20 years ago, on a Sunday, my car broke down about 30 miles south of here, at a group function. I left tke key in a magnetic container inside the frame under the door, iirc, and I got a ride home with someone else there. I called GEICO with which at the time I had towing insurance, and they called a tow company while I was on the phone, but I couldn't hear what was said. Thank goodness I was smart enough to insist on talking directly and finding out the name of the tow company. Never let someone else make all the arrangements without at least getting the 3rd party's name.
They were to tow it to a shop a few blocks from here and when 4 PM came and I hadn't hear anything, I called the shop and they knew nothing.
I called the tow company and they said they went to the car and the door was locked. I'm sure I'd said where the key was plus if they'd called Geico, Geico would have called me. Plus I was in the phone book, the only one by my name. I told them again where the key was, so they towed it the next day and dropped it off without making the shop sign for it or pay anything for towing, and they got whatever Geico paid them but not the hefty additional for being 30 miles away. I guess they didn't want me complaining to Geico and I didn't.
I went college with a guy who grew up on a farm in western Illinois but became a lawyer in NYC.
He bought land in Woodstock NY. Now Woodstock is just like 20 or 40 other little towns in the area, but he wanted Woodstock I'm sure because it was famous.
But I have to give him a lot of credit: He researched, designed, and did a plurality of the labor to build his own pretty large house, on the side of a hill overlooking the valley and the next hill. He cut down the trees and paid for at least two truckloads of gravel to make a still-rocky road. He paid for someone to dynamite enough to have a flat area for the house.
He framed it... 2 stories high, 40 or 50 foot square with windows from a foot or two above the floot to ceiling (16 feet iirc) on the whole south side, plus 1/2 the west side and 1/4 the east side. In 1976, the doublepane windows cost him $10,000, delivered.
For the walls below the windows, he used logs, not lengthwise like in most log cabins and houses but so the ends showed inside and out. That was his big mistake. The logs had dried for weeks, months, or a year or two, not sure, but they continued to dry after they were in place, and shrink, so there were holes almost an inch big that the air would blow through. He chinked it with cement, that didn't look sot good. (He remodeled his loft in SoHo NY and there too the design was great, he did some of the work, but final touches he sometimes did in an ugly manner. The cement chinking looked terrible. I'm not sure what the next owner would do to make it look nice.)
We had a fight when he didn't show sufficient concern for his girlfriend or her daughter, 102.6 and 103.6 fevers** at Rainbow in a North Carolina national forest, Nantahala, and he just wanted to get back to NY to go to work on Monday, and I wanted them to see a doctor (I won***.) and it was the last straw ending out friendship after 20 years.
***The police were watching traffic and all the parked cars, or something, on the road outside the forest, about an hour's hike, 15 minute drive, from where the camping was, and they offered to call an ambulance, but that would have taken as much time as our**** driving to the hospital. The doctor there just gave them water, watched them for an hour or two, but it's not some boyfriend's right to decide they dont' need a doctor. They even had insurance to pay for it. ****I'm glad I was driving and it was my car.
**Turned out to be shigellosis (inflamation of your shigella!), and about 5000 of the 10,000 campers got it. The CDC investiated, sent me a long form of which they said, "If you return this, you'll get a copy of the report" and both happened.
But I still stopped by his country home when I was nearby and it didn't look like the windows had dropped. I presume he had some 2" vertical
2x4s holding the windows up and didn't depend on the logs.
Unless both cut ends are fully sealed they absorb and release moisture. Even log houses expand and shrink with the seasons - just like your hardwood floors.
Years ago, talking to my old neighbour - who had a beautiful log home built - I remember him saying that there were some sort of "jack screw" devices built into the structure - to adjust for the long-term settling as the big logs dry out. < not sure about seasonal expansion/contraction ? > They also used some special framing on top of windows & doors. It all seems like a lot of bother - but it's a really great looking home - and the present owners seem happy there. Recent technologies might have reduced the troublesome stuff - this log home is 30 + years old.
As for Micky's original post - re : the decorative cordwood - .. it might be a nice touch - if the cordwood is properly dried and treated for bugs, and sealed .. .. and I hope they used something stronger than 2 x 4 for window framing .. John T.
I don't know if he sealed it or not, maybe not. Plus I presume it has to be resealed once in a while, and I'll bet he doesn't do that.
I just used 2x4 generically. I wasn't wasn't there for that part. He might have used bigger.
The same webpage I quoted also said the logs had to age for 3 years before being used, and I'm next to certain it wasn't that much. I don't remember seeing any stacks of short logs aging. I would have found it curious.
I have another friend from college who lives in Denver and he and his wife were driving around the mountains an hour west of there and came across a 6-room log house. Vacant. They found out who owned it, USC or Stamford, and he wrote them and they had inherited it from a sea-captain who built it to get as far from the sea as possible. He left it to the school which never used it, and they sold it to my friend pretty cheaply.
It needed quite a bit of work but he was handy and only 30 y.o or so. He found chinking, made from newspapers as early as iirc 1870. He had the second half of his wedding reception there.
Also in the area were a bunch of fraudulent gold mines. People would dig a hole, salt the mine with gold, or just say it had gold, and then raise money from investors in the east, a small amount of which they would put into more digging, and the rest they would live on, very well, or save. The police and prosecutors tried to stop it, but of course they didn't advertise in the Colorado law journal. The time was the end of the 19th century, 1870 to 1900, somewhere along that time.
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