Paul Bunyan

As the original sill logs of the cabin were heavily damaged by termites, we decided to replace them with new, hand-hewn logs. Luckily, Mike had felled some large white oak trees on a mountain near Bristol about five years ago. The situation was perfect: White oak is very rot resistant, and the fact that these trees had been cut for a few years decreases the chance of shrinkage. So, Mike and crew spent several days on the mountain hewing away. (We did agree to let him run the logs through a portable saw mill to square them off--a luxury our hearty ancestors did not have.) The logs were so long and heavy, we had to hire a U-Haul truck (the modern version of a team of work horses) to transport them to the farm.