portable sawmilling

gabriel and i drove down to destiny yesterday to meet mckim mitchell, a sawyer from new hampshire. he's also a former new hampshire state representative as well as family. mckim read the destiny star and noticed that we were planning on sawing some of our own lumber and let us know he'd be happy to do it with his equipment. in the rain, we all took a look at the log pil. mckim confirmed the logger's estimate that the pile contains about 3000-4000 board feet. mckim noticed some center rot and what's called shake, a condition where the rings of the tree seperate. this will limit the quality of wood coming from those logs. overall, however, the logs look good. if you're wondering, a board foot is 12" x 12" x 1" of lumber. it's a common volumetric standard by which lumber is quantified. imagine one square foot of shelving board and you've imagined roughly a board foot. our project will likely take eight to ten thousand board feet, so not all of it will come from our land, but probably 1/3 to 1/2. since we needed to clear the land anyway for our building and septic sites, the logs were essentially a bonus which means we're getting the timber we saw on-site at about 1/2 the cost of buying it from a mill.

mckim has another job he's finishing, but he estimates he will be able to start work at destiny around june 13. he's going to try to work over the weekend of the 16-18 so that folks can come up and help stack and move the wood. if you're interested please sign up on our work email list by contacting bambi at info#faeriecampdestiny.org (replace the # with @).