built on there. Generally, almost all of them use short lengths of log and they’ll be spliced so your wall, say it’s a 30-foot wall, will have four eight-foot pieces on it, spliced just randomly wherever they happened to land. Then with our homes, which myself I consider real log homes, we’re using the real logs, we’re cutting the trees down, we’re hauling them out full-length, getting them to our work site and we’re peeling them by hand. We take the outer bark off with a tool called a peeling spud, which is like a big chisel, and then the inner bark we take off with a pressure washer and what that does is it leaves this really smooth surface between the bark and the wood. It’s a smooth surface and it doesn’t need any sanding – and that’s what we’re
going for. And of course, our logs are larger. We are using logs up to 20 inches in diameter and we don’t go any smaller than 10 on a wall log – and usually we don’t even get down that far so they will have a better R-value, which is its insulating capacity, than the manufactured one. The thing about ours is when your house is built and you’re sitting in your living room – I still do this, sitting in my living room
and I’m looking at the logs – you can see all the little swirls and where the knots go and the way the logs are fitted together and one log is big and one is small. It has a much better aesthetic to me than all the logs being the exact same, uniform. Roger, I understand that Heartwood Log Homes is big on the use of natural log features. Can you please tell the readers just what that means? RE: Well in most of the log homes we do we engineer roof support trusses and log roof beams. We also do log stairs, we do railings out of log, we do a lot of mantles for fireplaces, we do furniture, beds, tables – a little of everything. We have done entire log dining room sets. Actually, we had a fella build a house in New Brunswick a couple years ago and it was a conventional home and we put log stairs in and we put log railings in up around the loft area and then he called and he wanted to have a log wine rack, so we got this big log with lots of character to it, lots of big knots and burls, and we drilled holes in it so he could stick his wine bottles in it and that looked pretty cool, too.
We like to just play around with bits and pieces that we have left over and make something out of them. We did one house where he wanted a gnarly log – there was a post that came up where the stairway was and he didn’t want just a regular post there, he wanted something really gnarly – so I managed to source something I knew he’d like and left a lot of the branches on it and we put that up for him. We didn’t tell him about it until we arrived to put the house together, so he was pretty thrilled to see that come off the truck and stick it in the middle of his new house. We did a really good job of finishing it and he had an eagle carving, so he put the eagle carving on the top and built an eagle’s nest on the top of this thing. It was pretty neat. We’ve also done a lot of those custom log features in conventional houses too. So somebody who maybe doesn’t want to go the whole route and have a log house, they can have these log features in their house and it gives it a really nice feel. A lot are log stairs. And it also works well in commercial buildings, especiallybuildings that have something to do with the outdoors like fishing or hunting stores, that kind of stuff.
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NOVEMBER 2019 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • NOVEMBER 2019
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