son, Nathan Ellis, who had been working with us for a while before that peeling logs in high school, that kind of thing, he stayed with me and is still working with me today. He’s been at it for a long time. He’s been doing the stairs and railings for us for quite a few years. Do you often come face-to- face with that general misconception that a log home has to be a traditional bungalow – a hunting cabin? I understand that you and your team go much bigger. RE: The biggest log home we’ve built was 4,700 square feet, six bedrooms. It was built as a retirement home/lodge for a couple from Porters Lake. They wanted to have a place where all their kids could come with their families and they could all get together with lots of rooms. So they had six bedrooms, which were sort of like suites for each family. They had their master bedroom, they had a big games room with a pool table, ping pong, air hockey – I forget all the things they had in there, but it was quite a sizeable room for playing in. They had a Jacuzzi, a sauna, and the kitchen was designed for multiple cooks because they knew when they would be having big family dinners they would have a lot of people in there cooking. The dining room was also quite large. There was 4,500 feet of logs in that place. That’s the largest we’ve done. The smallest was probably a 16 x 20 bunkie that we built for a fellow that we had already built a log house for. He wanted a little place for his grandkids to come to; just a place they could go and bunk out. There was no wiring in there, there was no plumbing, just the very basic 16 x 20 building with a little loft in it that the kids could go play in and sleep in. Then we build lots in between those two extremes. Where do the logs in Heartwood Log Homes come from, Roger? RE: We deal with woods contractors and land owners. We have one guy who is sort of our go-to guy. He knows a lot of the land owners around and he does the cutting himself. Many of the logs that we get are being cut for development – and here in the Annapolis Valley there is a lot of develop- ment – for either farmland or a subdivision. If someone is cutting these trees down you can say that the logs in your home are as close to the natural condition as you can get. Fifty-to- 100 years from now people can go in that house and look at your walls and say, “Wow, look at that; that must have been some tree.”To me, it’s saving that log from just being milled up into 2 x 4s or whatever else might happen with it. We try to save whatever logs we can out of some- thing like that. Other than that, they are selectively cut on properties. Our logs come pretty exclusively from the Annapolis Valley. There is a lot of pine that grows through- out the valley here and there is nice sandy soil. The sandy soil helps when you’re hauling the logs out of the woods because you don’t want to be beating it all up over granite boulders and tough terrain – it’s going to be somebody’s
living room someday, after all.
What differentiates a hand-crafted log home from the manufactured options out there? RE: Manufactured log homes, well, they’re built by machine. Some of the machine log homes are good – they do a good job – some of them not so much. Anyone looking for a man- ufactured log home, I recommend you check it out care- fully, get references, and talk to other owners first. Usually they’ll start with an 8 x 8 cant [square of timber] and put it through a machine. It comes out the other end with every- thing basically the same with whatever joinery they have between the logs all 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. “The biggest log home we’ve built was 4,700 square feet, six bedrooms.” 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
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DECEMBER 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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