There is something quintessentially Canadian about Roger Ellis and the story of Heartwood Log Homes. From his office at Heartwood’s Margaretsville, Nova Scotia worksite, Roger told Spotlight on Business how a cabinetry-carpentry course, a hitchhiking trip from coast-to- coast, and a book called Building with Logs changed his life forever. “I started off after high school,” he said with a halting matter-of- factness. “I took a cabinet-carpentry course so I was doing woodwork right off the bat. Then my wife and I took the summer and went out to BC – we actually hitchhiked across the country back in the ‘70s when that sort of thing was going on – because we had friends in northern BC. When we got there, we saw all these beautiful log homes being built. We fell in love with them. At that time in the ‘70s there was a fella named B. Allen Mackie and he had written a book called Building with Logs. He had this philosophy that if you got yourself a piece of land and cut down your own logs and built yourself a log home that you could have a home for your family with no mortgage. He was a back-to- land sort of guy. The whole ethic of self- reliance and back-to- the-land, sharing your knowledge-style living, it really hit me and my wife and so that’s what I wanted to do.” Four decades later, Roger has built log homes in Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and in the Blue Mountains of North Carolina. Each hand-peeled log in a Heartwood Log Home brings you closer to nature and in the self-reliant tradition of B. Allen Mackie it’s energy-efficient, too.
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MARCH 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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