Six years ago, Jim and Krista Juczak's dream was to be out of debt, off the grid, self-employed, and living comfortably.  They bought land in western New York near Lake Ontario and built a cordwood house, with their own hands, during their time off from teaching high school.  Two years ago, Jim, Krista, and their two children moved into their mortgage-free, wind turbine - powered, and wood-heated home.  In twelve months they'll have paid off their last debt, and they are already contemplating quitting their jobs and expanding their gardens into an organic produce business.  Two friends have joined them to form the nucleus of "Woodhenge," a sustainable community in which members pool resources with a goal of group self-sufficiency.  "We believe we can have an upper-middle-class lifestyle on a lower-middle-class or poverty-class income," said Jim.

The Juczaks are part of a growing movement of homesteaders bent on escaping the rat race and living lightly on the earth.  Following in the footsteps of the back-to-the-land pioneers of the 1960s and '70s, today's homesteaders have the advantage of access to rediscovered and updated versions of traditional building methods, using natural materials such as cordwood, straw bales, earth, or cob (a mixture of sand, straw, and clay).  These substances are cheaper - sometimes free - and more environmentally friendly than conventional building materials, enabling homesteaders to put up a house at low cost and with low environmental impact.

OLD METHOD MADE NEW
The cordwood method, also called stackwall, stackwood, firewood wall, or stovewood masonry, entails the building of walls with short logs - usually six to twelve inches long - stacked and embedded in masonry so that the log ends and masonry filling are exposed on both the inner and outer walls of the house.

The history of cordwood building is unclear, but cordwood pioneer Jack Henstridge speculates that primitive people may have begun the practice as a result of stacking firewood near a fire pit and noticing how the stack kept heat from escaping.  It would be a short step to cutting off drafts by filling the spaces between logs with mud and thence to building an enclosed structure.  Cordwood buildings estimated at 1,000 years old are still standing in Siberia and Greece.  Others are found in Czechoslovakia, Norway, and Sweden, where there are examples over 100 years old.  In North America, cordwood structures are plentiful in parts of Canada, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and Wisconsin, where a museum village has preserved a cedar cordwood house built by Polish immigrants in 1884.

This method of construction, in addition to ecological benefits, cost savings, aesthetic beauty, and creative possibilities, offers homeowners an opportunity to participate in the building of their own home, due to the simplicity of construction and the lightweight materials involved.  While conventional home construction costs $100 to $120 per square foot at minimum, including the skilled labor required, landowners with basic carpentry skills can do most of the work themselves on a cordwood structure and spend only $10 to $20 per square foot, according to cordwood construction guru Rob Roy.  Founder of Earthwood Building School near Plattsburgh, New York, Roy is the author of 12 books on alternative building techniques and builder of numerous cordwood structures, including several in the Hudson Valley.

As Roy likes to say, "Children, grandparents, and beavers can all build cordwood."  Although local green builder Andi Feron doesn't mention beavers, he vouches for the remainder of that statement.  Based near New Paltz, Feron specializes in installing cellulose insulation, an energy-saving, highly rated insulation made of recycled newspaper and boric acid, but his real love is cordwood.  After taking a workshop with Roy and assisting on several of his projects, Feron trained a crew and supervised construction of a cordwood guest house at a Buddhist monastery near Albany.  "The grandparents mixed the mortar, the kids made it into little balls, and just about anyone was able to squish the balls in between the logs," says Feron.

Roy has been involved in the building of a 26-foot-diameter circular home in Stone Ridge as well as two cordwood structures at the Center for Symbolic Studies (CSS) in Tillson, just south of Rosendale.  Steve Larsen, co-founder and co-director of CSS, along with his wife Robin, shows off a small, two-story building, which houses a wood-fired sauna.  Inside the second-floor meditation room, the muted tones of wood and masonry glow softly in the afternoon sunlight, accented with flashes of red, blue, and green passing through bottles of colored glass embedded at intervals between the logs.  There's a soothing symmetry to the room's hexagonal shape, and the irregular rounds of log ends form a repeating pattern that contributes to a sense of organic harmony.

"This was a community building project," Larsen says.  "It bonds people to do a project like this together."  Also on the property is a cordwood house built by Barbara Pakenham and her son David, also with community assistance, using Roy's "mushhome" design, a circular structure with a mushroom-shaped dome enclosing a second story.  David is still finishing off the second floor, including insertion of glass panels in the dome, which features a wall with plastic ledges bolted on for his rock climbing practice.