Author Michael Pollan might be known for his bestsellers on humankind’s relationship with food (such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma or The Botany of Desire), but before he penned either of those books, he wrote about building a house. Specifically, he envisioned a Thoreauvian writing cabin that he would build with his own hands, although he was (in his words) "a radically unhandy man.” My wife found a copy of A Place of My Own in a secondhand store, and I’ve found it entertaining – especially in light of the barn we’ve been dismantling over the past week-and-a-half. Pollan takes his reader t ..read more

 Editor's note: For more information about the House by Hand project, click here. Oh my goodness. Where do I even begin? Saturday was the big raising day in which we had 20 or 30 people lined up to help assemble and lift our house timbers into place. As I mentioned last week, Mike, Julia, and I had been obsessively monitoring the weather forecast developments the whole week before and we all were starting to feel nervous as we saw loads of rain encroaching on the day. Ironically, the end of last week in which the final prep work happened was swelteringly hot – so much so that we were sta ..read more

(This post was inspired by a conversation had recently while hewing a timber.) When Henry David Thoreau built his little cabin on the shores of Walden Pond, he borrowed an axe and started chopping down standing pines at the end of March. By mid-April, Thoreau, a woodworker with average competence and limited experience, had hewn his timbers, cut the joinery, and made ready for the raising. And in his words, “I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it.” Thoreau was endlessly distractible, pursuing clouds and ants and loons in the pond, so one can imagine his workdays being less ..read more

Hewing a log with an axe creates a sound like no other. After peeling some bark and snapping a chalk line, the hewer stands atop the log and chops notches down its length all the way to the line. In a freshly felled pine, this impact sounds a wet resonance, accentuated with the harmonic ring of axe steel. Get a number of carpenters together, put them in cool, echoing woods, and the rhythmic music of hewing is magical. That is what I best remember about the Charpentiers sans Frontières project here at the M&T shop back in 2019. Dozens of axes ringing at once, sometimes falling into step ..read more

I can admit that some people might think I have a problem with my relationship to timber-framed buildings. My woodshop is a 1790s Vermont frame, my blacksmith shop is a hand-hewn Charpentier sans Frontières frame, our newly built cottage is a modern rough-sawn frame I bought third hand from a friend, and six years ago, my wife Julia and I took down an 1810-ish cape cod house to restore for our home. When we took it down, we swept in to save it from bulldozing, but we were not ready to put it up right then. We knew we needed at least few years of preparations to get things in our life ready for ..read more

Justin Dietrich is an M&T reader and woodshop teacher in Lincoln, Illinois. Inspired by timber framer Rob Hughes and the CSF timber-frame project here in Maine, he decided to explore the possibility of working with his high-schoolers to design, build, and raise a timber frame in a local park. Dietrich was kind enough to share their experience with us. “I decided to use just my "Advanced Woods" students on this project, as these students had already taken my “Introduction to Woods” course where we build a picture frame, a box, an end grain cutting board, and turn a bowl on a lathe,” he said ..read more

  Today is the last day to order the Another Work is Possible book-and-film bundle for the discounted rate of $63. Starting tomorrow, Saturday, Feb 1st, the only option to purchase these products will be as individual items at full price.   You can order them individually now at these links below: The book alone is $50. The film alone is $25   Mike and I wrapped up copy reading the book this afternoon, and it’s going out to the printer on Monday morning. We are so proud of everyone that helped put this book together, and know that if you are into what we publish in the magazine ..read more

The house project is getting real now. The “tiny house” cottage in which my family will live during the 1810 house restoration is closer to “ready” each day. Today we were installing the last of the outlets and trimming windows and doors. The only large item that remains inside is the kitchen installation. Mike C has already done the prep work for the small utilities addition which will house the bathroom and washer and dryer. We should be making good progress on that tomorrow. We are as of this writing less than three weeks away from moving in and I’m just starting to feel a bit nervous abo ..read more

This week, Mike and I began working out the repair strategies for my 200-year-old timber-framed home. There will be a number of interesting scenarios to figure out, all of which we’ll be talking about on the Daily Dispatch as they come up. But before we could even get there, we realized that the design of the frame was so unusual to our eyes that we didn’t know what the proper terminology for the members should be. We’ve got a pile of books in our library, many of which I’ve been reading here and there over the years, but there are some designs that just don’t fit the standard models dep ..read more

For those of you that have been asking for details about ordering this book and film, this announcement is for you: We’re going to be kicking off the first two weeks of the Another Work is Possible book pre-order and film release as a bundled package for a discounted rate of $63.00. This offer will be good for two weeks – January 17th-31st. After that time, these products will only be sold separately for their full price: the book is $50 and the film is $25.  When can you order? Well, because we miss those crazy midnight releases we used to do, we’ve decided to open orders at 12:00 a.m ..read more