Homegrown Home

• By GEORGE MORRIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jan 25, 2009 - Page: 1D - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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FRENCH SETTLEMENT — When retired school principal Ray Matherne was in the hospital with heart problems in 1994, he surprised his wife, Marie, with an idea: How about building a new home?

By building, Matherne did not mean hire someone to build it. He meant building the house — or, at least, the interior — themselves.

And by doing it themselves, he didn’t mean using lumber delivered by a building supply business. He meant using the wood on the family’s 150 acres in French Settlement: cutting the trees, milling the wood, drying, planing, installing and finishing it.
Marie figured it must have been the medicines talking.

“I just humored him,” she said. “I didn’t think we’d ever do it.”

But they did. Starting in 2000, after subcontracting the framing, electrical and plumbing, the Mathernes did the rest in the 1,816 square feet of the main section of the house, plus the porch. In the seven-year process, they created not only a home, but put a wide array of wood grains on display.

The Mathernes used 23 varieties of trees that grew on their property to make the wall paneling, beams, ceilings, doors, wainscots, trim and cabinetry in the house. Only the longleaf pine flooring, which a relative got out of New Orleans, didn’t grow on Matherne land.

The white pine, yellow pine, cypress, beech, ash, cherry, pecan, hickory, black locust, magnolia, sycamore, poplar, persimmon, willow, cedar, sweet gum, Tupelo (swamp) gum, red oak, gray oak, white oak, mulberry, maple and hackberry were cut and worked a few yards away.

“It was my idea to see how many different kinds of wood that could be used to build with,” Ray Matherne said.

Although the land had been in the Matherne family since the 1800s, Ray and Marie lived in Dutchtown, where both worked in the school system until retiring in 1979 and 1980. Ray got the idea when a brother built a considerably smaller house from wood, which was in great supply on the property. The Mathernes converted a metal building on the property into a temporary home, which eliminated time spent driving to and from Dutchtown.

Neither of them had building experience, but their son, Terry, did, and he took the house plans and calculated how much wood they would need at the various widths and lengths.

“We learned as we went,” said Marie, 81.

“Anybody can be a carpenter if they know how to figure,” said Ray, 87. “She was a home economics major, so she was probably better at measurement than I was.”

There was a lot to measure, and a lot of hard work. After downing a tree with a chain saw, Ray used a tractor to drag it to the sawmill.
 At first, a portable sawmill was used, but the Mathernes decided it would save money to buy a band sawmill for $5,000. Set on a concrete slab, it has wheels that role over iron rails, requiring someone to push the cutting blade the length of the log, then back again. They dried the wood in a barn.