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 insulat- ing 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 aes- thetic 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 fire places, 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 con- ventional 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 com- mercial “It has a much better aesthetic to me than all the logs being the
exact same, uniform.” buildings, especially buildings that have something to do with the outdoors like fishing or hunting stores, that kind of stuff. What’s the actual building process like on a typical log home for you and your team – and the client? RE: Our process begins here. We do all the construction here at our own worksite in Nova Scotia. We fit all the logs, we build the shell, we do all the finished cuts, we do whatever sanding of the knots that we have to do and we apply the finish. Then we dismantle the whole thing and we ship it wherever in Eastern Canada or the Eastern United States it’s going and re-assemble it on the foundation. We’re not spending a lot of time and having to move in a lot of equipment to someone’s building lot. We come in and typically we are there for two or three days and we have the whole thing all put together. As long as we can get a boom truck or crane in close to the foundation and we have lots of reach, we’ll take-on any project. That usually means having a driveway or a road that we can get a tractor-trailer in on because that’s how we transport your new log home. The house we are doing right now will be just off seven kilometres of private road. We get
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • DECEMBER 2018
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