They built an incredibly warm house using nothing but regular firewood! 🔥✨ The technique is surprisingly simple yet genius—every detail is crafted for maximum warmth and durability 🪵🏡 You won’t believe how this house turned out—take a look inside in this article! ⬇️
The amount of clay needed should be about 20% of the volume of the firewood. Clay acts as the main element of the mortar that binds the logs into strong walls for a firewood house. To make the clay warmer and prevent it from cracking, it should be mixed with finely chopped straw. The straw should be added in a volume of 10-15% of the clay’s volume and mixed thoroughly.
The foundation for a firewood house is quite simple. A simple strip foundation is sufficient, with layers of stone poured and sealed with liquid mortar to fill all the gaps effectively. The foundation only needs to be about 1 meter deep, as wooden walls are lighter than brick and more resilient to ground movement.A depth of 40-50 centimeters is ideal, as it provides sufficient insulation to keep the house warm even during freezing winters.
Building wooden walls is a simple technique, but it demands accuracy and attention to detail. The logs must be carefully placed on the mortar with joints kept as thin as possible. There is also a small trick to make the walls warmer. The trick is to apply the clay-salt mortar in two parallel rows rather than a continuous layer.
This method creates an air pocket within the clay layer, which prevents the seams from freezing and forming cold bridges.
When building corners, it’s important to use a method similar to bricklaying, overlapping the rows of logs to add strength to the whole structure.
I’m building a 9×9 meter house with one and a half floors using 40 cm long logs and clay. The walls are laid like bricks, with each row overlapping the corners. Every 50-70 cm, I added a layer of inch-thick boards, which also helped level the structure.
At a time, I can only lay three rows of firewood, as the clay needs time to dry. If I lay more, the weight of the upper rows pushes the lower logs out.
One detail I didn’t find in any manual was the need to secure the walls with braces or formwork, similar to what is used in TISE technology. I used shields made of three boards, placed both inside and outside, along the entire length of the wall. These shields are movable. At the bottom, they are attached to the finished wall with screws, and at the top, a spacer of 41 cm is used to maintain the wall’s thickness and ensure the logs don’t stick out too far. The shields also help keep the walls straight.
For windows and doors, I made boxes with boards measuring 200×100 mm to fit the wall’s width. These boxes are set directly into the masonry. Since the wall is 9 meters long, I added a fifth wall in the middle of the house, built with 150×150 mm timber. The ends of this timber are embedded directly into the main walls.
The beams for the second floor are supported at one end by the frame of the fifth wall and at the other by the outer walls. I placed a board along the full length of the wall beneath the beams to ensure they remain level.
I had to stop work on the second floor for now since frost has started, and water is freezing in the mornings, making it impossible to lay walls in such conditions.
