34 C O N T E X T 1 3 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 4 heritage preservation is the same. In the absence of official recognition, we felt that our plan to rebuild the house as it had been was an act of preservation. We were fortunate that our second son,André, a skilled cabinet maker, had just graduated with his first university degree and was willing to take on the responsibility of re-building the house as a summer job.We gave him a contract and he moved into a small cabin on the land he had previously built as a university student. Mark also spent the summer working on the project. Our youngest son, Torben, then in high school, worked on it in his holidays so it was a real family effort. André hired an excavation contractor to dig a hole for the foundation, then the boys built a wall of cement blocks five rows high from the floor of the hole.The sill beams were placed on this wall. Of all the posts and beams in our ‘kit’, the sill beams were the only ones with significant rot, but we were able to patch them.The eight beams to support the first floor were inserted into the slots in the sill beams which had been made 200 years before. Laying the floor boards on the beams for the ground floor proved to be one of the most challenging parts of the project.The old floor boards were of varying thickness and width having been pit-sawn by hand then planed on the edges. Some were wider at one end than the other, and the grooves cut into both edges had been made by hand and were of various sizes. Pieces of lath were used for the splines. Putting them down was like working on a giant three-dimensional puzzle, when one does not know for sure one has all the pieces. Miraculously, after three days of onerous work, the floor was complete, albeit with narrow gaps in some places and uneven spots in others. During the construction, before the roof was complete, rain fell on the floor.The old dry wood swelled, filling the gaps.The uneven spots disappeared when we sanded the floor on the completion of the building. Now we have a very beautiful old pine floor, smooth and full of character. Perhaps themost excitingmoment of the project was the erection of the first posts.We chose the set of two which had not been cut in half in the demolition andwhichwere still two storeys high, and assembled one complete bay, held by angle braces and secured by mortice-and-tenon joints.We used ropes to hoist the first of the eight sets of posts and beams at the west corners of the foundation. It was exhilarating to see themvertical and the boys climbed up to enjoy the view from the heights. The other seven sets of posts and beams were erected in a similar manner, the cut posts patched with metal plates. We found that the mortice-and-tenon joints holding the beams for the second floor to the posts fitted well, as did the many other joints. The roof rafters came next, followed by roofing boards covered with asphalt shingles. We knew from the beginning of the project that we would not try to replicate the infill of the outer walls as they had been constructed in Kingston. Instead we chose to use cordwood. For this method logs are cut into appropriate lengths and piled between the posts. For our house, André bought white cedar logs and piled them up to one side of the building site where they dried for most of summer.When it was time to use them, our sons cut them to seven-inch lengths and mixed the mortar. For cordwood construction, the wood tends to suck the moisture very quickly out of the mortar mix, so it needed to be wetter than normal.Wet sawdust was also added to make a very porous, fluffy mix which does not crack like a rigid mortar would if used with cordwood, given the significant differential of expansion between the masonry and the wood in the Canadian climate.We used three parts sand, one soaked sawdust, one Portland cement and one hydrated lime.These proportions have the advantage of curing slowly,while minimising cracking once dry. Before building the wall of cordwood and mortar, André nailed a large sheet of plywood to the posts.This made the task of placing the logs easier and kept the outer wall smooth and even. We wanted the house to be very well insulated, so we applied panels of foam insulation two inches thick on the inside face of all the walls, and then covered them with wallboard. The roof was insulated in a similar manner. The result is a house relatively easy to heat with a woodburning stove and a fireplace on all but the coldest winter weekends.The house finally regained a stone chimney to replace the one left behind on Carleton Island when my husband Wilfred built a new one to accommodate the efficient wood-burning fireplace he had invented.We now enjoy the beauty of this fireplace and the heat it provides. For the past 30 years our weekend house has beenwhere friends and family gather. It is the centre of our family life. Originally built on an island in the St Lawrence River, it spent 200 years beside the Cataraqui River in Kingston. Now it sits on a hill overlooking the Salmon River in Eastern Ontario.We hope this is where it will stay. Nathalie Sorensen enjoys gardening, writing, poetry and spending time with friends and family. André Sorensen building the cordwood wall Detail of the construction showing beams and posts
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