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I once had a fat stack of Mother Earth News sitting in an ancient wooden magazine rack in my suburban living room. I’d pore over the endless photos of permaculture gardens, canning, and beehives. But the topic that most caught my eye was building with cordwood masonry.
Cordwood masonry is a style of natural building where short lengths of logs are laid in a matrix of mortar with the log ends facing outward, unlike traditional log homes that have the side grain facing out. You can read more about what cordwood masonry is in detail in this post.
My husband and I were drawn to the unique appearance of cordwood masonry. Even if two cordwood builders were to use the exact same building plans, each house would end up being completely different. There’s an endless variety of patterns that can emerge as you build. It’s very organic.
We were also enticed by the notion of building without a mortgage and using resources that were readily available in our area and on our potential future property.
Fast forward ten years from our initial foray into finding raw land and building our cordwood home, and we’ve learned a LOT.
We’ve learned not only from our own cordwood build, but from others who have either contacted me through my blog or who I’ve connected with in the Cordwood Construction Facebook group. And as I’ve come to discover, there are a lot of pros and cons to building with cordwood masonry.
If cordwood construction has been on your radar and you’re trying to figure out if it’s something you may want to build with, read on. We’ll dive into the nuance and things to consider before you take the plunge.
Pros and Cons of Building With Cordwood Masonry
Benefits to Building with Cordwood
LOWER COST
Building with cordwood is a relatively inexpensive way to get a beautiful, unique, sustainable home. Depending on how you source your logs and how much of the work you do yourself, cordwood can be considerably less expensive than building with traditional stud framing.
Once you complete a cordwood wall, it is finished both inside and out. You don’t need to spend additional money on sheathing, house wrap, insulation, exterior veneers, drywall or other interior finish work.
There is a downside to this though: I sometimes find it difficult to cover up an interior cordwood wall. Usually, that’s because it is such a lovely thing to look at, but there are other reasons. Keep reading to learn about it in the Cons section.
SUSTAINABILITY
Many people who choose to build with cordwood masonry harvest the wood themselves right from their own properties. This eliminates the need to obtain lots of farmed lumber in the form of studs, sheathing, and so on.
Harvesting the cedar trees from our own property had the footprint of our chainsaw fuel and oil, so I won’t pretend like the footprint is ZERO. But it is certainly better than modern timber farming and the emissions associated with it from harvesting to processing to transporting it.
The harvesting of trees from your own lot can even improve the health of your forest if you do it well.
LESS WASTEFUL
There is a lot of waste that goes into typical construction. I live in an area with a lot of new construction from single-family homes to apartment complexes, and I frequently drive by build sites with dumpsters full of lumber. All those trees that grew and grew just to be harvested and thrown into a landfill. What a shame.
Even constructing a standard log home has a lot of waste because it requires a certain uniformity to the logs that are used.
By contrast, cordwood masonry can use most parts of a tree right down to the smallest branches. You need a variety of log sizes and shapes to build with cordwood, so you have more opportunities to use parts of a tree that would just be discarded otherwise.
ENERGY EFFICIENT
Cordwood has two big benefits in terms of energy efficiency: good insulation and thermal mass.
Imagine a cordwood wall like a mortar-insulation-mortar sandwich. The insulation in the middle keeps the interior mortar at a more stable temperature, which regulates the living space through the day and night.
The logs themselves also act as insulators. The thermal mass of the wall system releases the cool from the night throughout the day, and then releases the daytime warmth at night, keeping a consistent cycle of temperature regulation in the space.
I will say this can be a mixed bag though. I’ve often found that after a multi-week stretch of temperatures in the 90’s outside (or somewhere over 30 for you folks using celsius) that once the temperature FINALLY breaks and the outside cools down, it can take a little while for the house to catch up to that relief.
FIRE RESISTANCE
Cordwood masonry is recognized by many major insurance companies to be fire resistant. Why? Because they recognize it as a type of masonry and not a style of log building.
The mortar itself is not a flammable material and it is very hard to light a full log on fire.
Seriously. Have you ever tried to just light a whole log on fire before?
If you’ve ever built a campfire before then you know. You use kindling and small wood pieces to get a fire going from within before a log will light. You don’t start by lighting a large log first. This is the same principle.
Not only that, but each log is separated from the next by a matrix of mortar. It would take a considerable amount of time for a fire to spread from log to log.
The University of New Brunswick (UNB) conducted a fire-resistance test on a representative sample of cordwood wall. In the book “Cordwood and The Code”, this test was outlined as follows:
“A non load-bearing cordwood masonry prism was constructed and tested under conditions which approximated the ASTM standard fire endurance test (ASTM El19-88). The fire test was conducted for five hours and twenty-six minutes without failure.”
“Cordwood masonry can be considered a safe material to work with respect to fire resistance. The fire test showed that the wall is able to withstand a blast flame for over five hours. A practical fire resistance rating for the purposes of the National Building Code of Canada assembly comparison system of at least one and half hours is recommended.”
-“Cordwood and The Code”
In short, if we ever had a fire at our house the stud walls and tongue-and-groove would be the first to go. The cordwood would likely remain.
WORKS IN MOST CLIMATES
I say “most” because I haven’t personally visited every single biome on the planet, so who knows. Maybe there is somewhere on earth where it’s a problematic method, but unless you’re looking to build in Antarctica you’ll probably be fine.
There are cordwood buildings found in all parts of the world from the chilly winters in Alberta, Canada to the humid American South to the desert and mountain climates of Mexico.
The trick is following best practices, which you can read more about here:
READ: How to Avoid Rot in a Cordwood Wall: A Best Practices Guide
EASY TO BUILD
This doesn’t mean that the rest of the house is easy to build too, but actually building up the cordwood is the easiest part and you’ll have the most fun doing it. It feels very much like “arts and crafts” at summer camp.
We’d often pop on some music, a podcast, or an audiobook and listen while we used our hands to shape and mold mortar around each log.
That being said, the entire building process, including the log prep, can be very physically taxing. If you’re the one harvesting the trees yourself, you have to be physically able to operate a chainsaw and move the trees yourself.
And let me just say — trees are heavy.
But overall, the actual technique is easy to learn and can be done by just about anyone. You can even lay cordwood while sitting down!
You can learn the ins and outs of cordwood construction in greater detail in our online course Building With Cordwood Masonry:
The Negatives of Building With Cordwood Masonry
As much as I would love to paint a rosy picture of building with cordwood, I can’t. You need a realistic idea of what it truly means to build with this technique.
While it is something I would gladly do again and again, it may not be the best method for you. Read on to find out some of the cons of building with this natural method.
LOTS OF PHYSICAL WORK OVERALL
From cutting down trees and prepping the wood to framing, cordwooding, and finishing, the entire process of home construction is a very physical job. Cutting the trees was easily the most exhausting part of the process for us, followed by the post and beam framing and all of the other aspects of building that require brute strength.
If you’re planning to do a lot of the work yourself, make sure you’re up to the task. If you have physical limitations, make plans for dealing with it well ahead of time.
For example, you can outsource the more taxing labor like site prep and framing. You can even find ways to get cordwood already prepped for you if you’re savvy and keep an eye out for opportunities. I’ve seen many people get peeled cedar logs as discards from log home companies, fence post makers, and so on.
IT TAKES A LOT OF TIME
Cordwood is not a quick process. Even if you hire out the foundation, framing, and roofing, the cordwood itself takes quite a bit of time to do. It took us from July 16 – October 30, 2016 to complete the cordwood, working primarily on weekends, holidays, and after work on select weekdays.
You can see some of those building updates from when the walls were going up to get a sense of what that process looked like:
CAN BE TRICKY TO GET PERMITS
It is SO important to work closely with your code officials if you are in a location requiring building permits and inspections.
It is not impossible to build to code and comply with inspector requirements if you have the right materials and information to give them. That said, some inspectors may see cordwood as too non-standard and simply write it off as a NO without taking a closer look.
Luckily for us, our inspector was a reasonable guy who took an interest in our project because it wasn’t just another cookie-cutter house. We learned a lot from working with him and our house ended up being better built because of it.
If you’re even THINKING of building with cordwood, go ahead and get yourself a copy of “Cordwood and The Code”. It’s a lifesaver of a book.
You can learn more about working with code officials in these posts:
READ: Natural Building and The Code
READ: A Beginner’s Guide to Working With Code Officials and Permits
NOT ALWAYS SUSTAINABLE
If your property doesn’t already have a healthy supply of suitable trees, you may end up having to source logs from outside your immediate area. Perhaps you can get logs from another property owner nearby. You may also find them from a logging operation, local sawyer, or even local log home builders.
This can raise your overall cost to build and increases the footprint of your project.
This isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, but you do need to consider whether the materials are readily available for you to build with as you choose your building method.
DECORATING CAN BE…TRICKY
I alluded to this earlier in the post, but decorating around cordwood walls can be problematic.
There are often walls that I look at and think, “Man, if this were in a regular house with drywall I’d put a big ol’ bookshelf right there.” But then I look at the beautiful colored bottles and the log shaped like a heart that my husband did up for me and I think about how I could NEVER cover that up.
The same goes for hanging pictures. My family has a LOT of art. Grandpa was a painter and professional artist. My mom is an accomplished artist in her own right, as were several members of our family going way back. So I have paintings coming to me. One in particular is MASSIVE.
I did not fully account for that when we created the layout for our house. Hanging pictures on our tongue-and-groove pine walls is very easy! Hanging them on cordwood walls isn’t necessarily hard, but I also don’t want to cover it up.
And realistically, we just don’t have many of those pine walls available to hang artwork.
Aside from artwork, a lot of folks wonder about hanging cabinetry, shelving, and other functional items. I will say it can be tricky, but is definitely doable. The key is making sure you build your cordwood wall as level and plumb as possible at the outset. From there, some folks choose to mount backing strips or backer boards to help hold whatever they’re trying to install.
For example, we used 2×4’s and plywood to mount all of the solar equipment in our solar shed. You can see a bit of that below:
You can see the process in more detail in these posts:
READ: How We Built Our Cordwood Shed
READ: How We Upgraded Our Off-Grid Solar System
So should you build with cordwood?
I think it’s a fabulous natural building method, but it’s definitely not for everyone. If you’ve read through this post and feel like you still want to tackle it, make sure you grab our free eBook all about how we built our cordwood house:
Also, be sure to check out our online course “Building With Cordwood Masonry”
It’s full of lessons, videos, and worksheets that not only walk you through the process, but give you tools you can use to plan your own custom cordwood build from start to finish.
Learn more about our original cordwood homestead project here. And be sure to join us on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram for more homesteading goodies that don’t necessarily make it to the blog. Thanks for reading!
