To be very technical about it, chinking is blocks and wedges of wood stuck in the gaps between logs for a particular construction style. Mud covers the chinking inside and out to seal the chinking. Over time mud has become synonymous with chinking. The common American style of log cabins used logs squared off on at least 2 sides, which would be the top and bottom of the logs. The logs were notched only enough to hold the structure together and the gaps of several inches were filled with chinking and sealed with mud. Most modern log cabins and other traditional styles are constructed without those gaps and the mud is just used to seal the crack or sometimes just for decoration.* Mud *was not just some wet dirt, it would have been clay or plaster in the past and now is almost always a flexible synthetic material.
Note that logs “settle down” in the years after construction. That means the logs WILL crush windows, and your kitchen cabinets will move closer to the floor after several years.
Professional log home builders leave empty space above the windows so the logs can slide down without harming the window [door]. And install adjustable sliders on cabinets so they can be raised back up as needed.
With that said, you can have a company build the log cabin for you. Here is one company which does this nationwide…
http://www.betrbilt.com
Start saving your pennies cuz you’re gonna need quite a few of these.
This only happens to people who have no clue what they are doing. This is akin to telling people that conventional roofs will leak and rot away if they don’t cover them with shingles.
I will describe the experience a friend of mine had. He is a college professor, meaning he had free time all summer. He was experienced with a chain saw. His property was heavily wooded. After he decided where the house would be, he cut down all the trees on that part of the lot. He took away all the limbs and let the trunks dry for a couple years. Then he dug out a trench, lined it with plastic, filled it with preservative and put the logs (cut into convenient lengths) in the bath until he had done all of them. I don’t know how long they sat in the bath nor what he did with the preservative after.
That done, he hired someone to destump the land, dig a space for a basement, lay a foundation and basement walls. Then, and only then, he hired a couple of locals who had done this many times before, to actually build it, leave spaces for doors and windows, fill in the chinks erect roof beams and all those things a layman will not know how to do. They did a super job.
The houses nearby had telephone and electricity and he was able to hook up to them. There was no water or sewage. So has a septic tank and he hired a contractor to dig a well. He got some water, not much, from the well and it tested high in arsenic. So he gave up on the well and gets his wash and toilet water from the lake he is on, while for drinking water he fills five gallon carboys at the nearest town. This is a headache since they are in a heavy snow area and the private dirt road around the lake has to be plowed continually. Also regraded every spring. Still he manages to live there over all vacations and even now, when all his teaching is on Mondays and Wednesdays, he and his wife are there for at least half of every week. It is extremely comfortable, but the water situation would drive me nuts.
I said “chinks”, not “chinking”. As in, narrow gaps or cracks. Chinking is apparently what one uses to fill chinks.
And I’m speaking from the experience of my aunt, who built her own log house (as in, the majority of every sort of work involved was done by her personally). It may well be that the pros have ways to deal with this problem, but that’s just yet another argument to having it done by a pro (if at all).
could I suggest a ‘yurt’? http://www.yurts.com/
Or some other source. Round buildings are more efficient for construction and heating. Just you and your man should be very comfortable in one. I’ve seen other round homes that advertise (and I think, truly) being able to be built by ‘amateurs’ with a few basic skills. They are fascinating to be in and, per the owners I’ve talked to, fun to live in. In other words, a log cabin is one neat thing to consider, but there are others.
Naturally, that leaves a lot of questions to be addressed – water, power, sewer, heat source, use of wind or solar power, possibly water power…and much much more. All the discussion here about using experts to fully lay out for you what you are looking to do is excellent advice.
It is certainly an argument for having a log cabin at least designed by a pro or using a kit. Log cabins are certainly easier to build than most types of construction, but that’s just the labor. Like most things the devil is in the details.
Round buildings might be efficient to construct and heat, but they’re horribly inefficient to actually live in. Look around at all of the furniture in the room you’re in, or in any other room in your house: Odds are it’s all rectangular. Fit that into a room with curved walls, and you’ll end up with a lot of wasted space.
About the only true advantage of a round structure is that it can be easily built on a single small central pillar. In some terrain this becomes practical, but as noted above it is very difficult to make efficient use of the space. The efficiency of heating is a misleading, the construction materials and insulation matter far more than the shape of the house in modern times. If you had to make a house out of uninsulated low thermal mass materials then a round structure will be more heat efficient, but far more inefficient than a house with a huge difference in surface area to volume that is properly insulated.
There’s actually good reasons why home aren’t built of logs anymore … and good reasons why there’s not very many old homes built of logs … they just don’t last …
Let’s skip the obvious … dirt floors may have been okay in the 19th Century frontier … but today this is considered unacceptable … thus the concrete slab floor you’re planning and I’m sure your excavator SO is dialed in on the foundation and just how God awful deep y’all are going to be digging …
As mentioned above … there’s only a few species of tree that are suitable for this construction … the others will rot long before the mortgage is paid off … and these suitable species are in extremely high demand … they are milled up into siding and if you’ve priced cedar siding lately you know just how much you’ll be paying for enough logs … and these logs will have to properly seasoned … cut them down, stack them with air gaps and covered, and a year minimum before you can use them … green logs will twist and warp during dry weather and that’ll make a mess of everything …
Are you planning on renting a milling machine and a crane … or are you going to hand-hew them … maybe in the 19th Century we could find enough straight trees, but today this isn’t the case … at a minimum you’ll need to hew the top and bottoms so they fit together … and have plenty of extra … there will be mistakes and there will be logs ruined while you learn how to fit them together properly …
… and you’ll still be framing your roof … even in the 19th Century, people hand sawed dimensional lumber to build trusses … as far as I know, log roofs were only built in coastal Norway and where these folks immigrated to here in the USA … so not surprisingly, purlin construction is something of a lost art …
Your electrical will be in pipes nailed to your walls and the electrical boxes will protrude out into your living space … I suppose you could cut channels on the inside of the logs … but either way you might find this will look awful, perhaps ruining the rustic look you’re trying to achieve … plumbing, cable, phone all the same thing … just nailed to your walls …
You avoid these and other problems by buying a kit, with it’s warranty … and from the links above we can certainly say these are beautiful homes in every way … I’ll bet dog hair to kitty litter these companies sell more modest kits … something for every budget … there’s some trade-offs with this route but I’ll double down my bet that you will be completely satisfied with the results (and so will your insurance agent) …
I once worked in a mill where we made pre-cut log cabins … we’d buy 4x8 cedar beams, run them through a planer to round off the sides and cut a tongue-and-groove system on top and bottom, cut them to length, notch them and load all the pieces into a semi-trailer so they could be hauled out to Amish country … about half our business … the Amish didn’t have a problem with electric wiring … it was completely forbidden in fact … so our kits were of great value to them because they could assemble these kits by themselves … no power equipment needed … just a sledge hammer …
Talk to your state forestry department. Land use conversions are usually exempt from forest practices but you usually have to start the process (pay $) in order to declare it a land use conversion.
And are surprisingly inexpensive.
Another thing to do is buy a used double or single wide and park it there. In many areas you can live in that while building your primary residence. (In some, you can live in a mobile with few restriction).
I like the idea of a post-and-beam frame covered in structural insulated panels. On This Old House, they once built an extension to an existing house using this method. The post-and-beam frame looks cool and the panels make for a well-insulated structure.
Over half of my house is a log cabin built in 1845, over 170 years and still going strong.
That half is way more energy efficient than the stick built half (added in 1910). Until we remodeled 3 years ago the “conventional” had no insulation in the walls. Even with the spray-foam insulation we added, it’s no match for a foot and a half of solid oak.
Then again, a foot and a half of solid oak is a lot thicker than most log cabin walls. Most are of a thickness much more easily matched by conventional construction, using insulation with much higher R values.
I knew someone who built a cottage in an area with very small trees - pine trees no more than 30 or 40 feet tall, spindly, no more than 6" diameter at best - but plenty of them. Basically he build a dual-wall log cabin with side-by-side logs, and filled the gap between with pink fiberglass insulation. However, he used a lot of the local clay to chink the chinks between the logs, inside and out.
Agreed with this. If you’re just building a real cabin which is little more than some walls to keep out the wind and a roof to keep out the rain where you can camp rustically a few weeks every year, then that can be pretty cheap. If you want something that meets building codes with electricity and running water and a building loan, that’s a whole other kettle of worms.
You said it --Those worm kettle codes are a real bitch.
I think people would be surprised to find out how much work is involved just keeping some camping cabin up. Keeping out the bugs and raccoons. Keeping the wood from rotting. The same with the outhouse.