Tyler Cabin Adventure III

It's amazing what God creates. After being chopped down, cut up, stuck together with pitch, and exposed to thirty-two years of wind, rain, sun, and insects, the larch logs that make up the log house are still solid at the core. Well, this is true for 90% of the house. There is one section that's rotten, due both to insects' work and a long time of poor gutterage on that patch of the house. But after we were done peeling and scraping the bark off the logs, here's what most of the exterior walls looked like:

Not showroom quality, mind you; but which one of us would look this good after being cut down and left to weather for three decades? If you had only this much greying and cracking, you'd be singing Hallelujah!

Notice, however, the spaces between the logs. Although Grandma and Grandpa put what looks like tar between the logs, they were never properly chinked. Part of this was due, I'm sure, to the fact that it's very hard to chink logs with bark on them. Besides, Thoreau didn't use chinking, I'm sure. Chinking is just another one of those modern inventions that keep you soft and reliant on petroleum-dependent industrial society.

It also keeps your log house standing longer and its occupants warmer in the winter.

By the time another generation of Tylers reached adulthood, there were spaces in between the logs that you could see light through. (No lie: You could stand in the house and see bright sunlight through the cracks. Of course, you couldn't do that most of last week, because it was raining. But trust me. The gaps were huge.)

So we had to chink.

Chinking is really glorified (and by "glorified," I mean "extra expensive") bathtub caulk. Take a tube of caulk, introduce it to a randy bag of mortar mix, give them a motel room for a couple hours, and BANG: you get chinking. Squeeze it on like caulk, and it hardens like mortar with a little flexibility. We bought four boxes of chinking (eight tubes to a box) for a few hundred dollars (ouch!), and got to work. (Praise the Lord: the labour was free--if we fed them.) Here's Geo under the eaves, filling up the gaps.

After you've tooled the bead of chinking with your finger (which is much cheaper than buying an extra expensive spatula designed especially for the purpose), here's what it looks like:

See how nicely the colour matches?

It's supposed to take about a day to dry, but since it rained all week, our chinking took about three days to get solid. But we've been telling ourselves that's good, because it means that the chinking won't pull away from the wood by drying too fast. (We're now experts in the log house renovation field: we can tell ourselves these things.)

Now the rain can't get in between the logs and rot them; and the wind can't squeeze in there during the winter time. Which means maybe that cute little wood stove won't have to work as hard.

~emrys