From Start to Finish

Early April in Zionville: I chose a "flatter" site at home behind the workshop, which is fairly central to the big sugar maple trees, and a great spot for the sugar shack. Do not be deceived by the pictures which make things look pretty flat. In actuality, the ground is not even close to being level.

April 9th: In Creston cutting up some yellow/tulip poplar, beech, and black locust trees into 9' logs.

April 9th: Logs loaded on the trailer, with some bonus firewood for next season's maple sap boil'.

April 9th: Two loads of logs offloaded at by the sawmill in Zionville.

April 19th: Cleaning up the build site.

April 20th: Stacking rocks for a primitive foundation to get an idea of how difficult leveling things is going to be.

April 21st: Moving in and stacking larger rocks for a more firm foundation. The ground here might not look like it, but it is absolutely loaded with rocks. Large rocks lay scattered all around the woods, and there is nowhere on the homesite that I can dig a hole without hitting rock, thus any part of this project that will require rock, I have more available than I could possibly ever need.

April 30th: Back in Creston getting ready to cut a large white pine into logs. This tree uprooted in October of 2021 (which is when I took these particular pictures.) Cutting up this tree I learned that you can get poison ivy simply through contact with its dormant vines. There was a lot of old poison ivy wrapped around this tree, and since it hadn't leafed out yet, I wasn't being careful. So yeah, that part turned out to not be so fun.

At this point I was going to try to document the process of building the sugar shack from scratch via video, but it was a huge hassle, and I kept forgetting to record parts of the process. I decided I didn't have enough time to fiddle with a camera and be productive in my work with what little time I have. My hat is off to the faithful youtubers who do this. Here is what video I did record on this particular day.

April 30th: Prepping to load the large white pine logs. Getting these logs to the trailer proved to be a frustrating task given the slope of the terrain. The pictures do not do the slope justice, and the logs kept wanting to roll downhill, sometimes getting tangled up with trees, which required a lot of man handling and positioning obstacles to prevent/reduce rolling.

April 30th: Winching the largest white pine log onto the trailer. This particular log took me a very long time to get on the trailer (see previous comment.)

May 2nd: Back in Zionville, starting to mill some of the yellow poplar logs for true 2x4's (My first attempt a non-live edge slab cuts')

May 22th: Back in Creston, formulating a plan to cut a decent sized shagbark hickory tree that uprooted during the winter.

May 22th: Getting ready to cut the shagbark hickory tree into 9' logs.

May 22th: Winching the logs to a spot where they can be loaded onto the trailer.

May 22th: Shagbark hickory logs are stagged for loading.

After several trips to Creston over the course of a month and a half (now being late May,) I have quite a pile of logs to mill. I have a couple logs of black locust, two beech, five shagbark hickory, three nice sized white pines and several small ones, and the rest all being yellow poplar.

May 29th: Construction has begun using freshly milled black locust 2x6s for the outer frame for the floor. Over the next several days i'll add joists and boxing with yellow poplar, in addition to adding more stacked rock support and fine tuning the leveling.

June 4th: Starting to mill the shagbark hickory for 1" thick flooring planks.

June 4th: The first shagbark hickory log is all squared up and ready to cut the planks. This wood is incredibly hard, and taking toll on my blades. I have to cut very slowly.

June 5th: Hickory flooring being installed. The stack of planks on the right are white pine planks I milled to get the log out of the way. These will eventually be used for the siding. So far, this foundation is incredibly solid! I am impressed with the stacked rock solution.

June 9th: Milling the last of the shagbark hickory for the flooring, and another blade broke. I destroyed two blades getting through these logs ($20 a piece). Cutting through this wood is like cutting through rock. It's obvious here that the blade is dull, since I am handling it without gloves, but this blade was brand new before I started cutting the log before this one. With the performance of the mill/blade on shagbark hickory, I will never intentionally seek out this type of tree to mill in the future.

June 11th: Completed the flooring. I just need to cut off the ends to even things out. I will say it again... This base foundation is incredibly solid. I cannot feel any slight movement at all when forcefully shifting my weight. It is as if I am walking on concrete.

June 12th: Getting ready to start milling yellow/tulip poplar logs into 2x4s for wall studs. Cutting the yellow poplar is a breath of fresh air. Compared to cutting the hickory, cutting the poplar is like cutting through butter.

Before I start building the walls, I need to figure out what I am going to do for the windows. Originally I was planning to take the easy way out, window wise, but wanting to let a lot of sunlight in, I’d like to have as many as two 24”x36” (minimum size) windows on each side, and purchasing new windows will add up to a significant cost. So I have been considering building my own barn sash windows, and potentially using polycarbonate instead of glass. The cost of polycarbonate is expensive, and even sheets of glass are far more expensive than I assumed. I may visit some local antique shops and see if they have some old windows that might have a complementing aesthetic. Whatever I end up doing, I am hoping to limit expenses wherever possible, and willing do things in a DIY manner.

July 17th: I built two wall frames a couple of weeks ago, and then the third today. I had a 2 week break from working on the shack after going to Michigan for vacation to visit friends and family. I depleted my supply of milled tulip poplar, so I will be milling a few more logs at some point this week to obtain the lumber needed for the final wall as well as the roof.

July 18th: After a nice rain, the shagbark hickory flooring looks really pretty.

July 23th: Wall framing is complete, as well as the framing for the roof. I am actually going to make the roof with poles and greenhouse plastic for this year, this will allow me to easily prop the roof open to allow steam to escape during sap boiling. It will also allow in a lot of sunlight, and the sugar shack might be able to double as a greenhouse after maple syrup season is over.

July 30th: Completed the first hinged roof panel. It has been raining every day lately which has dramatically slowed me down in working on this project. Rain and thunderstorms are in the forecast for the foreseeable future.

August 2nd: Getting ready to slab out the big white pine logs for siding.

August 6th: The greenhouse plastic installed and secured on the roof (Farm Plastic Supply plastic attached to the wood frame with metal roofing screws with EPDM washers to help prevent tearing.) This will make proping the roof open much easier (since it does not weigh much,) and will allow a lot of sunlight in. Next year I will likely replace with clear polycarbonate roof panels for durability, but for this year I need to keep my costs as low as possible.

August 8th: Starting to plank the walls with white pine.

August 9th: Continued planking, until I ran out of what white pine I had milled so far. I'll need to mill more of the white pine logs this week to continue.

August 14th: Building the first of three windows from yellow poplar, and acrylic sheets (instead of glass, as it is both cheaper and much stronger.) Glued up, but will need to wait until tomorrow to let the glue dry so that I can finish it. I need to get these in place before I complete the walls. I am using two OPTIX 18x24 inch sheets per window.

August 22th: Walls and windows are completed. I ended up running out of white pine on the last wall, and had to use beech for four of the planks. It doesnt look any different, however beech doesnt hold up to the elements as well as pine, but hoping a Bora Care treatment that I plan to give the entire structure will help.

Before I started building the sugar shack, I had amassed quite a pile of logs, and I figured that I had more than enough to completely finish the project with what I had accumulated. What I didn't realize was just how much “waste” there would be in the form of log cutoffs, that is the curved parts of the logs that needed to be sawed off first in order to cut lumber. You get four of these per log, and if the log isn't perfectly straight you inevitably lose wood in order to square things up. I didn't end up getting as much lumber out of each log as a novice sawer such as myself thought. With that being said, I was able to just about finish the build as planned, but now that I am needing to build the door, I don’t have enough of a single species of wood to build the entire door. I am either going to have to mix and match, or actually harvest another tree (which would be the only tree that I would personally have to cut down for this project.)

In regards to the massive pile of log cutoffs that I have accumulated, some of these can be debarked and used for trim, but most will provide me with an incredible amount of firewood for my evaporator. Because of this, I probably will never need to harvest trees specifically for firewood as long as I am milling lumber. When it comes to live edge slab cuts, which is what I do for most most other projects, I of course will not accumulate cutoffs.

August 27th: I found a creative way to utilize some beech cutoffs which I debarked, along side beech boards, and a sugar maple branch for the pull. Door completed! I need to plane the top of the door a bit, as things were not totally square and I am currently prevented from being able to close the door all the way.

September 19th: I carved a couple of signs for the sugar shack... Later, in the fall, I setup the evaporator and installed piping for the smoke.