One winter ago, I cut down with a chainsaw eight or nine large white pine trees looming over my farmhouse at Maine. Billy Loubier owns a small sawmill two miles from my house and stopped in to estimate how much lumber could be cut from the towering pile of logs. Estimating the volume of usable lumber is done in board feet, or a piece of rough-cut lumber that is one foot long by one foot wide by one inch thick. I would be paying per board foot as well learning the operation of the mill.

I hired a log truck driver to load up the pile and haul it down the road to the mill site where Billy began changing each log from wild, live edged cylinders into sharply angled industrial forms ideal for piecing together a home.

Mr. Loubier uses his farm tractor with lumber forks to load up a sixteen-foot length of tree and power washes all the dirt out of the bark and crannies to preserve the sharpness of the band-saw blade. He lines up the log with the rails that the mill slides over and lowers the massive log gently down with the power of hydraulics.

He looks at the log and decides what the best use of the volume would be and whether it should be an eight-inch by eight-inch beam, a bunch of two-inch thick slabs of uniform width, or one-inch thick boards of uniform width. Years of staring down the end grain of logs have allowed Billy to decide the best use of each stem.

With the small engine of the band saw fired and the depth of the cut measured out, we slowly slide the blade down the length of the log. I am struck by immense strength clearly visible in Billy’s arms and back. The rope-like knots of muscle show the result of a lifetime of farm work. Back and forth, the saw glides, pulling a clean, bright board from with each pass until all that is left is a stack of lumber and the slab wood. This is the tree edges with the bark still on which I cut up and will use to fire the stove while making maple syrup in the spring.

At a large scale mill the amount of waste wood would be staggering from my crooked knot filled logs. But Billy can see lumber where others only see pulpwood, destined for a fire or the paper mill. The cut lumber is “sticked” with small pieces between each layer to allow for drying and handling. Looking at one of these piles of 17-inch wide, 16-foot long pine boards makes my mind race, thinking about the myriad possibilities for the timber frame house I want to build with all this fine wood. Satisfaction is associated with making and learning, and I was lucky enough to have a good teacher.

Mr. Waldeier, a philosopher and political economist, once built an addition to his house for a gross cost of $10.