying to tear down some “temporary” wartime buildings built out of Douglas fir in Canada. They had been working for 20 years to tear down those “temporary” structures, and were almost done. Pulling nails out of old Douglas fir is almost as hard as driving them in.One of my uncles had a big Douglas fir at his lake cabin and he said, “You know, you could build three houses out of that tree.” When they are 100 years old, they are 100 feet tall, four feet across, and just getting serious about growing. Some of them were over 300 feet tall and 12 feet across before they cut them down to build houses.So there is wood and then there is wood. My house is built out of Douglas fir and cedar. I think it is going to be here a lot longer than I will be.

This is a good example of a shake cedar shingle roof. Shake shingle are split from a large diameter section of a cedar log. So, they show a lot of grain. They are not tapered like regular cedar shingles. This gives them a proud texture.