Dad's Sawmill

This is the building that houses my Dad's sawmill. Like his garage, it is a pole structure and he built it himself with wood that he cut on his sawmill. The sawmill lived in the field until this structure was built.

The left-hand bay currently houses a flatbed trailer. The right-hand bay houses the sawmill. It's on wheels so it can be towed, and my Dad made it himself. The only part he got already assembled was the blade housing. He welded the I-beam and a bunch of parts together, and attached the axles, and put on a motor, and a bunch of other stuff I don't pretend to understand. It's a COOL thing. I didn't really appreciate it until I got to help him saw wood with it. Well, he sawed. I stayed out of the way and dumped the sawdust bucket when it got full.

The big white barrel halves hold sawdust. Behind them is a big fan, to blow the sawdust away from you while you work and help you breathe; it also keeps you cool on hot days. The sawmill itself is back in the shadows (click for a larger view) but you can see some of it, orange and black and white. To the right is a clever shelf thing with some scraps of wood on it. I'll talk about the clever shelf thing in another post.

The sawmill building is built next to a hill (to the right of the building in this photo) so Dad can drag logs over with his tractor, then roll them down the hill and onto the sawmill. He can do everything from start to finish by himself.

Logging Tools

My Dad has a sawmill. When I visited in May, we cut some lumber. These are a couple of the tools we used.

This Peavey was my great-grandfather's. Dad has a couple of them. They're used to maneuver logs.

A "cant" is a squared off log. A "cant hook" looks like this but it doesn't have a pointy end (so you can't stick it in the ground and tell it to wait for you). A peavey is a cant hook with a spike on it.


These tongs are used to haul logs with the tractor. You just open them up, put them on the log, and then when the tractor pulls they close automatically. It looks simple but they're big and heavy and I was pretty retarded looking the first few times I tried to get them to hook and unhook.

Road Trip

I went out of town for a long weekend this past weekend. My travels took me across the New River Gorge Bridge. I've been across a few times, but this time I decided to stop and enjoy a view of the bridge. It was about 5:30 in the evening, the air was visibly humid, my lens wasn't exactly clean, and the sun was in my face. But I snapped a photo anyway.

This is the second highest bridge in the US (876 feet) and the largest steel span bridge in the world. I didn't even know it existed until I drove across it because MapQuest said that was the best way to go.

Clever Shelf

Our old house has two closets. They were added into two of the bedrooms after the bedrooms were built, so they intrude into the room. They're pretty small, about 4'x6'. Maybe not that deep. We have no coat closet, no linen closet, no place to hide the broom and vacuum cleaner, no place to put aspirin and bandaids, no place for board games or toys.

Evidently, the prior owners also felt the need for more storage space, and they had some very clever solutions. Here is a shelf in the mud room, fashioned of a piece of board and some baling twine. I wouldn't have thought it would be stable if you described it to me, but it works like a champ.

Clever, huh?