In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 18 Jan 2020 13:42:17 -0500, "Phil Kangas"
wrote:


"Clare Snyder"
I buy appliances from appliance dealers and lumber from
lumber-yards,
and hardware from hardware stores. I also buy groceries
from grocery
stores.

Sadly the lumber yards and hardware stores are getting
scarce

"The only really good place to buy lumber
is at a store where the lumber has already
been cut and attached together in the form
of furniture and put inside boxes."
- Dave Barry

Post-sawdust lumber.

I went college with a guy who grew up on a farm in western Illinois but
became a lawyer in NYC.

He bought land in Woodstock NY. Now Woodstock is just like 20 or 40
other little towns in the area, but he wanted Woodstock I'm sure because
it was famous.

But I have to give him a lot of credit: He researched, designed, and did
a plurality of the labor to build his own pretty large house, on the
side of a hill overlooking the valley and the next hill. He cut down the
trees and paid for at least two truckloads of gravel to make a
still-rocky road. He paid for someone to dynamite enough to have a
flat area for the house.

He framed it... 2 stories high, 40 or 50 foot square with windows from a
foot or two above the floot to ceiling (16 feet iirc) on the whole south
side, plus 1/2 the west side and 1/4 the east side. In 1976, the
doublepane windows cost him $10,000, delivered.

For the walls below the windows, he used logs, not lengthwise like in
most log cabins and houses but so the ends showed inside and out. That
was his big mistake. The logs had dried for weeks, months, or a year or
two, not sure, but they continued to dry after they were in place, and
shrink, so there were holes almost an inch big that the air would blow
through. He chinked it with cement, that didn't look sot good. (He
remodeled his loft in SoHo NY and there too the design was great, he
did some of the work, but final touches he sometimes did in an ugly
manner. The cement chinking looked terrible. I'm not sure what the
next owner would do to make it look nice.)

We had a fight when he didn't show sufficient concern for his girlfriend
or her daughter, 102.6 and 103.6 fevers** at Rainbow in a North Carolina
national forest, Nantahala, and he just wanted to get back to NY to go
to work on Monday, and I wanted them to see a doctor (I won***.) and it
was the last straw ending out friendship after 20 years.

***The police were watching traffic and all the parked cars, or
something, on the road outside the forest, about an hour's hike, 15
minute drive, from where the camping was, and they offered to call an
ambulance, but that would have taken as much time as our**** driving to
the hospital. The doctor there just gave them water, watched them for
an hour or two, but it's not some boyfriend's right to decide they dont'
need a doctor. They even had insurance to pay for it. ****I'm glad I was
driving and it was my car.

**Turned out to be shigellosis (inflamation of your shigella!), and
about 5000 of the 10,000 campers got it. The CDC investiated, sent me a
long form of which they said, "If you return this, you'll get a copy of
the report" and both happened.

But I still stopped by his country home when I was nearby and it didn't
look like the windows had dropped. I presume he had some 2" vertical
2x4s holding the windows up and didn't depend on the logs.