382 Transactions of the Ajteeican Institute. 



cellar proper, should have a convenient basement beneath them. 

 Even on level ground the earth may be excavated two or three 

 feet, and the convenient room of one story more be secured beneath 

 the same roof, by the expenditure of only a few dollars more than 

 is required to place a building on half a foundation. 



SIZE OF BUILDING TIMBER. ^ 



It is not the lars^est and heaviest timber that makes the strousrest 

 and most jjermanent frame. Builders fall into an egregious mis- 

 take by employing building timber unnecessarily large for the 

 purposes required. A plank two inches thick and eight wide, 

 resting on a sulistantial wall of stone or brick, will subserve as 

 satisfactory a purpose for a sill of a large house, as a stick of timber 

 eight inches square. An injudicious custom has induced builders 

 to employ, sometimes, three times more timber in making a frame 

 than is really needful. A builder should study and endeavor to 

 understand the strength of materials. He who can save a dollar's 

 worth of timber, by providing the different parts of a frame of the 

 most proper and desirable size, saves another dollar besides the 

 first one, in the labor required to fit the timber for its appropriate 

 place in the frame. There is a vast deal of philosophy and science 

 in having every piece of timl)er in an edifice of such a form, as to 

 render the frame more stiff* and permanent. Sills, summers, beams 

 and posts of both dwelling-houses and barns, are often made pre- 

 posterously large. There is timber enough in many of the old 

 houses and barns in the first settled localities of our countr}^ to 

 make two buildings of the same size of the present one. In many 

 country barns, the posts and beams arc sufficiently large and strong 

 for a bonded warehouse of some great seaport. Two small posts 

 and a small beam, if properly put together, will sustain a superin- 

 cumbent pressure of surprising weight. 



The form of joists is a point that is not, to appearance, properly 

 appreciated and understood. A stick of timber, for example, three 

 inches by four, twelve feet long, would make a joist of a very 

 unsatisfactory form. But, let the same quantity of timber be sawed 

 into a joist eight inches wide, by one and a half inches thick, and 

 it will sustain double the weight with less spring or deflection. In 

 order to give desirable solidity to any floor, the joists must be 

 wide, or deep up and down. 



Inch boards, one foot wide and sixteen or eicrhteen feet lonor 

 would make joists that would spring but little; whereas, let joists 



