Original subtitles

I was mentioning to Rob, what are we going to start with first in here? The roof or something that we thought the best person, the best way to start was to meet Jackie, Mrs. Rob Roy, right here. Hi, Jackie. Hi. How are you? It's me. Well, he mentioned, you know, early that he had gone over to Scotland, I think he said, and got himself a Scottish wife. Tell us about that. Well, yeah, he did. He was already over there. He was. He's lived for longer in Scotland than I have. Is that right? Yep.

But, yeah, I went up there to live, and that's where I met Rob. Okay. Was this your idea primarily or his, this kind of a house? Scottish?

Well, this actually was a series of accidents, I guess, that we came up with this style of building. We were really interested in building a traditional log cabin. That's what everybody was doing in those days. But we had the opportunity to work on one, found that it was really heavy, and we weren't strong enough to do that.

So you got charter logs.

Well, actually, it was a National Geographic article. There was just a photograph that showed this style of building, and we said, well, that's got to be it.

He mentioned that. I've got to get the date of that article.

April 1974.

Because I happen to have 18,000 National Geographic. Do you have a lot of copies of that? Do you have any many copies of it?

That particular issue? No.

I'll see that you get a few. All right?

Sure.

I'll see that you get a few of those.

There was somebody who came to the workshop recently who actually did meet the lady who built that house.

Oh, I know.

That was from the Wisconsin workshop, yes.

Oh, wow.

Yep.

Okay. Well, we'll be talking. Well, there's one more person we ought to meet here, too. And I thought it was a hired cook at first, but Rowan, come over here and say hello to us. This is Rowan. How do you spell Rowan?

R-O-H-A-N.

R-O-H-A-N. Where is the name? Is that a Scottish name?

Well, it is an old Celtic name, actually, but that isn't where we came up with it.

Yes.

Rob has a story on that.

I just was down in Australia and skiing with a fellow down there, and his name was Rowan Shoreland, and I thought it was a nice name.

We found out it was an old Celtic highland name.

Okay. You're the only one in Northern Adirondack with Rowan for a name, I'll bet.

Yeah, that I know of.

Okay. Are you graduated from Northern Adirondack?

Yeah.

What year? A couple years ago?

Last year.

I don't know, 94.

Last year? 94.

Do you forget so quick when you get to be an adult, huh?

Yeah.

What, did you play any sports over in the,

Not really. No, I played basketball a couple of years, but then the last couple years I took off as working.

When you were working, you mean,

Just,

Around here?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. You were building your house. It was seven years ago. We went and saw your playhouse.

Yeah.

And today you're cooking.

Yep. Working on some salsa here.

Salsa. I asked you before off camera, what is salsa?

It's a spicy dip, I guess, for chips.

Yeah.

And it wasn't spicy enough for you at the first couple of days?

No, no. I've got to add some more stuff, so,

All right.

Yeah.

Okay, so you're,I heard you're working on teaching some of these lessons also?

I started doing that a couple of times with my dad, and so I guess we're kind of slated to go out to Pacific Northwest and Alaska next summer, so,

Great. Your whole family go out? You go out, too?

I probably won't get to go. It depends on how many registrants we have. If we have a lot, then possibly, but it means that the little guy has to come along with us as well, so it makes it more complicated.

But it might work out.

Somebody has to look after the animals, too, here.

Right.

We're homeschooling the nine-year-old this year anyway, so,Although he's off to school today, when he gets back and we go to Britain, we'll be homeschooling him through his entire fourth grade.

Okay.

And it might work out that we can all go out to Pacific Northwest.

I've heard seven years old a couple of times, but he's nine, right?

He's nine.

He's nine. All right. And is he into this, too, now, also?

Oh, yeah.

He's starting himself also, huh?

I think he's picking it up very well, actually.

Okay. All right. I'll let you kind of,We'll get you into the tour, too, now. You're going to tell us some things about different things here.

I have the mic for a moment here.

Yes.

I was at the workshop this weekend, and Jackie's the one who does the work.

Rob is the one who says, Jackie, do this. Jackie, do that. And she does the work, so let's get the credit where it belongs here.

All right. There you go. You want to say something about that? You want to defend yourself?

No comment at this time.

All right. Well, I guess we'll,Where do you want to go when you get inside? We want to continue with the walls?

Well, one thing you can,Well, we can start with the masonry stove.

Okay. That's the centerpiece, certainly.

Yeah. The masonry stove is built by Stephen Englehart, Keysville.

And, yeah, I'll see a little more of it if you take some of that off.

Notice the good quality of the stove.

That's a dryer. Is that right?

That's right. It dries.

You were using it as a dryer there.

That's correct.

You dry those towels and things, whatever?

Yes. Okay.

Now, this is the four-foot diameter section, but downstairs it broadens to five feet in diameter, so the floor joists rest,

Excuse me. Holly, I'm sorry. Did I step on your little toe?

Well, this is the fourth,The fifth member of the family is Holly.

There's some knocking.

Right. Right. Was there really somebody knocking?

It was knocking. I don't know if it came from the kitchen.

Well, he thought he heard a noise. Yeah, you probably didn't step on him at all.

Anyway, the floor joists rest on this six-inch shelf formed where the five-foot diameter reduces to four-foot,

so it's structural as well as supplying the heat for the house.

This is 23 ton of stone here.

Well, the downstairs portion and this combined is 23 ton of stone.

So you're putting your fire right in the masonry mass, right inside the mass itself.

You burn your wood hot and fast, get plenty of fuel value out of the wood, put it right into the stone,

and that heat will stay in for 24 hours or more, bringing, you know, imparting a low radiant heat into the home steadily.

It never gets hot enough that you can't put your hand on it, but imagine how much heat is stored in 23 ton of something.

Yes, but my problem,I heard this on one of the other programs I've seen,

and my question would be that if it's going to last for 24 hours, doesn't it get awfully hot the first 12 hours

and then kind of get cool off in the last 12?

No, actually, there's a lag.

It takes about eight hours for the heat to even work out to the perimeter of the stove.

All right.

And what happens is the temperature of the stove, just one firing a day, just keeps charging it up,

but it stays at a steady temperature.

It doesn't,the stone mass doesn't go warm and cold because it's so massive.

Okay.

With a stove like this, it gets very hot when you put the fire in, but then it gets quite cold when the fire is out.

So don't get too hot inside.

You don't have to open the windows or anything like that.

Oh, my goodness, no.

No.

And in the wintertime, of course, you use it for heat, but in the summertime, it's also storing cool.

There's 23 ton of cool material in here so that if you tend to overheat from sun coming in the windows or whatever,

gee, this is a reservoir of cool that's tempering the climate here.

Jackie, do you ever think that you should have put nine hangers instead of only seven?

Could you use more sometimes?

I see eight.

Oh, you see eight.

Okay.

There's another one around the corner here.

But I mean, you'd wonder,

Well, no, because it would just get more covered and more plotted, so actually it's probably just as well.

All right.

You give a surface, it gets covered.

At least it does in this house.

All right.

And both of your stoves, this is your,

Nice range.

Now, they both go into one flue here.

This stove goes into this flue here.

We have a stove downstairs that also goes into that flue there.

But that is not the same flue for the masonry stove.

So you're not contaminating your masonry stove flue.

So there's no creosote built up in the masonry stove, but you do get creosote when you burn an ordinary stove.

Do you remember up on the roof we saw two flues coming out of this chimney?

Notice that this stove also has a water front on it here.

Right here, you've got your hot water going out the top, cold water return there.

And in the wintertime, just the act of cooking or just a quick firing up of the cooking range heats our hot water in the wintertime.

In the summer, as I said, it's propane gas.

Yes.

Okay.

Do you have to,

Come over here a second, Jack, where I can get you on camera.

Do you have to learn to cook over again when you start in the winter after cooking in the summer?

Because the two stoves cook quite differently.

I really didn't find it a problem.

No, the only thing is baking.

You sometimes have to turn things around.

But I was brought up with a similar kind of stove at home.

That's what we had in our kitchen.

It wasn't wood, it was coal.

But I guess it was just kind of part of my life.

So it wasn't a big change for me.

We talked a little bit with Rob about his mother saying this is a little different way of living.

What about your parents?

Did they think this was different?

They really felt very guilty when they first came to visit us and they were living rough.

They went home.

They felt bad for you?

No, they felt guilty that they had so many conveniences at home.

Yep.

I never feel that way.

I feel just the opposite.

I feel guilty that you don't have them.

Well, we don't feel that way.

We feel like we've got everything.

We feel guilty that you do.

Oh, I know you do.

I know you do.

We're going to get into that again.

We're going to take a break here right now and we'll get a commercial.

Somebody, we want to tell you something.

We'll be right back.

This isn't the way it's built.

You don't put the roof on first, I don't think, but we're going to start from the roof.

I'll tell you, it's nice if you can get the roof on first.

Some people are building this same design with a 16-sided post and beam framework and

it gives them the convenience of having the roof on so that they're working their cordwood

masonry always under cover.

The trouble with this roundhouse without the roof on first is you're always working, you're

at the mercy of the elements.

Yes.

So this 16-sided post and beam framework is quite a compelling advantage, actually.

All right.

Before we get to the roof, I guess I should ask you, how long did it take you to put,

We had it closed in against the elements in seven months from breaking ground.

We broke ground in April and were able to heat it in November.

During that time we also had some problems with very dry log ends expanding, actually breaking up the wall.

This is another mistake I want to tell you about. Don't use very dry hardwood because it can swell.

So we actually built walls and tore them back down again for five weeks during that time.

So we had about six months from start to cover it in.

And then another six months, we were living comfortably a half mile away.

We weren't in a hurry to get in here. So we did things. We were out of money by that time.

So we did things which were labor intensive but materials cheap, such as sheetrock walls,

sanding and polishing the floor, those sorts of things.

So we moved in 13 months after breaking ground.

Why would hardwood expand? Did you get wet?

Hardwood is very dense and dry. Remember I told you about those dry hardwood pegs and the granite face?

Yeah.

Well imagine, if you can break off a 16 inch face of granite with a little hardwood peg,

can you imagine the effect of hundreds of cordwood log ends that are very dense and they get wet from water collecting in the slab

or a driving rainstorm? They're going to swell.

And when they do, they break up the wall.

With the cedar, we haven't had that problem.

There's enough air in the cedar itself to take up any fiber expansion.

So you don't use hardwood at all anymore?

Well we do, but we keep it up off the ground.

All these snow blocking areas between the rafters here are hardwood.

They were the leftover wood from the part of the house that we had to take the wall stone.

Who built it? Who built it? You two?

Yes, Jackie and I and our friend Dennis Lee.

We hired Dennis for five months during the construction.

He lives here on the hill now.

And we also hired two other fellows for short periods of time, three weeks and five weeks.

This is 20 years ago you say?

No, this one 14 years ago.

Oh, 14. So you had the two children.

You had one.

You had one at the time, right?

Yes, Rowan was around five.

So you had a double job at that time.

You were also a mother at the time.

Well she was also working as an RN down at the pediatric office, which she still has.

Oh, no, not at the pediatric office.

Oh, you were at the hospital at that time. That's right, working at the hospital.

Now, you know, I don't know. He's getting hot water ready and you're holding something.

There's no connection, I hope.

Rabbits do.

I think of that movie that I saw.

You've come in there by the years.

This is the youngest member of the family, I guess.

Yes, yes. You have a lot of animals, huh, Rowan?

Well, not that many. Dog, two cats and a rabbit.

Surprise, you don't have a cow.

Never thought of having a cow?

Well, no.

For your dairy products and meat, nothing? No?

No.

Okay.

We're getting away from this.

You're getting away from that. That's work, too.

Alright, so tell us now about your roof.

Okay, so what you've got is five by ten roof rafters to support,

Remember we're up on the roof house?

Yes.

That's 150 pounds per square foot.

When you get your soaking wet earth and then a snow load, four foot snow load,

on top of the roof, that can weigh 150 pounds per square foot.

That's like a whole bunch of 150 pound people each standing on one square foot.

So this has to be heavily engineered to take that load.

So our spans are not great here.

We've got the heavy five by ten rafters.

Half of them come to the center.

Half of them only come halfway because,

Oh, I see, yes.

You don't need all 32 of them coming to the center.

I see, yes, yes.

Because your planking spans here is very small.

Okay.

So now, on top of the five by ten rafters, you see two by six tongue and groove planking.

Then what goes on top of that is your waterproofing membrane.

That's what keeps everything nice and dry in here.

And we use the WR Grace bituthene waterproofing membrane.

Then there's four inches of dow styrofoam on top of that, the blue board, you know.

Then a layer of six mil black polythene.

This is a cheap insurance layer.

It sheds most of the water to the edge of the building.

If it happens to have a few punctures in it, that's okay because the waterproofing membrane

is going to take care of all that.

But you're getting most of the water to the edge of the building.

So you've got a crushed stone drainage layer, two inches on top of the six mil black poly.

Then hay or straw, scattered on that, two or three inches of hay or straw,

which forms a fibrous filtration mat so that the crushed stone keeps clean.

Then you have seven inches of earth on top of that.

So you grow your grass on top of the topsoil.

Any water that finds its way through the topsoil hits the crushed stone drainage layer.

It's been filtered by the hay and straw.

It zips down the plastic to the edge of the building, takes the pressure off the waterproofing membrane.

What's the diameter of your house?

Well, the roof is about 40 feet in diameter.

The internal diameter here from inside to inside is 36 feet.

36. Now I heard somewhere along the way or I read 2,000 square feet.

Correct. That's a lot of space.

It's 1,017 square feet on each floor.

Okay.

And that's based upon the 36 foot diameter.

I kind of forget here, I'm on the second floor.

I kind of forgot.

So your sleeping quarters are on the first floor?

The kids are.

The kids are.

Yes.

All right.

They're upstairs.

All right.

So we go down, we've seen your roof.

The doors with a wall, the bottle ends.

Now this here is from an old barn someplace, I take it.

Yeah.

That's completely on an interior circle.

And it cuts, this is an octagon post and beam framework that cuts the span from the cordwood walls to the masonry stove.

It cuts the span in half, this octagon, which makes the building actually, it makes the bending strength of the rafters four times greater.

If the span is cut in half, you're four times stronger.

This goes straight down to the base?

It does work its way down through some horizontal floor joists and finally through posts exactly superimposed under this post is another post.

Oh, it's not the same one?

Not the same one.

Okay.

It could be if you use joist hangers.

Yes, you could.

Right.

And it would go down to a footing below.

Okay.

We'll probably get to.

So when you've made your rooms within, you've used this interior partition, so to speak, to make the size of your rooms.

That's correct.

The inside wall.

It's convenient to rise up and meet your structural members with your internal wall.

Like right there, yes.

Right here.

You see, you're rising up and meeting under here.

Right?

Even this heavy rafter going in that direction, the wall rises up and meets under that.

Okay.

That's very important because if you just miss the bearing members with your internal wall, it's a nightmare of carpentry.

Imagine trying to weave a wall in and out these exposed timbers.

Now, we like the appearance of the exposed timbers because we get a sense of comfort from seeing them overhead.

Uh-huh.

So $630, 415, 8 PM, midnight, 8 o'clock the following morning, five chances to see the same show.

because the people work around the clock and so forth.

And our program here today, Calvin and I,

called What's Going On Here is on every Sunday,

but every other day there's programs, a different program,

three hours and 40 minutes every three hours and 20 minutes, Calvin?

Three and a half hours every day, five times different every day,

brought to you by Sam and Calvin.

You can become part of that by being a patron to Hometown Cable.

Thank you for tuning in.

The special features such as the shelf in the wall here.

Right here. We're looking at this shelf here.

Now that will go right straight through and the other half is the outside.

So you're applying that ahead of time.

Oh, absolutely.

And you put two at the same level so that you can have a long shelf.

Or you could just have a shelf like this one.

Right.

Knickknacks, you know, plate like that.

Some special features you can show.

Do you design this ahead of time on paper somewhere?

If you're going to put special features into the wall,

you should actually mark on the foundation that you want shelves here

or bottle ends or whatever it might be.

But you draw it on a piece of paper?

Yeah.

It's not giving an idea?

Yeah.

Basically what you want.

I know after you do as many as you have, you know,

you probably can picture these things.

But here's a piece.

Of course, I have a rail fence years ago,

and that's the part of a rail fence.

And that's a mushroom right there.

Notice the mushroom design?

The one below it?

Right.

This is your mushroom here?

Oh, and the whole thing.

Yeah, I see.

Here's another mushroom here.

Yes, yeah.

Oh, I see.

Yes.

You designed that in there.

Oh, yeah.

And the bottle ends.

I showed you how to make the bottle ends earlier.

Yep.

And here's the light coming through the bottle ends.

The shelves built at the same level.

There's another clear one up there.

Yep.

This one is not.

That's a mirror on the bottom of that glass.

Well, it's a blue glass cover over it.

Okay.

And these are not made.

These are we have to work very hard for.

There's still these one.

What's up to?

All these trophies.

Oh, well, different members of the family.

Yeah.

We're involved in water ski tournaments,

chess tournaments, pool tournaments, stuff like that.

And, of course, we'll get away from the construction,

but very unique.

I guess this is what you use in the summer to keep the heat out?

It's what you use in the winter to keep the heat in.

To keep the heat in.

Yeah.

Insulated.

Jackie made these.

These are wonderful.

She made them.

Yeah, look at that.

You can magnetically press them in like this.

You see?

That's right.

Oh, yeah.

So at night, these are our two biggest windows in the house.

So in the wintertime at night,

we cleat the windows off like this

so that we keep the heat in the house.

Of course.

Of course.

Very unique.

Very unique there.

And you find you have enough windows.

You have enough light in the house.

It's very light.

What you see is what you get.

Yep.

Okay.

Anything else that we,

You've made other faces, I guess,

along in your different layouts, right?

Oh, yeah.

There's some design features in the wall.

Is this a face here? Two eyes?

Yep, that's Dennis' panel.

The eyebrow?

Dennis Lee built this entire panel himself here.

He incorporated kind of,

That's your other son?

No, that's the fellow,

Oh, that's got to work here, Dennis Lee, that worked five months here.

Yes.

So you put up the,

Frames.

Frames first, and then build in between them.

Well, actually, on the cord, this is like a gigantic log end.

You've made these frames ahead of time in the wintertime.

As you're building the wall, of course, you have to know where they go.

You have to know what height they have to be.

And if you mark down on the foundation, window at 35 inches, you don't forget to do it.

It's easy in the heat of laying up the cordwood to go right on by that area.

And I hate tearing cordwood walls down with a passion.

Must be hard, huh?

Well, wasted,

Oh, wasted energy.

Energy, yes, yes.

And material, probably too.

Well, you can,

At least you can reuse the wood.

Yeah.

You can't reuse the mortar, of course.

All right, as we go along, this is a good time, I guess, to,

Mm-hmm.

If you,

We're not expecting you to start building a wood house tomorrow, and particularly what

we're telling you, but here are some of the things.

Yeah, let's sit right down here and tell us a little bit about this.

Well, I've written seven books on this sort of thing over the years, but the two latest

ones are kind of combined some of the earlier books.

This one's called Complete Book of Cordwood Masonry House Building.

It describes all aspects of cordwood, which is round houses, cordwood within post and beam

framework, and the stack wall corners, where the corners are built first in a criss-cross

fashion, like this house, and then the log ends filled in between.

So the first half of the book has that.

There's a lot of color pictures of different cordwood houses.

Here's two pages of our house, some local houses in O'Sable Forks, and in Harkness.

This one's in Harkness, actually.

Okay, and then the second half of the book is the step-by-step construction of this particular

house that we're in right now.

Yeah.

My second book, or the most recent one that's just come out, is Complete Book of Underground Houses.

It describes the construction of Log End Cave, which is a house like Richard and Lisa Gay's

house in Champlain.

In fact, they're a case study in this book.

There's six or eight case studies in the back of the book.

There's the step-by-step construction of the underground house.

And then we also have a video available from the building school.

All these books are available from Earthwood Building School here in West Shays-E.

And it's an hour and a half instructional video showing how to build a cordwood house.

All right.

How would people get some of these?

How do they go about it?

Are they available in the stores, or do they come from you direct?

Uh, well, uh, Nancy Donahoe at Cornerstone Bookstore in Plattsburgh sells these two books

here.

But they can also call us here at 493-7744.

And, uh, they could arrange to come over and get them here.

But Cornerstone in Plattsburgh also has the video we have here.

Okay.

How is it listed in the phone book?

Under your name?

Earthwood Building School.

Okay, look.

Under Earthwood Building School?

They were also listed under Robert and Jackie Roy.

Okay.

But Earthwood Building School.

And you'll find that same number?

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, this tape's available?

How old is the tape?

Uh, how long ago?

That tape is about, uh, that came out about, uh, eight months ago.

Okay.

This was done as a result of the big cordwood conference that we had here last year.

But it also shows, uh, the actual construction of a house in Black Brook that we're, we've been working on.

Uh, most of the houses that are in this book or, uh, or in the area have, are an offshoot of you some way?

The cordwood houses.

The cordwood houses, yes.

And most of the earth-sheltered houses, too.

Uh-huh.

But, uh, there have been some earth-sheltered houses built in the North Country which were not connected with us.

Okay.

Uh, all right.

Uh, they're two different technologies, but a lot of people combine cordwood and earth-sheltering.

A lot of the case studies in this underground house book, about three-quarters of them make use of cordwood masonry one way or another in the house.

You can see on the cover the cordwood masonry here and here.

Right.

Now, are these available?

Do you get, must get a lot of mail orders on these also?

Yeah.

Our, um, our work is to teach these types of construction techniques to people here at the building school and also we do a big mail order.

We send out thousands of brochures.

I have an eight-page catalog.

We sell not only these books, but other books on cordwood masonry, other books on earth-sheltered housing, and just general building books.

Yeah, you mean other than the ones you, uh.

Yes.

I sell books that other people have written.

Oh, sorry.

So we send out this catalog with about 40 different books in it, but these are the ones that I've.

Is there any kind of an association of people like yourself with this type of building?

Well, we keep here at Earthwood a database of the cordwood builders around the country.

Now, the people who are willing to share their houses with other people all appear in what we call the cordwood directory,

and that's another thing that we sell through the building schools.

It's a 16-page booklet with about 60 houses across the United States, and if you follow the protocol statement at the beginning of the book,

it tells you how to make contact with these people, how to arrange for a visit which is convenient for the owners of the house.

After all, they're extending themselves to people who are perhaps in the same kind of need of information that they themselves were a few years earlier.

So we find that cordwood people are very nice about sharing their knowledge with other people.

To give you an idea, Jackie and I just conducted a workshop in Wisconsin, and after the workshop,

we visited about five different cordwood homes that were in the directory, none of which had we seen before.

All of the people knew of us, of course, but we learned something at every single house.

We learned some new technique or some design feature or some mistake or whatever it was.

So we keep this database here.

As a result of the conference last year, there was another book published that I don't have on the table here called

The Conference Papers, Continental Cordwood Conference Papers, and there's 28 articles, case studies, technical improvements, code issues, for example.

There are four articles of code issues.

Quite a valuable resource as well.

Do you think of a problem where there are codes, like building codes?

Can it meet building codes?

Yes.

Some people have had to jump through more hoops than others.

I think it's a function of how stiff the local building codes are.

But I don't know yet of anybody who's been flat out refused to build their cordwood house.

In some cases, they have had to go through some considerable hoop jumping.

But ultimately, they've all managed to build the house that they want to build.

Rob, people are always looking for a speaker for different service organizations,

different groups.

Do you ever go out and do that, you or Jackie or Rowan?

I've done it.

Right?

Quite a lot.

I've, for example, the college always brings their environmental science class up here each fall or each spring.

I think they do it twice a year, actually.

And that works out very well.

They come a couple times a year.

I've done things for Rotary.

Here we are.

We're sitting here taking your time today.

We appreciate it.

You haven't given us your bill.

And whatever it is, it's ours is $5 more.

So you're going to be in trouble no matter what you do.

We really appreciate your time, of course.

And now, once this last six months or so, you did the interior work.

Of course, you don't do any interior work on the walls because they're all done.

This is the beauty of cordwood masonry.

Say this is my log end.

Yes.

When I lay that up in the wall, I'm attending to interior finish.

It's done.

It's done.

Yes.

Your exterior finish is done.

There's no painting or staining.

You've got your insulation is built into the wall.

You've got thermal mass, which isn't even present in the common home.

There's no thermal mass in the common contractor built home.

And you've got structure.

This is supporting the roof load.

So you're doing five things at once.

So this one log end going in is doing those five things.

So although it's labor intensive, you've got to consider that in the regular home,

the conventional home, there's something like eight or ten different actions and layers

that go on the wall.

You've got to frame it.

You've got to insulate it.

You've got your internal vapor barrier.

You're sheetrock, tape, spackle, and paint, two coats.

Then on the exterior, you've got some kind of sheathing, maybe some Sellotex board.

You've got a couple of coats of stain on this thing.

You add it all up, and this isn't so bad.

Do you ever go out and are you available to build a home for somebody else?

No.

Jackie's shaking your head there.

No.

No.

No.

No.

Are there builders?

I feel that the economy of cordwood masonry comes from doing it yourself.

All right.

As soon as you hire somebody to do it for you, then the economy is largely lost.

Oh, yeah.

But you've got to realize there are people who want to do things that may be economy and everything else,

but you just can't do it.

Well, my son Rowan is available to help get people started.

Okay.

Well, that's what I meant.

He just came back from Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked for three weeks with a guy down there,

showing him how to do the cordwood, building the cordwood for him.

Uh-huh.

And he's always looking for that sort of thing, so contact Rowan.

There you go.

He'll get you started.

Is anybody out there?

Sure.

Yeah.

All right.

Now, you do have to do your floor, of course, inside, after you got in.

Now, this is also laid out in short sections.

It's the same as the roof.

The roof is the same way, and they just get longer and longer, so you don't throw any wood.

You cut a piece off, and it fits up here.

That's correct.

You get down to very small pieces and towards the center.

You see over by the bunny there?

Okay.

What's the R factor in your wall?

I thought about that.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's a great question.

The R factor of the wall in this wall happens to be around R19.

Now, these R factors have been tested by University of Manitoba.

They built a 24-inch thick wall with a variety of woods, spruce and different woods in there.

And through a testing chamber, they come up with an R value of R24.

Now, that's a coincidence.

It doesn't mean to say that every cordwood wall is exactly R1 per inch of thickness.

Ours is a little higher than that because we've got all cedar cordwood, whereas they had spruce.

But the important thing is people might say, oh, R19, there's nothing extraordinary about that.

That's,

You're supposed to be building R-19, and that's true.

But what you don't get in the common 6-inch fiberglass wall is the tons and tons of thermal

mass storing heat for you, and we have thermal mass on each side of that insulation.

I showed you the sawdust insulation cavity.

There's tons of heat storing ability in this internal mortar joint.

In the summertime, it works in reverse.

The sun may beat its heat down on the side of the wall, but rather than conducting that

heat through to the inside, that has to do battle with the insulation in there.

The heat doesn't percolate through.

At nighttime, by radiant cooling, the heat is lost back out into the atmosphere, so the

house stays a nice steady temperature, summer and winter.

I saw you working with somebody else in that piece with Derek from Yurden, and my first thought

was there's not enough mortar on both ends of that log to hold that house up.

But there's no problem whatsoever to what you're telling me.

You've got 5 inches of mortar.

It seems like a little bit.

Well, then you've got 6 inches of insulation, and then another 5 inches of mortar.

Plenty strong.

There's no problem with that whatsoever.

Well, you're in a house here with 2 stories of load-bearing cordwood masonry, and I guarantee

you this is the heaviest roof in the North Country.

Guaranteed.

And it's on 2 stories of load-bearing cordwood masonry.

You know, everything's strong on compression, Bob.

True.

Yeah.

All right.

But I just want to say, you know, it doesn't seem like a lot of, I think of a cement wall

as real thick and everything else, and you've got, you know, like you say, the 5 inches on

either side, but obviously it's doing it.

Now, you had also mentioned along the way that there is some shrinkage in some of the

wood.

You can do.

You can do.

And then you use some kind of a plastic filler or something?

Clear?

The best solution is just clear caulking.

If you've only got a few log-ins in the house that shrink, such as this one right here.

See, that one shrunk quite a bit.

Okay.

And all we did is put a little clear caulking around it.

There's another big one over on that wall, Calvin, that 19-inch piece of beach.

That shrunk a great deal after it was laid up, so we put caulking around it.

Clear caulking looks best.

Yes.

If you try to put a colored caulking, it always looks like jury-rigged.

Right.

But the clear caulking, you don't even see it.

If every log-in in the house shrinks, then instead of caulking it, you'd apply a perma-chink log cabin chinking material.

It's a flexible chinking that comes in a five-gallon pail.

You apply it with your rubber glove or your three-inch paintbrush, and that will leach into those little shrinkage gaps.

There's one up in Ellenberg done that way.

Harold Johnson's house on Old 190 going towards Brainesville.

He's got a nice cordwood house, poplar log-ins.

They shrunk quite a bit, so we put perma-chink on the outside.

It looks great.

The perma-chink is flexible.

If there's any expansion and contraction in the wood, it takes it up.

My other question would be, I guess, someone would say, how come we don't have a fireplace as such?

Well, this is called a Russian fireplace, the masonry stove.

And if we go downstairs,

More efficient.

Infinitely more efficient.

There's nothing,

I heated for several years in Scotland with a true fireplace, and I want to tell you, that's an atmospheric radiator.

What you're doing with the fireplace is heating up the planet more than you are heating up the house.

Well, that's what I figured.

That's why all those birds stay in those chimneys, because it's nice and warm up there.

I don't think they're in active chimneys, Bob.

Well, not inside.

On it.

On the outside, up on top.

We'll be right back.

We're talking, of course, with Rob Roy.

We're going to see some more up here.

I'm going to go down into the,

I can't say the main park.

This is the living quarters up here, right?

Okay.

Well, that's good.

I'll show you what's down.

We moved into one of the small bedrooms on the north side.

Yeah.

Okay, and we're looking at a group of bottles that have been set up, and tell us about location.

This shelf here, under the sunrise design, is facing the rising sun on the longest day

of the year, so that at 5.30 in the morning when the sun rises, it lights up this bottle

and design.

That was worked out.

Oh, I just noticed there's a cat up there.

Yeah, you've got a cat up on the top there, too.

Also, we're in the north bedroom here, and the earth,

Oh, yes.

,goes right up.

This white surface-bonded block wall,

We talked about that.

,unneath the cordwood, and it goes right up quite high here.

See here?

This is 13 feet up above the north berm, so you've got 13 feet of earth sheltering.

16 inches thick of concrete blocks filled with sand, insulation on the exterior, all of this,

about 100 tons here, is storing heat for you.

Okay, this is the part underneath that is not exposed to the outside.

That's where the berm is.

Above-grade cordwood masonry.

Low-grade surface-bonded blocks, a little butterfly design here.

Now, this is a particularly thicker,

They are 6x10s.

That's a good observation.

A lot of people don't notice that, because the spans are a little bit greater in this room

than they are in the other room, so you build up from a 5x10 to a 6x10.

Again, this is that interior,

What do you call that interior?

Antagonal post and beam,

Off the inside.

It cuts the spans down from the inside to the outside.

It makes a perfect spot to make your rooms, too.

You know, it fits right in.

Okay.

We moved across.

You have one bathroom in the house?

There's one downstairs.

Okay.

This one is the main bathroom, and it's typical of the shape of room you would get in a roundhouse,

where the walls are radiating towards the center.

It's kind of a trapezoidal-shaped room.

Notice the washer and dryer?

Yeah.

That's solar-powered washer and dryer.

From the batteries,

The dryer, also?

Well, the dryer has a gas element for the heat, but it has an electric tumbler, of course.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

Then, the old-fashioned tub.

See the old length?

Half foot tub.

Yep.

Okay.

And this is a gas,

This is a propane gas water heater, but the elements from the cooking range also come

in and out.

Two more openings.

On the bottom there?

Yeah.

Two extra openings into that.

And, of course, that's vented to the outside because it's gas.

And that's how the water is heated in the wintertime, but in the summertime, just the propane.

Okay.

Well, we've talked before.

You could have that on the outside wall, but you wouldn't get the benefit of the heat that

you'd lose outside.

You get the benefit of that heat that's coming into the room.

I don't know how much benefit there is.

Okay.

Well, they used to,

Stove pipes, you know, they did that.

That's the way they heated upstairs years ago in homes.

You know, in the wintertime, though, people, they vent their dryers outside.

Yes.

Well, there's another way to do it.

You can actually vent it into a bucket of water like this.

A bucket of water, yes.

It blows the exhaust into a bucket of,

This is made by Maytag.

So all the heat,

You know, usually we're sending this,

Yes.

In the wintertime is the time that we use the dryer because in the summertime, it's hanging

to close out on the line.

But in the wintertime, you can recover all that heat by blowing it into this bucket of

water.

Here, the lint from the drying is supported by the surface of the water, and you don't

get any dust in the house, but you get the benefit of all the heat that you're producing

can help heat the house in the wintertime.

From the water that's there.

From the gas,

Yes.

The heat made by the gas.

And who makes that, you say?

Maytag.

Maytag has one of those.

Yeah.

It never has to be repaired.

It's right on TV.

You've got wrenches and don't use them.

Very lonesome man.

Yeah.

We just came down the stairs, which is just outside the bathroom area, and they've got

a circular stairway that comes down, and you've got this now, you're five foot diameter in

this center, you call it what kind of a,

Russian fireplace or masonry stove.

That's about 15 tons of stone you're looking at right here.

Right here.

And you see, also he had mentioned that this is holding the rafters, we call these, all

right?

Floor joists.

Floor joists.

That rest on here, you can't get it more stable.

What did you have to do in the ground under this to hold it?

There's a heavy footing.

It has to be.

It goes deeper under the concrete floor.

It goes eight inches deep there, and it's seven feet in diameter.

The footing for that comes out to about here.

Uh-huh.

Now, when you put your hand on that, what do you feel?

Cold.

Right.

Cool.

Yes.

So in the summertime, it's helping to cool the house.

Okay.

In the wintertime, that would feel warm to your hand, and you're storing millions of BTUs of

heat.

All right.

Now, does this give off the coal or absorb the heat in the room?

It absorbs the heat.

Okay.

It comes to the same thing.

Cold and heat is all the same thing.

It's all heat, just at different temperatures.

Okay.

So everything, the law of entropy is that everything wants to be the same temperature.

Okay.

So if that is cooler than the ambient, it's going to cool the ambient.

If that's warmer than the ambient, it's going to heat the ambient.

I remember, I think we mentioned this when we were talking with Mr. Vogan.

Mr. Vogan gave a test when I was a freshman in high school, and he came in, and he had only

one question.

He said, it's not coal today, it's,

Heat?

It's a lack of heat in the air was the answer.

So it's the heat that moves, not the coal.

That's right.

Cold air don't come in the house, they say, the heat goes out right there.

Is that what happens?

Yeah.

Unless the wind's blowing it in, of course.

All right.

We're down into, I thought we were in a living area upstairs, but certainly this is a living

area.

Well, this is where,

Fun area.

It's a fun area, and we also, we conduct our classes down here.

We put a cover on the table, and we conduct our, this is, we do our slideshow here and

do our classroom sessions down on this big table here.

Where we saw all old beams before, we now see a new beam up here.

Yeah, that's a 10 by 12 oak, and that's necessary to take the span from this post, that's an oak

post,

Yep, all the way over there.

Okay.

Yep.

Because this is not a true octagon.

One post of the octagon has been left out, and that would be right there.

You'll notice if you have a post here, it spoils your poach to the side of the pocket.

Yes, it does. I used to have a pool table when the walls were so close, I had a rod cut off to here.

You have one like that? Yeah, that's when you get to the corner.

Exactly, see? You get around the edge. The trick is not to get the cue ball there.

That's right. The trick is to leave your opponent with the cue ball.

There you go. Yes, there you go.

Now, this is a very unusual wall you've got here.

Those are not log-ins I'm looking at over there.

No, they're very short. They're only a sixteenth of an inch thick.

They're all beer coasters that I've collected all over the world.

Over 1,100 different beer coasters.

That's the Scottish wall, the English wall, the Irish section, the European wall, and the small North American section.

Wait over there.

We don't have many beer coasters in North America.

They don't have coasters anymore like that, no.

I just picked up some in Wisconsin, actually.

Is that right? I may have some old ones at home.

I may just check on that, too.

I'll trade you some for them.

Well, maybe we can do that.

Yeah.

We can do that.

I've got,

That's your collection over the years?

Yeah.

Are they all different?

Yeah.

Everything up there is different, huh?

Yeah.

Sometimes I'll show two sides of the same beer mat so that you get both sides.

Okay.

I saw some pool trophies up above.

Mm-hmm.

No wonder you cheat.

You've got your own table downstairs and you practice.

It never occurred to me that that was cheating.

I thought that was practice.

Ha, ha, ha.

That's your score wall?

That's for your classes?

No, that's,

We project the slides on there.

Uh-huh.

For your bulletin board.

Yeah.

I can draw on the slide.

If I project the slide up there and I want to illustrate something, I can draw right on there.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

So you,

That would be during your summer classes too?

Yeah.

Is this normally cooler down here than it is upstairs?

Yes, it is.

It appears to be,

Today it does.

But if in the wintertime, if you use the masonry stove as the primary heat source, there's

very little difference between the downstairs temperature and the upstairs.

Obviously, if you use that cook stove extensively upstairs, you are going to get more heat up there

than you get down here.

Right.

But if most of your wood goes through here, there's no stratification.

Because first, it warms up this mass.

It radiates downstairs.

Then the heat, because warm fluids float to the surface, the heat goes up the stairway

into the upper story.

Do you have to have an appointment to get your hair done here?

Uh, no.

No.

I think we're,

He's got himself a barber's chair here.

And, uh, just,

You just,

It's just great.

You've got a,

Come and see how we pump our water right over here.

Oh, okay.

Well, that's interesting.

I've heard.

We're very low pressure right now.

Yeah.

See, nobody's been pumping for the last couple of hours.

Now this is the pressure you take.

Yeah, it's almost zero right now.

So I can impact that by pumping,

This is an old Myers double action piston pump.

I'll just stop making noise for a second.

George Barber, my friend from Plattsburgh, I call him the Leonardo da Vinci of Plattsburgh.

He's married this old bicycle to an old Myers double action piston pump.

So, ten times around with one leg, pulls a gallon of water up from the well and pushes it into this blue tank here.

The top of the tank is closed so you're compressing the air as you pump.

You'll see the needle moving up now.

And that's when it changes the pressure.

See the pressure going up?

Look at it go up.

Yeah.

I bring that up to 40 pounds and that's our house pressure.

It's low right now.

So how long would you have to do that to do that?

About four minutes twice a day.

For our family household use of four people, we use about 80 gallons of water which requires about,

And incidentally that's about a quarter of the consumption of the typical American household.

Four minutes twice a day we'll do that.

The exception is if we do a wash.

The wash adds another 30 or 40 gallons.

Well, you just went,

You said several important things there.

You said 40 gallons?

80 gallons for our household of 40.

And it's about one quarter of the normal,

The average American household uses about 300 gallons of water per day.

Now, it's hard to believe and I can't figure out where the water is going but that's what everybody,

Well, a lot of it is flushing the toilet.

Flushing the toilets, right.

Well, you want low flush toilets.

You don't want to flush a toilet for every little piddling affair.

You know, just use it sensibly and water is a precious resource.

Absolutely.

You have no trouble.

You have enough water.

Yeah, and you get a real sense of the value of it when you pump every single gallon.

Oh, yes.

I bet you do.

Now, how do you determine who's going to do this?

Is this a punishment type thing you can do here?

If a guy don't,

One of the sons don't do right, he's got to pump more?

No pump, no dump.

So, four minutes and you,

Four minutes seems long at the time probably.

Well, it's also a way to keep fit too.

Agreed, yes.

I like to think if I do this every day until I'm 100 years old, I'll live to be 100.

It's hard after you're 95.

Oh, is it?

Yeah, it gets hard after 95.

Maybe they have no problem all the time.

It gets hard after 95.

All right, well now, certainly you could do something here to pump that water up for you.

You could, but we'd do it to save electricity because typically in a small household solar application like this, you might be using 20% of your power for water pumping.

We can save that 20% and keep fit at the same time by using the bicycle pump.

So, this is our battery storage system here.

These are 6 volt golf cart type batteries, deep cycle batteries, 6 volts.

If I put them negative to positive in this way, this now becomes a 12 volt battery.

This unit here is a 12 volt battery now because I've connected negative to positive.

Then if I parallel them with these lines, I accumulate my wattage or my amperage, but still at 12 volts.

So now these 10 batteries becomes a gigantic 12 volt storage battery, storing about 720 amp hours of power.

I can go through a week without sun or wind with this when the batteries are new.

These batteries are about 5 years old now.

They're getting near time to replace.

They're still working for us, but maybe when I get back from Britain, I might put in some new ones.

Five to six years?

I got seven out of my last ones, but they were tired in the last year.

Okay.

Now, do you tie in the windmill and both into the same?

Right.

You don't have to go through a different apparatus?

Yeah, they go through different control boxes, but they end up in the same batteries.

Okay.

The control boxes aren't in here.

They're outside.

They're out in the next room.

Okay.

I've got my fuse boxes.

Here's 310 volt circuits.

I've got four 12 volt circuits.

So my lighting is all on 12 volts.

My small appliance circuits are 110 for microwave, vacuum cleaner, washing machine, that sort of thing.

The plug is 110?

That one's, yeah, 115 AC.

I've got them all labeled, you know.

Actually, yeah.

This actually goes out to my office building because, you know, you can't carry 12 volt power very far.

There's a great line loss.

So for my office building, I have that, when I use any lights or anything in the office building, that goes through the inverter.

That way I'm carrying 115 AC out to the office.

That's about 40 feet from the house.

You lose me very quickly when you get into electricity.

I don't claim to be.

But you're talking here what you would see in a normal car, 12 volt battery.

Well, no.

Runs lights.

No.

No?

With two of them.

A normal car doesn't have a deep cycle battery.

What does that mean?

These batteries, it means that it has very deep plates under the, a very deep well underneath the plates.

So that if you get a buildup of, what do they call it?

Not phosphate.

I don't want to say phosphate.

Sulfites on the plates.

You're not shorting out between plates.

You can deep cycle them.

When you charge them up, you'll shake the sulfites loose from the plates.

They'll settle in the bottom of the well without causing a short circuit.

All right.

Your car battery is made for a quick, large charge, a large discharge and therefore a rapid charge.

These are made for a more, more of a discharge, but they'll, they can deep cycle many more times.

If you, if you take your car battery and leave your lights on, say three or four times, that's the end of your car battery.

Okay.

It might survive once or twice, but after three or four times, that battery's had it.

You know that as well as I do.

These batteries, golf, right.

Golf cart batteries, you know, every day they're being recharged, recharged and being used out.

And they, they come back after 18 holes, almost totally discharged.

Right.

They plug them in, they charge them up again.

Well, we charge ours with, with sun and wind.

Yep.

Okay.

That's what you see here.

And of course you see some of the vegetables raised here, some of the canned goods.

Right.

And much, much like we saw at Peter Allen's, you know, when we were over there, we were in his room where his batteries were.

Here's dried mushrooms here.

Uh huh.

Mm-hmm.

It might, yeah, it would help a little.

That's a 12 volt.

Okay.

We're down with 12 volt batteries, uh, lights by the way, folks.

This is DC rather.

Yeah.

Not 12 volt, but yeah, 12 volt.

DC lights here.

And this is a masonry stove.

Mm-hmm.

A place for three chimneys that aren't being used.

No, these are the clean outs for three horizontal flues.

The, the exhaust of the fire comes out the back of the stove, up, horizontal, up, horizontal, up, horizontal, and then up.

So you have all this long transfer time between the heat of the fire and the actual stonework.

Okay.

It's like an airtight damper.

When there's no more colored flame, but only clear flame coming off of the bed of coals, you can safely shut the thing down.

No more carbon monoxide is being produced.

And now that bed of red hot coals is radiating its heat into the stone mass for another 12 to 15 hours.

You need to tell me you can burn 12 or 15 of those and heat your house with 15?

Once a day.

And in the spring and the fall, every second day you fire it.

But in the wintertime, you fire it.

Once a day, if you get a prolonged cold snap, such as sometimes you get 10 days in a row up here where it's below zero, then a second firing. So you'd be firing it twice a day under severe conditions, but normally once a day.

You know, you mentioned about these three different ways. In Russian, I saw an article somewhere or a documentary on a Russian stove or something that went in and came around different ways.

But it wasn't a furnace like that, but it was more or less, of course, it worked the same way.

Right.

And you clean out each individual one.

But that's the beauty of it. You don't have to clean them out because you've got no creosote. In 14 years, I've never, ever had to clean this chimney out.

I put the clean outs in in case I did, but in the actual event, I haven't had to. We have had zero creosote in all that time.

Because you're getting complete combustion.

You built this yourself, or is there an actual,

Steven Englehart in Keysville is the builder.

But there's a metal unit inside that's the actual stove you buy?

No, he actually, no, he built it all in fabrics.

Right from scratch.

Right from scratch.

The only thing that's metal is I get these doors from,

Uh-huh.

We used to sell those cook stove years ago, and they gave me an extra door to put in the masonry stove.

Yeah.

I would build one now.

Having worked with Steven and see how it's done, I would feel confident in building one.

But at that time, I felt it was just too magically mystical to attempt to do, but it really isn't.

Does this floor get real cold in the winter?

No, because it has styrofoam underneath the floor.

Okay.

So you're charging it up, and the styrofoam stops the heat from conducting to the outside.

Even this 23-ton masonry stove has an inch of styrofoam underneath it.

No energy nosebleeds.

It was a foot, and the weight crushed it down to one inch.

No.

Styrofoam will actually support 5,600 pounds per square foot with only 10% deflection.

You see, I didn't know he was going to say that.

I just happened to ask that question.

I knew that.

You knew that. Calvin knew that.

I knew he knew that.

He wouldn't tell me.

I knew he knew that.

You knew he knew.

But you're telling me, right?

Yeah.

There's a few people out there, I'm sure, that don't know that.

All right.

This unit right here, we did see something on this order when we were over down the street

to Peter's, and this is telling you how much your battery is charged up right now?

How much we're using, how much we're making, zero.

We're not making anything in wind right now.

Okay.

This is just the wind plant, and this is the average.

Oh, this is the wind.

Okay.

Yeah, the solar, we are making 15 amps of solar power right now.

Okay.

That sun is making 15 amps of solar right now.

Okay.

So we're only using in the house with these lights on, we're using about 9 amps.

We're making 15, so I've got a net 6 amp gain going into the batteries, even while we're

using lights.

While you're using it.

If I turn these off, I get a net 15 amps gain.

Okay.

Now, does that, is this the battery reading for that also, or just?

Yeah.

No.

That's for both?

The whole thing.

Okay.

And you see the wires?

That's not being used out.

I think that's coming in?

These wires?

These are incoming.

Incoming.

It goes through the control panel here, this control panel here.

Okay.

This is a little bit warm right now because we're making a lot of solar energy today.

Okay.

You see, if you look at the wall over here, again, you can see where the wood construction

stops.

And you can, you have chute, you have a wood chute to send your water, to send your wood

into the home through this wood chute.

Okay.

So you can back the pickup truck right into there and store your wood in here.

Yep.

Okay.

I don't have any more lights for you.

That's all right.

It'll,

We're looking at a, tell us what this is?

Well, this is the only internal cordwood wall in the house.

It was a little panel just made for fun for Darren's room.

We put a fishbowl into it and a hummingbird design on that.

Uh-huh.

Just hanging over the fishbowl, a few bottle ends, some shelves.

Yeah.

Now, the people came here from England, saw his stone circle out there, went to England

and put one up.

That was approximately the order.

They, they copied this from you, right?

I think that's correct.

That this is a place called Stonehenge.

Not 100% certain.

About how old is Stonehenge?

They don't know, do they?

Yeah, well, the, yes, they're pretty, pretty sure.

The beginning, Stonehenge was built up over about a 2,000 year period.

But the first work at Stonehenge was about 5,000 years ago.

One of the mysteries, and they still don't know exactly why this is the way it is.

They have some ideas and, as you say, light shines in certain places, different times

of the year, but they don't, it's still a relative mystery.

A great mystery, too.

This is, uh, the boys' room.

Darren's bedroom, and, uh, this is one of the pieces I was telling you about, the old

Champlain Sea, where this is the fossil remains of the beach on the edge of the sea.

Oh, isn't that clever.

And we found that stone around here, and we built it in.

This is a surface-bonded concrete block wall.

Isn't that clever?

And we just built it in there.

There is a good view of the other side.

There is a good view of the interior of that, of that, the other side of that interior wall.

So this room gets nice and bright as the sun moves around.

About two or three in the afternoon, the sun beats in these four windows here, and you

get a wonderful, uh,

Now, if you think you can make any baskets in here, you've got a problem.

See?

That's his light right here.

That must be hard to get light through there.

Don't show much, huh?

Well, he, for reading, he uses this little light.

Yeah, you are, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

But it gives it okay, generally, the background light.

Yep.

Okay, you see the walls again.

We're still going in this 2,000 square feet, uh, homeland.

You've got interior, uh, glass, uh, blocks here, too.

That puts some light on the stairway.

This is a surface-bonded block wall, so that your, uh, this stove here,

Oh, this is another stove?

Yeah, this stove enables you to watch an open fire.

Uh-huh.

You can open, at Christmas time, we set up the Christmas tree down here, and we have our Christmas,

and we can open that and watch the fire.

It's the only place in the house you can enjoy a live fire.

But, it's safe against this wall, because it's a block wall.

Yeah.

Okay.

Another TV down here.

And then, uh,

It's a solar room.

Now, whoever's using this ought to be in there pumping that water.

Well, I want to marry this up with a, uh, see, I've got electric lines coming in here,

and I've got to figure out, when you're doing the NordicTrack exercise,

you might as well be making electric at the same time.

Yes.

Because, you know what they have on these things?

They have this resistance.

Right.

You know, and different resistance.

Well, instead of that, why not, why not be turning a generator?

See?

And with these two 12-volt lines coming in here, if I can just work out the, uh, the pattern

of, uh, connecting, uh, the NordicTrack to a little generator, we actually have the little

generator.

It's just a case of the mechanics of the flywheel.

Would you hook it to this?

No, you'd hook it to the, to this thing that goes back and forth.

Oh, okay.

You get this flywheel turning?

Yes.

I've got to figure out how to get that turning a generator.

Instead of putting extra, extra load here, why not make electricity?

There's a guy in Plasbury by the name of George Barber.

You could tell me how to do this.

He could help you out with that.

Yeah, that guy George.

Yeah, I've heard he can help you out with this.

All right.

When we were talking outside and I made the remark, I don't know if we did it on camera,

about, uh, if you've got these big windows that are giving you all the heat and light

in the, uh, winter, what's it doing in the summer with all the heat?

And he told us he keeps it out by having the doors here.

Well, and let's go back to the winter.

Okay.

When the sun is low and there's snow in the ground, you're reflecting a lot of heat into that room.

It'll actually get up into the nineties in there.

So of course you open your sliding glass door, you're in, and you help heat the house.

Yeah.

Now in the springtime, you're starting your plants in here for the garden, you know, your

garden plants.

In case it's in danger of freezing, you can leave the door cocked open a little bit,

let some of the house heat come in and prevent the plants from freezing.

Now my son, Rowan, is building a new bed in here.

That's what all this lumber is for.

He's going to build a 10 foot by 3 foot wide bed and attempt to grow vegetables through the

whole winter.

Now there's only some vegetables that you can do that with such as kale and cabbage.

Some of the, some of the vegetables will grow through the winter, but that's his experiment

for this winter is to put a raised bed in here right in the greenhouse with us.

The thickness of this door here.

And it's fully insulated.

And this is two inches of styrofoam and 16 inch cordwood walls.

Calvin, you might want to look at that cordwood wall because the bottle end design is one

of the better ones that you'll see there.

Very unique.

Not for everybody, obviously, right?

Well, maybe you could think it could be, but it's not for everybody.

Some people don't have the imagination.

It's true.

True.

You know, they want everything very, very modern, brought to them and the easy way out or whatever.

But it's certainly a different way.

And you've been very happy here for raising your family 14 years here.

Well, as Jackie says, we don't feel hard done by.

We don't feel that we're wanting for anything.

You know, we perhaps use 10% of the electrical energy as the typical American home.

But gee, our kids, they do well in school.

They have a good worldly view of things.

And you don't have to be deprived to gentle down.

But you mentioned homeschooling though.

What do you mean by homeschooling?

Well, we did that with Rowan.

We homeschooled Rowan the first year and then it was his choice to go to school after that.

We're doing homeschooling with Darren this year in his fourth grade.

And it will probably be the only year that we do.

It's our opportunity to get to know Darren on a different level.

We're both capable of teaching him.

The school's in support of it.

Rowan graduated valedictorian at Northern Adirondack School.

So homeschooling didn't hurt him any.

And then, you know, we've pulled the kids out of school a number of times to travel, to go to Scotland, to go to Central America.

I believe in Mark Twain's saying, he says, never let schooling get in the way of your children's education.

So you'll be how long in England?

We'll be five weeks over there.

Darren will attend school in England for a couple of weeks.

Jackie's sister's over there.

She's arranging that.

What better education you have?

Will Rowan be going too?

Rowan's looking after the business. We've got the dogs and the cats and the money, and somebody's got to look after the business.

That's great. I suppose we ought to go upstairs and say goodbye with the whole family. Anything else, Calvin, you can think of?

What kind of a background? Engineering or whatever.

Yeah. What got you into this, and how do you figure out all these engineering feats of a home like this?

Things get done when they have to get done. If you don't have the answers, you seek them out.

You go and talk to people who do have the answers. You try to find as much information as you can.

As I said, there was no literature on how to do cordwood. There was only that we knew it was available.

To make things easier for the next people, we've contributed to the literature by writing a number of books on this sort of thing.

Take the engineering. If you can plug numbers into a formula, if you get the right formulas, you can figure out how much load there is on the roof,

plug it into the formulas, and work it out yourself.

Then you could have it checked by an engineer, just to make sure it doesn't fall in on you.

What did your dad do for a living?

He was an inventor.

Oh, you mentioned he was an inventor.

He did not finish the ninth grade.

He did very well. He had a business. He designed the fastest screw-making machinery in the world at that time.

It would slot screws 700 per minute. He invented all this and never finished the ninth grade.

Well, you don't need to have, I don't think, college education for a mentality.

I don't advocate not having school. School would have maybe given him even more.

Yeah.

But was happy with what he was doing. He must have died at an early age.

Yeah, pretty early. He was around 59.

Yeah, yeah, because you said he wasn't here 20 years ago when you first came up here.

So you found a home in the North Country, and you like it in the North Country.

Well, we've been here 20 years, and whenever we travel and we go all over the world, we're always glad to get back here.

And we love our home and the comfort of the home, and after five weeks in Britain, we'll be glad to be back here.

They've never had a flood on Murtaugh Hill.

Several thousand years ago.

Yeah, several thousand years ago when the lake was here.

We were talking with, if you remember, we were talking with Leonard Pantry when we were out at the Gulf,

and he was talking about the depth of the water throughout this area.

Well, Murtaugh Hill was uplifted 1,100 feet or so from the surrounding plain.

There was an uplifting, and the geology class from Plattsburgh State comes out on the hill

and looks at some of the special geological features of Murtaugh Hill, the dike infusions and this uplifting.

On Peter's property, you can see the edge of that, that uplifting effect.

How big is Murtaugh Hill?

I don't really know.

Any idea?

This is 1,200 in altitude, but I don't know.

It's part of the foothills of the Adirondacks.

The Adirondacks, of course, are this anorthocyte.

We're down here looking at you.

Ever just use this as a sitting room at all?

Yes.

It's a pleasant space.

Yeah.

Now, I imagine it's just beautiful here when all these leaves start to turn in this fall.

You're going to miss that, being in England.

We'll be back on October 19th.

Yeah, we probably are going to miss it.

Yeah, you'll miss it by October 19th.

That's true.

It'll be done by about, I would think, the 10th.

They say this year it'll be earlier because there wasn't so much water.

All right, as we look out, we see a lot of things, of course, that you don't need, but

that he wants, like all the stones and the other stones.

That's work that gives you some satisfaction or you wouldn't.

Well, you need food, you need fuel, and you need shelter.

But you can provide those things yourself.

So you're really talking about the basic necessities of life here.

And you can pay somebody else to do it for you, or you can do it yourself and be free

of that crippling mortgage for the rest of your life.

It's your choice.

And if you don't spend as much, you don't need to make as much.

Is that pretty well?

Exactly.

Your taxes go down because you're in a lower tax bracket.

The best way to be rich is to be poor.

All right, we'll discuss that some other time.

And we want to also mention, of course, he's got one of those hoses into every one of the

beds out there.

Remember, we saw him come off the wooden barrel.

And there's his garden right there.

And you've been eating vegetables all summer long now.

Oh, yeah.

And be all winter long, too.

All winter long now, too.

All right.

Well, I spent a very enjoyable little bit of three hours here on Murtaugh Hill with a

very unique family.

I would say a close family, I would say, right?

Oh, I would say.

Very, very close.

We were talking about education and the home.

We also found out about the valedictorian at the school, too.

Your dad is very proud of that.

Very, very proud of that.

And togetherness.

And you don't need anything else except yourself pretty well out here, right?

Your family.

You get gas for your car once in a while and so forth.

You can tough it out in this house.

You need pretty quick those tickets to get to England, though.

I heard they're not here yet.

They're not here yet.

All right.

In closing, we'd like to thank you very much for letting us come into your home, a very

unique home.

We've heard a lot about this Earthwood.

It's called the Earthwood.

Is this?

Earthwood Building School.

You can find us in the phone.

But the home is called Earthwood, too.

You call this?

Yeah, the home is Earthwood and the business is Earthwood.

All right.

And it's in the phone book under Earthwood.

There are books.

There are videos.

And we hope that you've watched every bit of this.

If you didn't see it all, remember, if it's early in the afternoon, it's going to be on

four more times.

So meet this family.

And if you ever get a chance, I say, well, give them a call.

Are you ever open or have open house up here at all?

Certain times of the year?

Yeah, we're having one while we're away.

Is that right?

October the 13th or 14th.

Saturday.

Okay.

Let's make sure we get that.

October 13th.

Let me check that.

There'll be an open house.

Close.

Okay.

You can meet Rowan and you can just see firsthand.

And you should see this, by the way.

And I would think by that time, you're going to be very pretty with all these leaves around

here in addition.

That's the 14th of October.

And what's the hours on that, Rowan?

10 to 3 or something?

It's being held.

Okay.

10 to 3.

And it's up on Murtaugh Hill.

You'll find that just west of the road that comes up from West Shays-Ey.

Yeah, the Recor Road.

Recor Road.

A half mile further up the turnpike.

If you're coming from Plattsburgh, a half mile further up the turnpike from the Recor

Road, you'll see our Earthwood Building School.

Come in to the Murtaugh Hill Road.

We're two miles up the road.

Two miles up the road.

It's a dirt road.

It's a good road.

You have no problem.

And you just ask everybody as you come up, I guess.

Well, you don't need to.

Just come up until you see the sign.

You keep coming up until you see the sign.

The signs will be here.

And I guess I can invite people.

That's all right.

You want to have them see it.

And you don't have to buy one when you get here, but you want to come see what it's all

about.

And these people won't be here, but Rowan will be.

They're going to be in England.

Okay.

Thanks again very much, folks.

Okay.

Rowan.

Jackie.

Rob.

I'm going to show portions of those classes I took over the Labor Day weekend.

Okay.

Will we show that right now?

Yeah.

I'm going to show some of the classes that he was held here over the Labor Day weekend.

All right.

Thank you.

That's when the people were here.

You said from 14 years old up to 81?

71.

71.

Okay.

Thanks very much for watching.

Hometown Cable.

Remember, every day, 1230, 415, 8 p.m,midnight, 8 the following morning, five times

every Sunday.

What's going on here?

I'm Bob Venn, Calvin Castine.

Thanks for watching.

See you next week.

Thanks very much, guys.

You're welcome.

Yep.

Yep.

Thank you.