Aslak Lie Historic Home
The home’s namesake built his family house in the 1850s from local white oak after immigrating from Norway at 50 years old. Aslak built the home by hewing logs with axes and raising them with pulleys to fit precisely in dovetailed joints. Wisconsin’s hardwood may have been denser to work with compared to Norwegian pines, but proved it’s durability.
State Historical Society of Wisconsin
Aslak Lie and family
August 1875, photo by Andrew Dahl. The photo shows the horizontal log construction which makes up the first floor of the building. Additions were made to the original home to accommodate a growing family.
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May 2022
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Community Raise Day
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Nels and his favorite tool
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Installing roof beam + rafters
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Second floor frame
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Roof boards + siding
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Cedar shingles + ridge cap
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Oct 2022
The photograph was taken before deconstruction. The background shows the building process at the start of the summer of 2020.
Collection of new and antique tools used in everyday building process.
Collection of hand tools
Nels Diller has led a devoted effort to reconstruct the historic home using traditional methods and tools. Throughout my summers of working on the project, I have practiced removing bark and sapwood from logs, cutting dovetails with saws, chisels and planes, using a drawknife to creat cylindrical pegs, raise logs with a system of pulleys, create two flat parallel surfaces on either side of a log and fitting joints to lay a level log.
This video shows how we used axes to remove material, before using more refined tools.
The material is removed by making cross cuts and using a broad head axe to chip off material. This is one of the first steps in the process, followed by using a scrub plane to plane flat. Straight boards are screwed to the sides as guides.
