By late October I'd felled, bucked, and marked all the trees I wanted milled, then had Tim Bittorf (Bluffside Services) take them to Henschel Sawmill (the only female sawyer in Wisconsin!).

Here's the log pile at Henschel's.

A few weeks later it turned into these four large stacks. Grand total: $1,500.

Many trips back and forth in the Land Cruiser, and *a lot* of board handling, the stacks disappeared.

And became this, stacked and stickered and ready to dry.

The effort was immense. Due to an unseasonably warm early winter, the heavy loads created an immense amount of mud. Several Ultra, Super and Mega carwashes couldn't clean the undercarriage. Only a pressure-washer worked. (A proper driveway is on tap for early this year.)

So glad to have this part of the project done. After drying, the 2x4s will be ready for framing. The 1x wall and floor material has to go into the kiln for drying.

Yep, that's right. Fine Homebuilding podcast star Ian Schwandt (and his lovely wife Sara) stopped by High Bluff in late September to check out the lot I was always telling him about.

Their visit made podcast episode #602, with Ian not only mentioning the visit, but posting a picture of my manboobs (along with some other site shots). Too late now, but this is probably NSFW.

Looking forward to sharing more about the build with Ian, Patrick, and the rest of the podcast team. However if there are any more photographs, I will demand final cut.

OG readers of this site will recall the Xanax and Valium-hazed* felling of a big red oak back in September.

In December I had the oak (and a bunch of other hardwood) timbers taken to the only female sawyer in WI, who's just 5 miles away.

What you're supposed to do at this point is trailer your lumber back to your site for air drying. A forklift loads the trailer. But Door County received a bunch of ❄️ in February that made that impossible. So I used the brute force method that recalled Door County settlers: I hand-loaded it all into the back of the Land Cruiser (4 trips!) and then shoveled out nearly 2 feet of snow in two spots to stack and sticker it. It was just an insane amount of work that had me considering Lumber Liquidators.

It'll all be worth it. It's wide and pretty and there's enough flooring to knock out most of the main level. This is what I'm telling myself.

* Should've been Xanax and Valium-hazed.