Log-built luxury: log home kits offer builders easy ways to provide clients with unique upscale dwellings

Building Products, July-August, 2004 by Sharon O'Malley

When general contractor Wyatt Perkins started building log homes 30 years ago, he worked on small cabins for weekend outdoorsmen. Today, he's building mansions where families live full time.

"They were pretty rustic back then" says Perkins, president of General One in Hamilton, Mont. "People just kind of put them together and hoped for the best. Now, there's a lot more really high-end log homes. There's a lot of consideration given to the sealing and products."

Indeed, the average log home now measures 2,200 square feet and costs $250,000--not including the land it's built on, according to the Log Home Living Institute. And the buyers are 40-plus years old, College-educated, and earn 5100,000 or more, notes Mike McCarthy, editor of Log Home Living, a consumer magazine affiliated with the institute.

"All the old stereotypes go out the window" McCarthy says, "and once you see one, you can understand why."

NOT ABE'S LOG CABIN

Few of today's $100-plus-per-square-foot log structures resemble Abe Lincoln's humble boyhood home or your grandfather's hunting cabin in the woods. Manufacturers of log home building materials say more home buyers are making log homes their primary residences--or at least buying them with the intention of living there full time in the future.

The trend toward log-built luxury was about a decade in the making, but the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, ma), have solidified the sturdy structures' spot among Americans' favorite alternatives to traditionally framed housing.

"Some of the ways we think about our lives and how we spend our time have changed," notes Barry Ivey, director of marketing and dealer development for Katahdin Cedar Log Homes, which, like most manufacturers of log home components, sells materials in a kit that includes a pre-cut, pre-drilled log stock, heavy timbers, purlins, rafters, and other wood pieces that form the structure's shell.

"We're finding more and more people who perhaps are required to work in a city for their career, but don't necessarily want to live there" Ivey says. "So we get more people moving their families outside of the city where they have a sense that maybe they're a little safer."

Once there, Ivey says, those families choose homes with a "rugged-built, sturdy, solid-log construction so they can feel secure."

Builders construct about 25,000 new log homes a year, accounting for 7 percent of the custom home market. That compares to about 7,000 log homes sold annually during the 1980s. In 2001, log home sales were greatest in Colorado, New York, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Builders sometimes double as log home dealers and manufacturers sometimes build log homes, but most refer homeowners to a network of specialty builders.

AIDED BY CAD

Log home building's day in the sun might not have arrived without a combination of computer-aided design that allows manufacturers and builders to mill, drill, dry, fasten, and seal logs with a precision that accounts for shrinking and settling; an industry effort to standardize the quality of logs and construction; and an influx of consumer magazines to showcase the grandest log home designs.

"It's an ever-evolving industry" says Ivey, who notes: "You see architects getting involved with log home construction, so you get a lot of fresh ideas for things that in the past, people thought were impossible with a log home."

Among them are high-vaulted ceilings, second stories with dormers, soaring gables, walls of glass, hand-peeled railings, and state-of-the-art kitchens and media rooms.

Still, most of the homes begin with a manufacturer's stock floor plan and a package of pre-cut materials--including numbered logs so the builder knows which one goes where--that put the difficulty of log home construction on par with stick-built homes.

Because logs for the walls can measure up to 60 feet long, builders need heavy-lifting equipment on site. And log homes can take up to three times as long to build as conventional homes. Otherwise, notes Belmont, N.H., builder Jack Lilley, who builds both log and frame homes, "A good stick-built guy can do a good job of building a log home. It's just more time consuming, but it's not harder."

Indeed, notes Tommi Jamison, marketing manager for log home manufacturer Hearthstone, computer technology allows manufacturers to mill logs so precisely that there's rarely a materials shortage, or any waste, on a log home building site.

"We create a floor plan and a [three-dimensional] model for every home, so you see every component that would go in one: rafters, chinking, insulation strips, through-rods, the couplings that hold the through-rods together, everything" she says. "Not only does that allow us to cut an accurate piece of wood, but it also gives us a bill of materials."

Still, Jamison notes that while the 400-plus manufacturers of log home materials offer a wide selection of stock floor plans, most customers tweak them to suit their own taste, making about 90 percent of jobs custom.

"No two of them are exactly alike," confirms builder Kirk Overfield, a supervisor at Cabin Run Contracting in Deep Creek Lake, Md., who builds a dozen log homes a year. "Log home builders are a creative lot. A lot of them put their own style, their own trademark details, in the houses."