[Cob] Pole walls

[Elizabeth]

I lived for several years in a house that is locally known (southwest Washington) as a log-slab house.  It was built in the 1920s
 
The frame is, I belive, fairly standard wood-frame stud construction, and the house is panelled, inside and out, with the slabs that are cut off of logs at the mill before they are cut into lumber. The slabs are round on one side and flat on the other.  The flat side was placed against the frame and attached with big nails.  Someone later on had nailed in quarter-round molding--the kind you can buy at any hardware store--into each gap on the inside of the house, probably in an effort to close up and conceal the gaps left by shrinkage.  
 
Some time in the fifties, the house was raised off the ground and given a concrete block foundation; in spite of this, most of the logs on the outside had pretty bad dry rot.   The attic was insulated with blown-in insulation.  
 
The slabs had some pretty big gaps where the wood shrank--there were places where I could hold my hand up to the wall and feel cold air blowing through; there were also places where we could see daylight through the walls.  When we complained about these, our landlady came out and stuffed handfulls of fiberglass insulation into the worst spots.  Some earlier tenant had tried chinking it from the outside with silicone caulk, which was peeling off.  
 
Nonetheless, the house could be heated more or less adequately with a wood stove, which my then-husband spent most his time feeding, or a baseboard heater supplemented by a portable heater.  If the stove went out with tempearatures in the 20s outside, we woke up with frost on the INSIDE of the windows.   I worried a lot about what the house would do in an earthquake--I could imagine the frame twisting and the slabs peeling off and dropping on us.  
 
The house and all our clothes and bedding always smelled like smoke--the chimney may have leaked smoke into the attic, and I think the wind blew it back in through the cracks in the walls as well.  
 
We also had big wrinkles in the carpet, because with the irregular edges on the walls, the carpet installers hadn't been able to stretch it properly.
 
I do think a layer of poles, especially if they were overlapped the way Charmaine as described, would work around a cob house, especially if they were chinked.  You could minimize the need for shrinkage by drying the poles first.  But I'm not sure it would be enough for Alaska!  Maybe combined with light straw....(see archives).
 
We didn't try doing our own chinking because we had such a crotchety landlady who thought the house, built by her father, was a historic treasure--also we couldn't figure out what to use.  
 
Elizabeth

		
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