Drop Huge Trees & Mill into Lumber

It took weeks of cleanup.  We wanted to use the debris rather than pay to have it hauled away.  That meant shagging all the limbs into smaller and smaller sticks to fit into the wood stove and putting the smallest stuff through the chipper.  I painted the log ends with a thick blue paint to help the drying process and stack the logs in a place large enough to get the sawmill close.  After a month we were ready to call the fella with the portable sawmill.  I jokingly told folks it was blue spruce.

Saw Mill to custom cut our trees

May 2, 2003  The Sawmill job was as interesting and awesome as the tree topping.  Don Peroni (425-882-5199), and his wife came over to help stack logs on Friday.  They were here at daylight the next morning setting up the saw.  The deal was $250 for 2 days sawmill work if Dee and I helped the whole time.  Whew, we only thought we understood that this was to be some hard work ;)  Dee kept us filled with sandwiches and Aspirins and lots of water to keep us going.  The temp was in the 80's and green 12' 2"X 10"s are way heavy.  The four of us worked 2 12 hour days and just finished the last log as the sun was going down Sunday night.  What a Long Hard Job !  Those folks earned their money, In the end we shared a few garlic beers and I gave them an extra $50.for the great job.

Good ole fashion full dimension lumber.  You can't buy this stuff at Home Depot!

Many of the boards will be used as floor joists for the second floor.

The ceiling for the first floor will be open rafters making the floor joists visible.

Tired out or not, after the sawing we still had to quickly get the lumber stacked and stickered to dry out without warping, getting wet, or staining.  In addition to that was the cleanup.  Even more debris than you can imagine.  We had about 12 wheelbarrows of sawdust alone to spread and about a full years worth of firewood chunks to stack.  We also ended up with dozens of "moon boards".  Moon boards are the first cuts on the log where one side is the rounded bark side. I kept many of these moon boards and peeled them to "hopefully" use someplace in the construction process.

In order to legally use our own lumber for structural construction we had to also pay for a lumber grader to come inspect our rough cut lumber.  On September 10, 2003 a very interesting fella named Glen came to inspect.  He inspected 1,476 board feet of rough cut lumber.  He also had a moisture meter so we could verify that our lumber had dried perfectly from April to September, only 5 months.  He told us we did a great job of stickering and stacking the lumber for good results.  Most of our lumber was graded to #1 premium clear standards with the rest matching a #2 grade.  This job required Dee and I to "Un-stack" the lumber as the grader inspected and stamped.  Then, after he was gone we again had to re-stack and securely cover the lumber once again.  How many times will we handle this lumber?

So, we ended up with the following Graded for Structural fitness lumber: 73 - 2"X10"X12'  There were many boards that had "wane" (showing of bark or bark rounded edge), that was not gradable, as well as the moon boards, and some pieces not wide enough or with some bad spots, but usable in construction other than for structural purposes.  Since he was only here for 2 hours he was able to reduce our fee to $150.00.  That was terrific, because to tell the truth; all this work to drop trees and sawmill the lumber and grade the lumber was costing MORE than just going to home depot to buy nominal construction lumber.  Still, we did it this way and feel much better for it.