Cordwood Masonry

The land was ours. That part was settled. What we didn’t have was a way to put a house on it.

A bank wasn’t going to help us. I’d been a single mom in retail for twenty years — there was no positive credit history, no savings to point at, and no down payment they would have called serious. Myron and I had each other and the eleven acres my mother had gifted us. That was the whole balance sheet.

So the question wasn’t “what kind of house do we want?” It was: what can two people actually build, with no loan, on our income, in our spare time, in Western New York?

Finding Rob Roy

I started searching. The first useful phrase I found was mortgage-free. That phrase pulled up a book — Mortgage Free! Innovative Strategies for Debt-Free Home Ownership — and from there, the name behind it: Rob Roy.

Rob ran the Earthwood Building School out of northern New York. He’s since closed the physical workshops, but he still writes, teaches, and consults. He built his own home with his own hands — a round, mortgage-free home, with walls made of stacked firewood and mortar. Cordwood masonry. He’s a prominent advocate for the method, and the least prescriptive voice in it. He’ll describe what he likes about a choice, then walk you through what you’d need to think about if you went that way — without insisting you do it his way.

What hooked me on Rob wasn’t the technique, though. It was the philosophy behind it. He was direct about how to build a house without financing: small, slow, pay-as-you-go, and with skills you can pick up as you go, rather than skills you have to hire. The cordwood walls were one piece of that.

I read everything of his I could find. Soon, I’d shown Myron enough of it that we sat down at the kitchen table to talk about it like it was actually possible.

Looking at everything else first

Before we landed on cordwood, I made myself look at the alternatives. I owed it to us not to pick the first interesting method I’d found.

Stick-built was the conventional answer. It’s how my father, a physician, built the house I grew up in — a four-bedroom he built with his own hands in the 1960s, one room at a time, as he could get to it. You could do that then. We couldn’t pull a permit for a phased build like his today, and we didn’t have the cash to buy all the materials up front.

Timber frame is beautiful, and a few of the homes I came across made my chest ache. But timber frame is an apprenticeship craft. We couldn’t afford a timber-frame kit, and without a master timber framer to learn from or a sawmill connection to keep the wood affordable, it just wasn’t within reach.

Log had its own problem. We didn’t have enough trees long and straight enough for a log build, and the ones that came closest were down in the creek valley — we’d have had to skid them up to the construction site before we could even start. The trees we needed weren’t where we needed them.

Rammed earth and adobe weren’t suited to our climate. Western New York doesn’t give you the long dry seasons those methods want, and our freeze-thaw cycles are unforgiving to anything that has to dry slow and stay dry.

Earthship — I admired the ingenuity, but ruled it out fast. The build was complex, the construction plans cost real money, and we’d have had to source the tires — three logistics problems before we’d laid a single wall.

Cob was beautiful and cheap, but slow. The build pace — especially in a climate where you only have a handful of months a year to work with wet earth outdoors — would have kept us in the camper for a decade. And once built, we’d be constantly working to protect it against our wet and cold environment.

Stone was the prettiest option on paper. We had stone on the property. We did not, however, have enough stone to make a 1,200 square foot home, or the equipment to move what we’d need, or the time to gather it by hand. Two pairs of hands and a wheelbarrow wasn’t going to be enough.

Straw bale was the closest call. The numbers were tempting — high R-value, fast walls, cheap material, plenty of DIY-friendly resources by 2004. I read about it longer than any of the others. What stopped me was moisture. Straw bale lives or dies on keeping the walls dry, and Western New York is wet. Humid summers, long wet shoulder seasons, snow that sits against a wall for long periods. Pulling that off requires careful detailing and serious plaster work that we’d have to learn from scratch. And the bales themselves would have to be bought, trucked in, and stored dry before we could start — three more problems we didn’t need. Cordwood let us build with what was already on the land.

The techniques called for basic skills that we could easily master. All we needed was patience, a level, and a willingness to do the same motion several thousand times. The carpentry around the openings for example was conventional enough that we could learn it from books and a few good neighbors, like my brother Merrill, who lives across the street.

Myron had picked up some masonry experience in earlier work, and that turned out to matter more than I realized at the time. Mortar wasn’t a foreign language to him. He knew when it was too wet, too stiff, too rushed. That alone saved us a season of mistakes. 

We didn’t know this at the time, but cordwood masonry doesn’t have to go up all at once. You don’t have to finish a wall in a weekend. You can build a section, walk away, come back next month, pick up where you stopped. That mattered enormously — life kept happening around the build, and the build had to wait for the money and the seasons to align with our schedules.

Cordwood is beautiful, and cordwood is warm. It is also labor-intensive. But what set it apart for us was that the labor was the kind we could do ourselves.

That’s the question I’d offer to anyone standing where we stood in early 2004: not what’s the best natural building method? but what’s the best one I can realistically complete, with the people I have, the money I have, the land I have, the climate I have, and the time I have?

When we framed the choice that way, cordwood was the obvious answer.

We didn’t know yet how long four summers would feel. We didn’t know how many things we’d have to learn that no book covered. We didn’t know which mistakes were ahead of us. We just knew we could make it work, the materials were already on the land, and the people involved — the two of us — were determined to pull it off.