I love my log cabin. It’s at least 75 years old I’ve done plenty of maintenance since I got here 15 years ago. The first couple of years was a lot of work to rehab, but since then it hasn’t been bad at all. A lot depends on the wood that it’s made out of. Mine is made of White Cedar, and it’s highly rot resistant. I don’t have to rush to get the logs oiled all the time, the wood is fine after 75 years, it’ll be here for another 75.
You can find some small low cost cabin kits online. You can find kits for small cabins with a materials price of around $25,000. That wouldn’t include a foundation, but usually all the materials you’ll need to make a weather sealed cabin. These are fairly small, and there may still be tiny cabin kits available for less. But lowest price isn’t always best. The better logs will be materials like cedar, cypress, and hardwoods that can get very expensive. Cabins are easy to build, it’s like stacking up lincoln logs. But that’s just the walls. All the windows, doors, stairs, trim, roof, floors, and every other piece is as time consuming and difficult to build as with any other construction type. Sometime moreso. But it’s easy to expand a small cabin. You can cut new doors with a chain saw and attach more log rooms, or use other construction techniques.
If the property you’re looking at has a lot of rocks around, I’d consider building with those. Stone walls are long lasting, inexpensive, rot resistant, and can be left half finished without big problems. If you’re pouring a concrete foundation anyway you could walls made then and later faced with stones. Save the wood for the construction away from the ground. So at least a half wall of concrete stone or block, then up some more with logs, and traditional wood frame roof. Or skip log walls altogether and just go with the stone and a wood roof.
The sites for log cabins online are full of info. There are kits, builders, suppliers, and plans. You can count on the places that have been in business for a long time, and you’ll see that their prices are higher too. Like everything else, they cut corners to offer things at the lowest price. But you can easily price out the materials yourself from materials suppliers and see whether you’re getting a good deal if you buy a kit.
It’s all doable. It’s usually faster construction than conventional stick frame buildings that can be done by a few healthy people in reasonable time, but other than that I haven’t seen any real price advantage. The larger log cabins often cost more to erect than a conventional house of comparable size.
One thing I love about living in a log cabin, if I want to hang something on the wall, I just hammer in a nail where I want it.
