Saturday, June 23, 2012

Building a Log Home, chapter 3

North Arrow Log Homes rented an airplane hangar that was so large it could hold a couple of two story houses. The cranes that used to handle the big engines of B-52 planes now lobbed eighty foot trees trunks into place. The workers could work through the winters without contending with the harsh and freezing weather. We asked for delivery of logs to our property after school got out in June. They began laying out the logs in February.

These pictures show our first and, a few weeks later, our second visit to the facility. The labor intensive scribing kept four men busy. With noisy chain saws the guys cut each log to fit tightly against the one beneath it. The log ends fit together like the old Lincoln Logs I used to play with as a kid.



On the first visit we felt like we were walking through the floor plan I had sketched a few years earlier, but something was off. First of all, the rooms seemed small. We had our copy of the plans and a tape measure and soon verified that each room was exactly right – if you measured from the center of the log. Every room lost a little square footage due to the large diameter of the logs; some logs were as thick as two feet. I had expected that and it wasn’t going to be a problem because of the spaciousness, high ceilings, and large windows. Still, something was wrong. We finally discovered that they had placed the wall between the guest bath and the laundry a full foot and a half into the laundry room. The guys were chagrined and offered to start all over, but we thought it was one of those happy mistakes. The laundry room was still plenty big and the extra space in the guest bathroom allowed for a little more luxury.

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