Log Cabins get performance makeover

This Casco home features Katahdin Cedar Log Homes' Energy Envelope System. It is constructed with whole logs (like a traditional log home), then insulated on the inside face of the logs with rigid foam insulation, which is covered with cedar v-match to mimic the look of the log. This system provides a continuously insulated wall without thermal bridges R-values can be customized to meet any performance level. Courtesy photo.

The ol’ log cabin gets a remake with modern amenities and better energy performance.

By Lee Burnett

As the pandemic drives demand for rural living, Maine-based log home builders are seeing a marked increase in demand. Steve Howard of Berwick, who usually builds three log homes a year, has six booked. Depending on the dealer you ask, they’ll tell you that new log home sales in Maine jumped anywhere from 20% to 90% over the past year.

Jim Bickford in the yard of his log home business in Hollis. Photo: Lee Burnett.

Jim Bickford of Hollis, who has been building log homes for 35 years, heard that one of his log homes recently sold for double what it went for a few years ago. “That’s when I knew the market was on fire,” he says.

While today’s log homes have roots in the homesteading tradition and have that ol’ timey appeal, they are factory milled, equipped with the amenities of modern life and, increasingly, well insulated.

“I like creature comforts,” says Sue Roberts, who was smitten by magazine photos of log homes but knew she didn’t want the primitive type of log homes that she had visited once in Pennsylvania.

While they wanted modern amenities, Sue and Warren Roberts also wanted to downsize from their historic colonial on Main Street, Springvale. They hired Howard to build them a 1,600-square-foot cedar log home, about half the size of their former home, which they have since sold. Their new home in the woods of Shapleigh has an open floor plan, a fireplace and a porch, radiant floor heat and a shower in the daylight basement (convenient for Warren, who is a mountain biker).

“I wanted a local builder and I wanted local wood,” Sue Roberts says. “After living in a big, old drafty house, this is the other end of the spectrum. So peaceful.”

She loves the way the log home looks at night when the porch light casts a warm glow in the dark.

“There is something about a log home,” she says. “It has that aura.”

The Roberts’ priorities very much fit the profile of a current-day log home buyer, according to a few of the builders I spoke with. Amenities, open-floor plans, craftsmanship, woodsy locations and local sourcing are all important factors. A log home that simply feels like Maine starts with logs milled into identical D-style profiles, delivered as a kit and assembled much like a child’s set of Lincoln logs. But the homes are tighter than they used to be, and the price differential with conventional construction has narrowed.

Howard says the motivations of the current crop of buyers isn’t really much different than earlier buyers, just more urgent. “It’s basically the same,” he says. “It’s people who have wanted to do it for a long time. They were planning for future and they’re going to do it now—get out of the city.”

Getting out of the city was exactly what I did in visiting Bic Built Log Homes in Hollis to appreciate the craftsmanship of construction. It wasn’t easy to find! But, across a field, I spotted the telltale interlocking corner tails of a low weathered-gray log building.

On one side of the yard are stacks of unpeeled cedar poles, which will become railings after a retired couple peels them by hand on a consignment basis. On the other side of the yard are towering stacks of cants, square beams, six and eight-feet long, milled by Houghton Cedar Products of Lee; these are the raw material for a single home.

Inside a garage-like building is a monstrous-looking machine set up to plane the beams back into identical, log-resembling shapes. Bickford salvaged the machine from a shoe shop in Saco—where it was used to press soles onto running shoes—and converted it into a four-side planer. It’s powerful enough to produce a home’s worth of finished logs every two days.

This Nottingham, NH home was the first log home to receive LEED certification. It includes grid-tied solar, a geothermal heat pump system for heating, cooling and hot water, along with smart energy monitors. The total annual energy bill in this high performance home, $200. Courtesy photo.

Each manufacturer has a unique log profile. On a cutaway model, Bickford points out the features of log design that he perfected over time to keep weather out—a fat spiking ledge, drip edge, gasket slot, rabbetted end joints. Bickford, a log profile afficionado, collects sets of planer knives that fully occupy a chest of drawers. “I have a lot of antique log cabin knives,” he says. “I can continue to make any profile into the future.”

Bickford prefers cedar logs, which tend to be smaller than pine but more naturally resistant to rot.

Cedar starts out at 37% moisture, then Bickford lets it dry for a few months until it gets down to 12%—the ambient air moisture content in New England—or even 10%.

“When I started, pine was the norm, green pine,” he says. “But that could shrink an inch and a half over an eight-foot wall. Cedar is better. If you want your house to tell a story, there’s nothing better than cedar.”

Bickford’s own story is that he built himself a log home, then built some for friends and, eventually, developed it into a business. He had always loved the look of log homes but had been put off by chainsaw-style construction.

“I like something more refined,” he says. “A log home doesn’t have to be crudely built. That deters a lot of people. I’ve always been a fanatic for tight tolerances. In other words, precision.

Energy performance has been a continuous challenge with log homes. There are two problems: Air leakage and the poor insulating value of wood. Wood shrinks as it dries, which is more pronounced in a log home because of the larger volume of wood than with a conventionally framed house. The shrinkage opens cracks in the wood that collectively cause the entire house to settle, inviting heat loss and eventually rot.

Early log homes built with green logs required constant maintenance to combat these problems. Even one generation ago, New England Log Homes of Hamden, Connecticut—at one time of the nation’s largest with 100 dealers—went bankrupt in the late 1980s under a cascade of lawsuits.

Today, however, air leakage and settling have been addressed with tighter joinery, redundant closed-cell foam gaskets and drier logs.

Even a tight log home—when traditionally built—rates poorly on energy performance, commonly referred to as R-values. A solid sixinch log wall with no windows rates about R-9. That’s less than half the R-20 mandated for walls in Maine’s current energy code. This, however, can usually be satisfied with the addition of a conventional 5.5-inch wood stud wall with insulation, sheathing and wallboard. In other words: log home exterior, with framed walls interior.

Bickford says the trend is moving toward hybrid construction, combining two-by-six-inch framed walls with log siding, which any builder can install, rather than log walls. “It’s why log siding is so popular,” he says. “You can super insulate like a stick frame. The hybrid home is going to be the future.”

Katahdin’s Arborwall line is constructed with stacked logs and interlocking corners, but the exterior profile is milled to look like clapboard siding, which allows insulation to be added to any depth desired. Courtesy photo.

Katahdin Cedar Log Homes has shown it is possible to build a high-performance log home. It means saying goodbye to traditional single-log-wall construction. Katahdin’s Arborwall model doesn’t even look like a log home from a distance. It’s constructed the same way—with stacked logs and interlocking corners—but the exterior profile is milled to look like clapboard siding. Interior to the log wall, insulation is added to any depth desired and covered, usually with V-match paneling. The cutaway view of these log homes look very much like conventional construction.

“What we do is greatly different than the traditional log home,” says Gabe Gordon of Katahdin Cedar Log Homes. “It’s still a log home—solid logs, interlocking corners—but we also insulate the interior of the home. It’s vastly different. We can meet any specific R-value.”

Of course, in a carbon-conscious world, R-values don’t tell the whole story. Log home builders in Maine typically source their logs locally, greatly reducing the carbon-intensive impact of transporting building materials. Consider that embodied carbon—or the carbon generated by the production, transport and installation of building materials—can amount to as much as 10% of global emissions, according to Bruce King, author of The New Carbon Architecture: Building to Cool the Planet.

Besides, log homes have many attributes valued in a post-carbon world. The short supply chain (Maine cedar in a Maine home) and the volume of wood (2,500 to 3,000 linear feet of logs in a 1,500-square-foot home) suggest that log homes have a low embodied carbon footprint. If only someone would document that, log home construction might have a new life as the ultimate in sustainable construction.

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This article appeared in the Spring 2021 edition of Green & Healthy Maine HOMES. Subscribe today!

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