Running the Sawmill

Today the Cantankerous Farmer and his father are milling lumber on The Grandparents’ small sawmill for the house we are building. Someday we hope to have Wee Farmers, and we’ll need more room than our yurt (16 feet in diameter) provides. At 600 square feet, the new house will be triple the size of our current living space. I am thrilled. Counter space! Indoor plumbing! It still hasn’t sunk in that our lives are about to take a big step closer to elegance.

The first time we ran the sawmill a couple years ago, I was captivated. The band-saw blade cuts through the cedar like cold butter, slow and smooth, and the sawdust that flies out is raspberry sorbet pink. And the smell! I have found yet another difference between me and moths. I can’t breathe that smell in deep enough.

The beams and boards that stack up throughout the day are of course the best part. With gorgeous grain and knot whorls practically glowing along their length—these boards seem somehow unrelated to the deafening hours spent focused on not losing fingers. There are about twenty things to concentrate on while a loud, dangerous saw is flying, and you have to concentrate on them every single time you make a cut. With sawdust blowing inside your safety glasses, into your mouth, up your nose, down your neck. But at the end of it all, there is the “I made that” feeling. I made wood. It is beautiful. And soon it will be a house.

In November, we spent a day milling oak beams for the upstairs loft. There was one oak tree we had cut down only to clear it from the building site, and it didn’t look particularly promising for a milling log. It was knobby, gnarled, burly, and had a slight curve to it, but once we peeled off the bark, it revealed itself to be a massive beauty. Where the burls had been along the trunk, the grain eddied into pools of the richest dark brown. We’ve placed it so we’ll be able to see it from three sides in the house. Indoor plumbing and a beautiful interior that we made? No, it still hasn’t sunk in.