Log Home *sweet dreams*

You probably noticed that my blog posts vary quite a bit in frequency. My best intentions are to blog on a somewhat regular basis, but sometimes other things tend to crowd out blogging. Lately these other things have been designing our new home and experiencing a book hangover! {Definition of book hangover: when you've finished a book and you suddenly return to the real world, but the real world feels incomplete or surreal because you're still living in the world of the book - quote Urban Dictionary.com} In the past four months I've read 15 novels written by Earlene Fowler and enjoyed every single one of them! I really did feel a bit lost when I'd finished the final one.

Today I thought I'd share an update on our log home. As I've mentioned in the past, my husband and I are dreaming {and planning} on building a small log home on land we purchased several years ago. When you look at the gravel road on my blog header you can see where we will be building. Our land is on the right hand side of this road. We've spent the last eight months working with a builder on the design of our home.

Design drawings for our log home

It's been a fun and educational process. We'd been dreaming of our log home ever since we started looking for land about seven years ago. As we searched for land we had two main criteria:

• my husband wants to be able to hunt on it
• I wanted to make sure it did not have a scary mountain driveway that would stress me out every time I drove on it

We were blessed to find land less than 20 miles from where we currently live. This allows us to stay with our current jobs, remain in our beloved church, and keep all the same service providers we've used for the past 29+ years. Our lot is just about a half mile off a well maintained state route. Neighboring homeowner's frequently comment on seeing bear, deer, turkey, wildcats, squirrel, and other small animals.

Work book to help plan your home

Last fall I attended a Log & Timber University in order to gain basic knowledge about the process of building a log home. One of the things they encourage is developing a priority list of features you'd like in your home. Then, as you need to make choices regarding what to include you have something to help guide your decisions.

While attending the log home show I met a builder/dealer for Katahdin Cedar Log Homes who works in the area we plan to build. A couple months later he came to meet us at our lot and look over the land. Both my husband and I liked him immediately. He has been a wealth of information and so patient as we've worked through many drafts of home plans.






One booth at the log home show is called the newsstand. Here you are able to purchase bundles of outdated log home magazines at a greatly reduced price. I've done this twice now. Most of the homes in the magazines are way too fancy and elaborate for our needs, but it is so helpful to look at things such as floor plans, kitchen & bathroom layouts, wall treatments (all log interior versus including other wall materials), porches, etc.

A few of the many magazines I've collected for reference

As with any custom home construction it is difficult to know what you want to actually afford without just jumping in and submitting a preliminary design to a builder for pricing. Let me just say I have a new appreciation for the fancy roof lines, custom windows, and elaborate floor plans we see all around us in builder/developer neighborhoods. We quickly found that plain and simple best met our needs.

When first having to face up to choosing between the dormer windows or the fireplace we've always dreamed of it was a bit hard. But, we tend to live in the practical world and found that after a day or so of lamenting that ALL our dreams cannot be included we were perfectly happy to whittle down to what we really want to afford. We had no idea how much time and doodling goes into designing a floor plan that both meets your needs, and fits into the footprint dimensions of a home...we've put many, many hours into this over the last several months.

Approximate location of our home

Anyway, at this point we are pretty much finished with our final designs and hope to be advancing to the next step of the process soon. I hope you've enjoyed this little peak into our log home journey. Hopefully in the near future there will be more excitement to share as we move forward :o)