buildings, lumbering

From: BEThexton <bethexton_at_mFCvqNP8qbK5_4ECMIz2xt6X5RnysZYGRWwSigD49CwYG4XYBIM8YAH9L2RoHVZ5m7>
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 15:14:33 -0000

I think many buildings have multiple purposes. For example, on my sample map I show the "summer kitchen" used for food preparation in hot weather. But the same building is probably also used as a general shed in cooler weather, so could for example be used for sheep shearing when it rains, as a thrashing room for grain, and even as a part time woodshed in the winter for freshly cut wood *

Also, many roofs may span multiple "buildings." The classic example is when people and animals are under one roof. The wood shed could share a roof with the sauna or steam bath (both require an unusually waterproof roof), in many cultures barns have animals on the ground, with a loft for hay storage, and so on.

While I'd agree that you wouldn't imagine too many buildings, I'd point out that my grandparents farm, which at its peak had seven people living there (founder and wife, son and wife, three grand daughters who all left home in their late teens), contained the following buildings:
- main house, with a 'root cellar" (=storage pit) underneat and a tool shed along one wall

- a barn for the animals with loft for grain.
- a wood shed
- an ice shed (the farm was built just after the turn of the century, 
so it had ice boxes, and they cut their own ice out of the river each year and stored it in the ice house. I'd love to have this, but I don't think the Heortling have ice houses)
- the 'summer kitchen'
- another root cellar with a rough shed over its entrance
- a general purpose shed
- a sauna with attached smaller wood shed.

All that for no more than four adults! And all of the buildings were of "log hut" construction (stacked horizontal logs), not quick and easy modern construction methods.

So for a stead with 40 adults a dozen or more buildings probably isn't unreasonable.

Mark the dead (for firewood) or living (for buildings) trees that you want to take down in the fall. Go out once there is a good layer of snow, and chop them down. Trim the branches, hook up a yoke of oxen (or the men of the stead) to the trunk and drag it home. Bigger branches can also be dragged back that way, or loaded onto a sleigh.

Firewood can then be hacked up back at the stead, and roughly stored until summer. Then you'd re-arrange your wood shed, bringing the remaining (drier) wood to the front and putting the winter's cuttings in the back. Things cut down for building with would be probably hoisted onto branches to be kept off the ground, then left until summer when the building would happen.

Most likely the majority of firewood is gathered deadfalls, but there is always a desire in winter for some big hunks of maple or oak to put on the fire, especially in the evening so that they'll burn a good part of the night.            

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