[gbronner]

If you happen to have a bunch of high-quality logs on-site, you can get a portable sawmill to come to you. My estimate was that about $1500 worth of rental and labor yielded $5000 worth of rough-sawn custom timber, and the economics got slightly better if you had the mill there for multiple days.

This allows you to produce post and beam beams for personal use quite cost effectively -- they don't take that much time to saw, and the transportation cost is basically nil because you are going to use them on-site, and you don't pay the monster weight penalty to put them on a truck. You can't kiln dry everything, but you can air dry it, and it tends to be extremely good for construction. The waste can be burned in a wood boiler.

[ohthatsnotright]

Most code will require it to be graded, however, to use in a building which incurs additional costs and time since proper grading has to be done at a specified or lower percent moisture content. There are ways to get certified as a grader but it's not super easy so most people either associate with a mill who has a grader or hire one of the traveling graders to go on site.