About the Author
Jon Nunan is a writer for the home improvement industry and a staunch supporter of learning by doing and letting that which does not matter truly slide. When not writing, he can be found identifying wild mushrooms, picking berries, and taking on small projects in and around the wood pile he currently calls home.
Preface
If it were not for my mother’s lifelong obsession with natural living and my father’s uncanny ability to underestimate the difficulty of just about everything, I probably would not be writing this book. In the fall of 1995, my mother began casually dropping hints that she would like to build an eco-friendly cordwood house with her own hands; sometime in the early part of 1996, my father decided that this was a fine idea and began making preparations to sell our current home and begin construction of the house they live in today.
At that point, none of us had any idea what we were doing. If my father had ever picked up a hammer to do anything more than hang a picture, I was certainly not aware of it. The good sense and intricate planning that generally go into the construction of a family’s primary residence were decidedly absent from the very beginning; the “blueprint” my father sketched on college-ruled notebook paper with a blue ballpoint pen was — and remains — the punch line to many of our friends’ and family’s most-amiable inside jokes. Despite any formal knowledge of construction and with only our six hands to do the heavy work, Mom, Dad, and I (with some help from my 11-year-old sister and 6-year-old brother) began building our new home in June 1996.
Things did not go well at first. The plan was to live in tents all summer and have the house ready by the time Pennsylvania started to get too chilly to sleep outside, which is generally sometime around mid-September. The tents blew over the first week, so Mom, Dad, and the kids moved in with my grandmother in the next town over, and I moved myself into my father’s hatchback Suzuki® Swift — which at 18 felt like my own alternative dwelling. The ten hour days we put in (when not encumbered by day-jobs or other obligations) certainly bore fruit, but by early August, it became very plain that we had seriously underestimated how long this sucker was going to take to construct.
To make a very long story short, the house was habitable after about six months, although it was far from fully finished. Our experience was not unlike the experiences of many owner-builders, and even though the job did not go exactly as planned, the finished product is something each of us is extremely proud of. The obstacles that popped up when building the house my parents now live in were numerous and so were the mistakes we made along the way, but perseverance and patience carried us through. Now, we have a heck of a house. Like many owner-builders, we skimped on the planning and ended up paying for it both financially and in terms of effort; in the end, however, everyone involved in the construction of our cordwood home is glad we took the alternative building plunge.
No one ever said it was going to be easy — except for Dad, of course. It is my sincere hope that this book will help anyone who reads it to understand the kind of undertaking building an alternative home really is and simultaneously illustrate what a fulfilling and unique process it can be when done right (or even when done half-way right). Anyone who is interested in this kind of construction already has the majority of the tools necessary to bring their dreams to life in the form of their own bodies and minds. However — and trust me on this one — understanding the other tools and techniques required to build a sustainable structure before you move out of your current residence to start building is not a bad idea, either.
