Chapter 15

Over the long winter I discover two things. Two small rooms are boring beyond description. We need more space. It doesn't take much to decide to build better quarters. The second discovery is the small number of people here is not very viable.

When I started out, you know, it was just me living in a 10 X 10 hole dug in a hill. Oh, that was OK for just me. Things are different now. We have too many people for what little habitable space we have, especially during winter. I don't want to do that again. Why do we humans have to learn our best lessons the hard way?

What we live in now could be considered similar to the Neolithic homes of Skara Brae. In some ways, that is good from a security standpoint. For expansion purposes, though, the hill severely limits the growth potential of our home. We need a new home and definitely a new design.

I think back to prehistoric housing. A tent is out, not so good against the weather, and easy to knock over. I know of two styles of roundhouse. One is a circle of stones with a tepee like affair built over it. Usually a cone shaped framework of saplings and sticks is covered with some type of thatch.

The second style is built by digging a large round flat hole and burying posts just inside that hole spaced several feet apart. They are joined with vines and other small stuff to tie it together. This is filled in with wattle and daub. Some long poles are placed in the center and other poles are tied so that they radiate out to the walls. After being laced with vines they are covered with thatch.

Neither of these will do. It is colder here because it is ice age and I have doubts about a roundhouse staying warm enough. The other problem is thatch. If we have enough high grass here in my little valley to make enough thatch for a roof or two, we will be up to our asses in some type of grazing animals. Moving to a new area will be difficult and trucking in a lot of thatching material will be quite difficult, too.

Security also seems lacking in both of the roundhouse designs. Big cats, packs of dogs and even a wandering elk with a bad temper can be the end of any of us. I want something reasonably safe. It also needs to be expandable. If we add people to the community in future, the design needs to be applicable to them as well as to us.

I decide on a classic frontier log cabin. After scratching some designs out in the sand near the stream, I decide it needs to be quite large. The first will be roughly 12 X 24 feet in size. My original idea was a cabin about 10 X 15 but after some figuring I saw that as not much better than what we have. We have to do it right and not end up building something we will just abandon next spring.

Half of us will move into the cabin. That will give us lots of space and more room for storage which is really at a premium.

We have everything we need here in the valley, but we will have to drag it all here.

I drag out some paper and pencils out of my shipping box and start drawing what I want. Although a basement will be nice, I don't want to have to dig right now. We can add a root cellar outside, under one end — well, if we should really need it. We have the existing homes for storage now and can get by for a while.

My next concern is what I want in the way of foundation. Putting the wood on bare ground is the quickest way to building another cabin within 5 years because rot and bugs will eat it from below fast. Do I want to dig footers and go down several feet? No, I think that will be way too much work. Another option will be to build something similar to a crawl space. Stack stones up in several places and then put the logs on top of that. The down side to that will be that we will have to floor it, and that will be just one more cold surface in winter to radiate the cold.

I draw pictures of the various types of foundations and make some basic time and effort calculations. I find that it will be easier to build a cabin on a crawl space than on a deep foundation.

I want this cabin to be secure, so I don't want it at the bottom of the valley. Building on a hilltop will put us too far from the existing dwellings and water. The hill behind us is steep, but about a hundred feet away is a small rise on the hill that may be suitable. That will put it above the valley and close enough to our existing manmade cave-like dwellings.

I go up with Algossi and we survey where we will build the cabin. The site puts us about 25 feet farther away from water and it is now an uphill walk, but we only use it for drinking, cooking and a little cleaning.

Even the deep parts of the stream froze during winter and we ended up using a couple of hastily put together leather buckets to bring snow in to melt. It's surprising how many buckets of snow it takes to make a gallon of water.

We stake out the basic shape. I decide on a medium sized window and door in the front. The back wall will have a very small window just big enough to peek out or shoot an arrow out. With the steep hill behind, I don't see any problems securing the home.

I doubt the locals will know how to attack a cabin, and animals don't understand tactics, so the lack of windows on the sides will help us keep the place warm

Windows? What am I talking about! I really mean shutters, front and back. We don't have glass for real windows.

It takes many trips to where the slate is up the valley. We need to stockpile enough for the seven supports for the house. I want three supports on each side and one in the middle. The outside supports will support the walls and a floating floor.

Where I come from many houses have footers poured for the outer walls and a separate footer inside the walls for the floor. This is because the foundation in a slab home is one big pour of concrete that can develop serious cracks. We don't want those cracks transmitted to the outer walls.

Our foundation will be similar. Inside the outer walls will be floor joists that rest on the supports. The interconnected joists and flooring will be one large floor that is not really connected by screws or nails to the walls. We will be putting down our floor furs and they will overlap the walls and help keep out drafts.