BETHEL — With plenty of timely help from local builders and friends, David and Anne Carter built a 24-foot-square, timber frame-style addition to their self-built Willow Brook Lodge off Intervale Road.

The couple own and operate Carter’s Cross-Country Ski Center in Bethel and Oxford. But the addition was completed at their Bethel business to provide a larger rental and retail ski and lounge area, David Carter said on Thursday afternoon.

It also gives them a large function room.

“The whole idea of doing this addition was to make it much, much better for our rentals,” David Carter said of many Nordic skis lining two walls of the new building.

“We actually had all this equipment here before, but before you couldn’t even see it. We made (the lodge) bigger, because it gives us a much better ski shop.”

Earlier this year, Carter, a fourth- or fifth-generation logger and do-it-yourselfer, bought a portable sawmill from Thomas Sawmills in Brooks.

“The whole lodge came right off this land — even the old part, which was built 20 years ago,” he said.

It was stick built using rough hemlock cut from his Bethel lot.

“If you’ve got the resources yourself, it only makes sense to do that,” he said.

“This time though, the difference was we actually went out and bought our own sawmill, and then my brother (Tim Carter), went and cut the trees right here on the lot, mostly white pine.”

The portable mill lets them saw trees up to 27 1/2 feet long, because Carter said he wanted the addition to be a timber frame — a mortise-and-tenon building with oak braces fitted into chiseled-out slots in the pine, and then held together with oak pegs instead of nails.

It took about a dozen people five months to complete.

“We were cutting our own trees, sawing our own trees, doing our own mortise and tenons, and everything,” Carter said.

“It was a lot of chisel work. The wooden peg secures the brace. It actually makes the strongest building there is by doing it this way. That’s the way they did it back 100 years ago. No nails. One-inch wooden pegs.”

Pointing to a main support beam that rests on a section of a huge basswood tree from the Oxford property, Carter said, “That’s a 12-by-12 that’s 24 feet long, which is quite a massive beam.”

“It was my idea to use a 12-by-12, which is sort of overkill, but where we were using our own trees, it just makes for a really nice piece of wood,” Carter said.

But that created a dilemma of what to place under it for support.

It couldn’t be another 12-by-12, 8-by-8 or 10-by-10 post.

“So, finally somebody says, ‘Why don’t we put some kind of tree that we can carve,’” he said.

“Well, what happened is I found out basswood is a good wood that can be carved, but after we peeled the tree, we found that it was so beautiful that we said, ‘We’re not going to carve this tree. It’s absolutely gorgeous.’”

Now it serves as the room’s centerpiece.

Speaking of his and his wife’s self-sufficiency lifestyle of 36 years, Carter said, “This is the lifestyle that most Mainers need to embrace, because we can survive this way.

“And this is why we rent off-site cabins. We want people to have that old-fashioned experience to give them a taste of what the old days were, because, you know, we might be going back there.”

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