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
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