SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
APRIL 2018
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • APRIL 2018
Brad Neu knows he’s in the dream business. He knew it when he helped his business partner- to- be build his first family home out of necessity. He knew it when a few years later they were featured in Time Magazine. It’s why he’s been handcrafting custom log homes since 1975. “They’re not kits; everything we build is handcrafted, not machined,” he explained. “We are extremely focused on each client because it is such a unique product – it’s literally their dream come to life.” Each Montana Log Home is individually crafted to your specifications by Brad and his skilled log smiths using chainsaws and traditional hand tools. They work with only large diameter, dead-standing Lodgepole Pine, Engelmann Spruce or Western Red Cedar. These full-length logs selected from the prime timber stands of Montana are then hand-peeled, cut, and carved into your dream log home package. Montana Log Homes’ design and blueprint services are supplemented by a 64-page plan guide. If your dream is a little foggy, the plan guide’s log home floor plans and photographs may clear up a few things before the Montana Log Homes team treks to your corner of North America. Brad chatted with Spotlight on Business in early January from the company construction yard in Kalispell, Montana about the “working trade” he lives – and loves.
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APRIL 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
By David MacDonald B rad, please tell the Spotlight on Business readers a little about yourself, your years of experience in log construction and how Montana Log Homes came to be. BN: I started in log construction kind of on a fluke. I was going to college to be an electrical engineer and I came home to do an apprenticeship after my first year. I realized pretty quickly that an electrical engineer’s job is not at all what I thought it was and I was in need of money. My current business partner Jim Bathstalker had just started a company called Pioneer Log Cabins with another guy. (Jim had actually rented a home from my parents years before, so we knew each other since I was 14 or so.) So I ran into him and started doing logs with them. They were very much a start-up company at that time. I went back to college for a little bit, worked off-and- on when I was in town and then their business started to get busy. That’s when I really realized that electrical engineering was not my dream field. I dropped out of college and started doing logs full-time. Pretty soon I was driving logs and then I was running the company. It moved really fast. In 1981 I started with them and in 1985 Jim, my partner and I, partnered up and the two of us have continued ever since. Do you know what motivated Jim to start Pioneer Log Cabins, Brad?
BN : Jim actually started the business because of a need for a home and a lack of money. He read the book Dove and in that book the main character or storyteller builds himself a log cabin and describes how he does it. Jim did a little more research and he built his own cabin. From there, a neighbour saw what he did and said, ‘If you build me one, I’ll pay you.’ It kind of snowballed from there. By the time I started with the company, they had built at least six homes. The quality of what they were building then compared to what we are putting out now is substantially different. Things were pretty creative, let’s say, in those days. As I came on and particularly by the time he and I partnered up we had the system down pretty good and we were rolling into bigger projects in the mid and late 80s. “Jim did a little more research and he built his own cabin. From there, a neighbour saw what he did and said, ‘If you build me one, I’ll pay you.’ It kind of snowballed from there.” Is it the style of home that has changed to your advan- tage or is it the hand tools you use? Why do these “bigger projects” keep coming your way from all over North America?
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BN: I wouldn’t say it is the style of homes or the tools that have changed that much, more the quality of the construc- tion that we are producing. The hand-scribing, hand-chis- eling, and chainsaw work that is involved in building a hand-crafted log home is a working trade, there’s no doubt about it – practice definitely improves your performance. In the early days we weren’t really worried about how tight thelog fits; we could tink it or knock it or whatever. Overtime you kind of figure out new tricks and things that work better. I would say the quality of the fits of the logs has been our biggest improvement just through experience. When you mention “hand-peeled logs” at montanalog- homes.com, are you talking about logs that are not chemically treated? BN: Correct. Everything we bring in is what we call dead standing or naturally dyed trees, you know from a forest fire or a pine beetle plague, which has been very prevalent across the nation, all over North America actually. There are quite a few companies out there that choose to use live trees, they call them “green logs.” It’s an easy harvest; they always have a readily available supply of logs that are just standing out in the woods living and breathing. They harvest them, peel them, and build with them with high moisture content within the wood itself. Over time, that usually leads to considerable shrinkage in the log and a lot of structural displacement. Utilising dry logs would reduce that movement and settling by about 8-fold or so.
We work with loggers all over the place and we’ve pur- chased dead standing logs through countless businesses over the years. It’s a constant battle following where there could be a good source of material. We often go long dis- tances to inspect the sale or inspect the logs prior to pur- chasing them. We also use a secondary industry out there of entrepreneurs, basically log brokers, who are looking for what type of logs we need. They have multiple sources of loggers and people who they’ve known over years so it becomes a network with people out there looking for what you’re needing and putting two and two together. “The hand-scribing, hand-chiseling and chainsaw work that is involved in building a hand-crafted log home is a working trade…” When the logs come in we go through every one; we phys- ically inspect the log for any defects – the slope of grain or spiral of the grain in a log can be an issue, for example. From there it goes on to the peeling rack, which is basical- ly two logs set up about two-and- a-half to three feet off the ground, where we use the actual hand tools. Imagine a razor blade on steroids, I guess, with two handles on it. It’s a lot of physical labor to actually peel the bark and remove the top layer of the log. What would you say to somebody who’s considering the
manufactured, kit-home route rather than the custom built one? BN: There are some big differences between the two. Obviously the most apparent one is the actual aesthet- ic appeal with the hand-peeled natural logs I mentioned. With the machine or kit, every log is turned to look exactly like the one below it. With our style, each log is unique. From an aesthetic standpoint, handcrafted is quite a bit more appealing to a lot of people as opposed to a very uniform look from the machine. The other big difference is just the quality of fits that we can get and the service that we provide. In most cases when you are purchasing a kit-style home or a machine-style home, you are basically buying just the raw log product that has been run through a machine and you have the slope or whatever already on it so in theory it’s like stacking up Lincoln Logs, so to speak. But in reality it’s a fair amount more work than that. The logs are random lengths so you have to cut and fit them to the pieces yourself on site so the assembly time on site is con- siderably longer for one of those style homes than a hand- crafted home. Reason being, we pre-build everything com- pletely in our construction yard. It allows us to pre-build our own hardware, pre-build all the electrical cases, make sure every end is cut perfectly using the natural hand-sweep- ing style, and really customize the building exactly how the customer wants it. “From an aesthetic standpoint, handcrafted is quite a bit more appealing to a lot of people as opposed to a very uniform look from the machine.” What about custom details inside these custom log homes, Brad? Do you ever get requests for anything like bar tops or table tops or bannisters – things like that? BN: We do, absolutely. We have a band mill that can mill through a 30 inch wide log. Because of that capacity we have people come in and ask for things like bar tops quite a bit. We can take 24 to 30 inch diameter full-size log and make a bar out of it. There are always people who have been dreaming of their thing, their custom signature. Even in my own house there’s an example of this. I found two really gnarly, dirty logs and I said ‘I’m going to find a way to fit those in this house’ and I did. It’s one of the fun things about our design process. You can definitely personalize the whole place to any extent that you want. How big is the Montana Log Homes team? BN: We are currently at about 22 or 23 employees, I believe. Obviously 2008 was hard on everyone in just about every industry, but the log home industry got hit particularly hard. We managed to stay alive because 1) we are not that big of a company and 2) we are a national company. It only took finding so many houses throughout the entire nation
to stay afloat. So, we did downsize a little bit through that stretch, but we rode it out nicely and now we are gearing back up. Just recently we’ve been in the process of training an additional crew. That leads me into my next question. Do you prefer your crew coming in fresh or do you prefer someone with a lot of experience? BN: We prefer to mold them ourselves. I was the first employee – and that was in 1981 – and I was an apprentice starting out. I’ve got two employees down here now that started not that long after me that are still top guys within our system. We’ve got half a dozen who have been working for well over 20 years. We are kind of a family-style business I would say and we learn a lot from one another. We prefer to work through an apprenticeship and a training program where we bring in guys who have zero experience and we train them here, we bring them into the family. From what I’m seeing in my notes, travel is part of the gig for your log smiths. How far reaching is Montana Log Homes? BN: I was in Maine not that long ago, actually. We are in 40 different States from Maine to California and everywhere in between. We are also up in Canada: in Alberta and Sas- katchewan. We were actually featured in Time Magazine back in the early 80s when we were exporting log homes to Japan. We were one of the early companies that took
advantage of that new market. We only actually ended up doing it for a few years because the US market took off so much at the time that it didn’t make sense to be overseas anymore. Because of the nature of the system we can pre- build and ship anywhere. I have been able to explore a good deal of the world through this system. We also – and not all companies do this, but we always do – send two of our men to re-assemble on-site wherever the house is going. We fly out, rent a car and go do the restack and take a care of any chainsaw-type work that needs to be done. We do not do turn-key construction. We specialize in just the log portion so we can typically be in and out on an average house in about a week; a good-sized house maybe two weeks. And Brad I understand that you’d like to mention one of the custom touches you leave with every Montana Log Home customer. BN: Yes. We provide each client with an historical mark- er-type plaque that has their name and the year the house was built and our logo on it and then further down the road, 50 years or so, you’d be able to know when that house was built, who it was built for, and who built it. Let Montana Log Homes provide a quote for the log home of your dreams. Send a sketch or floor plan, including dimen- sions and the building location, to Brad and his design team at montanaloghomes.com .
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MONTANA LOG HOMES 3250 Highway 93 South Kalispell, Montana 59901
Phone: (406) 752-2992 • Fax: (406) 257-7014
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as spotlighted in the APRIL 2018 issue of SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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