Log home
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A log home (or log house) is technically the same thing as a log cabin, a house typically made from logs that have not been milled into conventional lumber. The term log home is contemporary and preferred by most log home builders, while log cabin indicates a smaller, more rustic, log house, such as a hunting cabin in the woods.
There are two kinds of log homes: "handcrafted" and "milled" (also called "machine-profiled"), made with a log house moulder. A handcrafted log home is typically made of logs that have peeled but are otherwise essentially unchanged from their original natural appearance when they were trees. A milled or machine-profiled log home is one constructed of logs that have run through a manufacturing process to remove natural features and imperfections of the log and convert them into timbers that are consistent in size and appearance. Many handcrafted log builders do not consider milled logs a log at all, a position milled-log manufacturers disagree with.
Handcrafted log homes have been built for centuries in Scandinavia, Russia and Eastern Europe. The Scandinavian settlers of New Sweden brought the craft to North America in the early 1700s, where it was quickly adopted by other colonists and Native Americans. In the 1920s, the first milled log houses appeared on the market, using logs that were precut and shaped, rather than hand-hewn. Most log homes today are of milled variety mostly because they are less expensive than handcrafted, but also because the manufacturers have had the marketing skill and resources to sell the perceived benefits of their construction methods to the mass market.
Today's log homes are far from rustic. They often exceed the cost of more conventional houses and come with amenities that would be expected in any substantial home. Every year, several thousand new log homes are built in North America.
[edit] Methods of Log Home construction
- Scandinavian Full-Scribe (also known as the "chinkless" method) where logs are scribed, custom fitted to one another, and notched where they overlap at the corners
- Flat-on-flat (logs are flattened on top and bottom and stacked)
- Milled log homes often are constructed with a variation of "flat-on-flat"
- Butt-and-Pass where unscribed logs butt up against each other at the corners without notching
- Half-Log where the structure is built with conventional techniques. Half-log siding is applied to replicate the look of full-log construction.
