DENISE LANG GO WITH SUCCESS
Choose the... #1 Realtor in Bigfork
(2015, 2016, 2017) Choose the... #3 Realtor Flathead Valley (out of 900+ Realtors) Choose the... Experienced Realtor with 238 Transactions (2015, 2016, 2017) 406.249.1758 DeniseLang@NPRMT.com DeniseLangRealEstate.com
Basedon information inandoutofNMAR/MLS for theperiodof 1/1/2015 to 12/31/2017. Informationdeemed reliablebutnotguaranteed.DeniseLang isa licensedRealtor® in the stateofMontana.
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 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.
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
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
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MARCH 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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