A wooden cottage design

Three readers phoned me after seeing my plans for a little one-bedroom cottage in the 13 June issue.

A wooden cottage design
- Advertisement -

Their main need was for accommodation for visiting friends and family. They liked the fact that the cottage was built of wood, and asked for further bedrooms. While wood was the preferred building medium, Alan from northern KZN questioned the use of the discarded logs lying around after tree-felling in the commercial forests in that area.

Yes, Alan, I too noticed the discards and discovered that they were dead trees prior to harvesting. The problem is that one would need to apply insect repellent and wood borer preservatives to the dry wood. There were also fresh off-cuts lying around, however – trims of standard pole lengths for commercial use. If enough, they could be treated and used.

- Advertisement -

In the sketch, I’ve contrived a typical wooden cottage. The structure is a ‘post and beam’, achieved by planting the posts in a vertical position and filling the spaces in between with short lengths of horizontal logs. This would require certain carpentry techniques to keep them in place; they will be explained in my working drawings.

In the coloured sections, I’ve shown the vertical posts in brown and the horizontals in yellow. The windows and doors have vertical posts alongside these to counter horizontal log shrinkage as the weather changes from wet to dry annually. The roof is also of log shingles, which can be obtained from dried-out log discards.

Let’s use what’s lying around – it’s eco-friendly!
Jonno