A move in the right direction

Photo by Pix Tresa on Unsplash

A while back, I talked about the kind of spread I wanted. It’s part of something I call Project Ithaca, just to have a name for it in my mind. I picked the name a year ago, before the Christopher Nolan movie was anything but a blip in the Hollywood trades.

As I’ve delved into it, there’s a lot to try and understand.

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That includes just how difficult it is to use your own trees to build a house. Honestly, there’s a lot happening there, and I’ll be researching it further, but what’s interesting here and now is that the Department of Agriculture is looking to rescind some of its requirements for buildings on farmland that gets federal dollars.

The Rural Business-Cooperative Service (RBCS), Rural Housing Service (RHS), and Rural Utilities Service (RUS), together make up the Rural Development (RD or the Agency) mission area within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). RD is issuing this proposed rule to rescind its regulation regarding construction and repairs. RD found this regulation to be unnecessary and unduly burdensome. In addition, it makes changes to RBCS regulations by removing references to the construction and repair regulations. The plain language summary of the proposal is available on Regulations.gov in the docket for rulemaking.

Interesting.

Why? Well, because of Project Ithaca, in a way. See, I want to build with timber-framing techniques. It’s a sturdy system of building that has created a lot of structures that are still standing centuries later. Sure, not all of them made it, but a lot did, and I like that.

And they were built with fairly green wood. To a degree, this is a good thing because as the wood dries, it shrinks, which means all that joinery gets tighter. The house becomes stronger over the first handful of years as the timber dries.

The problem is that, for a house, Georgia won’t allow you to use “ungraded” timber for any structure someone will live in. Grading means letting it dry completely and then paying to have someone come out and determine what all you can do with that timber structurally.

Yet, in the laws the feds say are sufficient for protecting federal taxpayer money, Georgia will permit you to build on “any accessory structure not containing habitable space.”

In other words, I can use my own trees to build a workshop, a greenhouse, a barn, or just about any other building I want other than the house, regardless of how much time I spend in there, just so long as I don’t cook or sleep there.

Think about that for a moment.

Hypothetically, the state’s law—again, good enough for the feds to trust to protect the taxpayers’ interests—says that I have to use this particular, graded, dried lumber to build the shelter I sleep and cook in, but I can spend the other 15 hours a day in a workshop made with stuff I picked up off the ground if I wanted, and that’s safe enough.

But if I want to use my own trees to build my own house, I have to let massive timbers either air dry for years upon years or find a kiln to dry them for me, thus driving up the cost.

Affordability is a big buzzword these days, and I really do want to find a way to make things like housing cheaper for folks, if for no other reason than it allows them to spend money elsewhere for better quality things.

The issue, though, is that if I want to spend less and use my labor instead, I’m not allowed to do that for my own home. I have no say in the matter. I can build a building that I’ll work out of all day, and it’s fine. I can build a massive barn where hundreds congregate for weddings or parties, and that’s fine, just so long as no one cooks in the building.

But if I want to build a home using a technique that’s been around for the last thousand years or so, I need some guy’s permission to use my own lumber from my own land on my own house.

It would be one thing if they simply created guidelines for using ungraded timber in homes, but they don’t. Not even for timber framing—which is allowed in Georgia, by the way—which uses green wood cut straight from the tree traditionally, all without issue.

Maybe I’m missing something in all the legalese, but it sure as hell looks like the issue is that they don’t want me using my own trees, but buying trees from someone else.

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I’m sorry, but even if that’s not the case, the fact that the feds are fine with whatever, and Georgia is fine with this kind of timber used on structures that people will be in for however long they want, seems to make the whole graded lumber requirement sketchy as hell.

We want affordable housing, supposedly. We just don’t want regular people figuring out how to build their own homes affordably, I guess.

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