Montana. The word evoked the old west for me. Winchesters, Colts, Buffalo, Antelope, vast hills and plains, mountain streams full of trout. When a client with a small ranch of 1500 acres (yes, the neighbour’s was rumoured to be 50,000 acres) called me for a design for a ranch near Big Timber, I couldn’t wait [...]
Chinking is the stuff you put between the logs to keep the weather out. That’s why we like to build an insulated sandwich in the spaces to insure against a Canadian winter barging uninvited into our livingroom and making itself at home. The ideal space to work with is about three inches of height by [...]
For fifty years so far, I have loved old log houses, particularly the hand-hewn square-timbered ones that I find superior to all other styles. I love restoring these log houses for families who also appreciated them. And I’ll go anywhere to find a vintage log house. They seemed easy to find back in the 60s [...]
Sometimes in our business we run into creatures big and small. One or another of them seemed to think these old abandoned houses would make a lovely home and why not? They weren’t being used were they? We’d often start with the dirty business of cleaning up after them since their natural tendencies precluded our [...]
Some log house enthusiasts think we can move the whole house in one piece. You can’t. Well, most of the time you can’t for lots of reasons…reasons why we disassemble them a log at a time, numbering each one and noting its placement on our rebuild plan. I know it sounds laborious and it is. [...]
My bride and I were on the way to Hawaii on our honeymoon, comfortably (well, not quite comfortably, I was 6’ 4” then and legroom was in short supply) ensconced in our seats. I couldn’t help but notice the guy beside me was reading one of those articles from a magazine inserted in the pocket [...]
I was called out to inspect a log house in the country near a hamlet called Canton. No, we were not in China …closer than that. It wasn’t quite a log house. It was half of a log house. A huge old maple had crashed through it during a recent storm. It certainly was a [...]
The phone was ringing. But it was the middle of the night. Must be an emergency. I rolled out of bed to answer it. It was someone in an agitated state for sure. When he right away asked me what my log buildings cost I figured him for a nutcase. I told him anyway. I [...]
I built my first green home 46 years ago. But I didn’t know it was a green home. It was a house of wood and stone mostly, and wood that had been around for a couple of hundred years or so (I never bothered to count the rings). The stone, precambrian granite…well, I think it was [...]
I just love things old. Houses, furniture, things with history, beauty, character and that patina that comes with the bestowal of nature’s slow grace. It was this love that led me, long ago, to a simple cottage in the woods that seemed to have the potential for something beautiful to be created. A clear stream meandering [...]