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 purchased 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 distances to inspect the sale or inspect the logs prior to purchasing 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.
When the logs come in, we go through every one; we physically 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 basically 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 aesthetic 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 weprovide. Inmost caseswhen 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
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 now.
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 considerably longer for one of those style homes than a handcrafted home. Reason being, we pre-build everything completely 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-sweeping style, and really customize the building exactly how the customer wants it. What about custom details inside these custom log homes, Brad? Do you ever get requests for anything like bar tops or tabletops 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.
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NOVEMBER 2019 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • NOVEMBER 2019
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