If you ever find yourself attempting to build a home for you and your family in a remote jungle environment, you will most likely be faced with making the following decision: “Will I buy the wood to build my house and then ship it in to my location, or will I cut it myself out in the bush?”
If you choose the former option, then your path is pretty straight forward. You will go to a local lumber yard, gather the timber sizes and lengths that you need, and then give them your first-born child as payment. Then you will arrange for a helicopter to shuttle all of your lumber to your building site for you. This will cost you your right arm.
Like I said, it’s not that complicated.
If you happen to be somewhat fond of your appendages and children, however, then you might want to consider the second option. This one is a little bit more labor intensive, but, overall, I think it is a more economical endeavor.
If your house plans are similar to ours (23 ft. x 40 ft., including the 9 ft. x 23 ft. front porch, and exterior siding made of simple, woven bamboo), then you will be looking at a timber list of roughly 800 boards, ranging from 6x2s to 2x3s (and everything in between). This may seem like a lot, but let me assure you…it is.
On average, it will take 6-7 GINORMOUS trees to give you the lumber required for a house this size.
So, you may be wondering, “How do I get started?”
First, you’ll need to gather your supplies. Here is what we headed into the bush with last week when we did this ourselves:
- 200 liters (50 gallons) of gasoline
- 7 liters (7 quarts) of 2-stroke engine oil
- 100 liters (25 gallons) of bar and chain oil
- 3 monster-sized chainsaws (+ 1 normal-sized chainsaw for cutting and limbing the trees)
- 2 Alaskan sawmills (attachments that go on the bar of the saws to help you cut an “even” strip of timber)
- 1 long, straight board to use as a guide for your initial cut on each log.
- Various files, tools, wedges, extra cutting chains, ear protectors…etc.
- 1 Jan Peter Mol (pronounced: Yon Peter Mole)
No matter what you do during all your prep work and packing, don’t forget that last one.
Jan Peter is an NTM missionary from the Netherlands, and before he joined the mission and came to PNG, this Dutchman worked for a decade or two as a lumberjack. He’s got a strong accent, and he’s about as optimistic as Eeyore, but holy cow, the man knows how to run a chainsaw!
You can’t put a price on having someone on your team who knows how to keep your saws sharp and do minor repairs (and cut down huge trees without killing everyone). We never would have reached our quota in time if it wasn’t for this man!
All right, so now you’ve got all your gear together. We’ll just assume that you were able to get everything to your location without too much trouble (we had to book a helicopter, just sayin’).
Your next step is to hit the bush. I would recommend having a dozen or two of your new tribal buddies go with you, since they are the ones who know the trees and the area (and they are all about 4 times stronger than you). You will be spending 8-9 hours a day, for the next week and a half, cutting trees and slabbing timber. (For a more detailed description of what this process looks like, you can follow this link to a newsletter we sent out a little while ago.)
You are guaranteed two things during this time: Your back will be incredibly sore at the beginning, middle, and end of each day, and you will find sawdust in places that you didn’t even know you had.
But, eventually, you will finish. And at the end of all your hard work, as you survey your huge pile of beautiful, albeit slightly crooked, pieces of timber, you will feel….well, probably pain. But, once you get over the pain, you will feel….exhaustion. BUT, after the exhaustion, you will eventually be comforted by the pride that comes from knowing that you just cut every joist, rafter, and stud of your new home using nothing but chainsaws and virgin jungle.
And then you will take a nap.
