If the lumber is supplied how much should it save o building a home? (hardwood, cost)
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Say I wanted to build a 1600 sq ft home in rural Washington State. On the land there are enough fallen Douglas Fir Trees in good enough shape to do so.
There would be the cost of cutting and transporting.
Say I wanted to build a 1600 sq ft home in rural Washington State. On the land there are enough fallen Douglas Fir Trees in good enough shape to do so.
There would be the cost of cutting and transporting.
After that how much might it save?
Nothing. In fact it would cost more to cut it, mill it and dry it than it would to buy it. Unless of course you have a sawmill and a way to kiln the lumber.
You'd be better off doing a timber sale, getting the net and applying it to your home construction. That's precisely what my godfather in WV did- he's a forester by trade. He bought 500 acres of mountain land with mature oak and hardwoods, did a select cut, sold the timber and made $100,000 and applied that to his log cabin build.
Nothing significant, or it might cost you a bit more.
Framing lumber is not a huge cost component in a home, it is merely one of many. You have fallen trees, not lumber, and the cost of milling and drying the lumber will be a significant fraction of finished lumber costs.
You also lose the economy of scale the large mills get, so your cost for milling and drying is going to be higher.
Some friends hired a guy with a small mill who cut and milled their trees in exchange for half the lumber. Then they let the lumber air dry for about a year before they used it to build.
Or, as K'ledgeBldr mentioned, build a log home. That requires a bunch of special construction techniques (pre drilling the logs for the electrical runs, allowing for several inches of log compression over doorways and such, etc.) so study up on those sorts of things before building. There's also some special tools the log folks like to use.
In order to know what you have, you should have the timber cruised by a forester to determine how much of it is merchantable & its value.
If there are log home builders in your area, you can get a better price for your logs from them than a sawmill. Or if you want a log home, have the value of excess timber credited toward construction of your house.
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