Found Shapes and Durability

When our son, Carson, was born in 1980, we lived in a Rubber Boom house I had purchased in Akron, Ohio. It was nice enough, for a balloon-framed house built in the early 20th century, but my wife Laura and I had decided it was not where we wanted to raise a child. Two years earlier, after months of driving around country roads in our lime-green 1947 Chevy pickup truck looking for land, we had purchased 49 acres in partnership with my parents with the intention of building a family estate where we could care for mom and dad in their later years. Purchasing the land meant my parents house in Vermilion, Ohio, had to be sold, so they purchased a 24' camper trailer and pitched camp at the entry to the soon to be built driveway. It was a major change from the luxurious house on the canal they had lived in, but it worked and gave them a temporary home.

Once we had built a barn, using salvaged timbers from a renovation project I had undertaken as the plant engineer at Novar Electronics in Barberton, we moved the camper and connected it to the barn temporarily so the garage part of the barn became their living room and the elevated shop section in the back their bedroom. From there they could watch the construction progress of the Tudor-style house we had designed and were building for them. I had no knowledge of timber framing at that time, so the house was stick framed, but I went out of my way to build it as strongly as I could, using Southern Yellow Pine to frame the 2x6 walls and 2x10 roof frame. I wanted it to be durable enough that if our son inherited it, it would make a good home for his family and maybe the next generations after that. Once my folks moved into their new house, the trailer they had been living in was vacant, so we moved it over to our portion of the land and made it the transition pod that allowed us to move out to our land from Akron.

Living in a small camper trailer can be challenging with a very young child, so we decided adding a porch would be in order. We built the porch on a deck built with the heavy oak pallets that the brick for my folks' house had been delivered on. We used clear filon fiberglass panels for the roofing to keep it from darkening the inside of the trailer, and these panels became our solar heating system when we enclosed the porch and made it our living room. Putting in a woodburning stove was all it took to make it a four-seasons addition to the trailer. Although far from durable, the change made it feel somewhat permanent, which turned out to be very important when my sister returned from a trip to France with her new husband and my mother gave her the camper to take back to California. One eventful afternoon, a Chevy Suburban backed up and took away our bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. Being young and resilient, we undertook the process of building an addition onto our porch so we had a place to live.

It just seemed logical to build the bedroom/office addition the same way, and sine we had plenty of salvage pallets and framing material to build with, we expanded into our now 480-sf pallet-floor residence. Eventually we added a four-pallet tool room and later a four-pallet playroom for our son, whom we were homeschooling. I often wondered, when I was in a back-to-the-land Mother Earth News frame of mind, if we should publish a magazine called "Pallet Life." Luckily my fixation was soon to be changed when Laura found a small article in Fine Home Building magazine about a timber-frame workshop In Gambier Ohio. We didn't quite know what that was, but we did have some antique "barn builders" tools, so we decided to sign up and go. It was blazing hot in the asphalt parking lot at Kenyon College where the workshop was held, but the timber framers who had come from Vermont and New Hampshire to teach us their traditional trade smiled from dawn till dusk as we worked to fashion a small two-story frame from a stack of rough-sawn oak timbers which only took a week.

As many of you know, for us that truly was a life-changing experience. When we look back, it is difficult to believe the amazing projects we have been involved with and the incredible people we have met along the way, but for me one of my best memories is that of working with my 5 year old son to build a timber frame bed with my newly learned skills and trees from our own woodlot. We had a lot of young trees since our woodlot had been logged roughly thirty years before we purchased it. We went out behind our pallet house and found some nice, straight sugar maple trees to use. I wanted the bed, which was actually a bunk bed over a closet, to have natural round posts with the beginning of the flare of the roots at the floor so we dug around the base and cut the trees below ground level. The bed was built into a corner, so the outside post remained completely round, while we split a log in half for the posts that met the wall. I knew the halved pieces would bow away from the saw cut when they started to dry, so we placed a spacer in the center and lashed each end with wet rawhide so they would stay flat.

The night we had sawed and rawhide clamped the split log it went below freezing and when Carson went out in the morning to inspect our work there were large icicles hanging from the cut ends where the sap had run out of the green logs. I told him he should taste one and enjoyed his surprise when he found it was sweet. Nature had rewarded him with a treat after all his hard work. It also inspired us to make sugaring part of his homeschooling. He could learn tree identification in winter, the value of pi while gauging the diameter of the trees to make sure they were big enough to tap, and the process of evaporation used to turn the sweet sap into maple syrup. The project of teaching our son how to build a bed from trees in his back yard using traditional timber-frame joinery branched out into an appreciation of the tradition of syrup making.

Our son worked with us for nearly two decades and became an excellent timber framer. His appreciation of the way trees grow and the many uses there are for them grew along with his traditional timber-framing skills. Today he doesn't need much teaching from his parents and his woodlot, but when he comes out here with his own young son, it's heartwarming to see our grandson learning about trees and how to use a brace and bit to drill the holes in the maple trees for the spiles that will deliver the sweet sap. He's a little young to be educated about pi, but that will come soon enough, and he already has an appreciation for using woodworking tools. Grandma and Grandpa are trying to decide what his first timber-framing project should be but he is already grasping what a tradition means. He won't be home schooled during the week, but the extra curricular activities that he will have available to him will give him the opportunity to decide for himself wether a traditional trade is something he wants to pursue.

The pallet house has been replaced with a much more durable 1815 timber frame that was once a church in upstate New York. When our grandson comes to visit, he spends his days and nights surrounded by the timbers made from the virgin forest of white pine, beech and chestnut trees where the church once stood. He is also surrounded by the traditions of hand hewing and square-rule joinery that converted those trees into a frame that is now over two centuries old. Obviously we hope that he will take an interest in learning those trades and keeping Grandma and Grandpa's tools sharp and working for generations to come, but I also know that the best way to let him make that decision for himself is to let him see both the durable products that can be created and the joy that comes with creating them. I can still clearly see the smiles on the faces of the timber framers who first taught me.

03/15/2020 Rudy R. Christian TTFE