by Heather B. Hayes
BELOW: Look for areas in your home in which you can plan flexible spaces — like the office/library/sitting area at the top of the loft stairs in this Colorado home, which can quickly be converted to a temporary guest room or game room.
BOTTOM: Incorporating conventional construction above the first course of logs will help reduce costs. Many owners use
Sheetrock on the interior, with half-logs on the exterior.
lLog home designers see it all the time: Homeowners with grand dreams of a mega-sized house featuring all the latest and greatest luxury details — and a budget that just doesn’t add up.
Planning the particulars of a log home can be especially seductive because no one — especially someone setting out to build their dream home — wants to settle for ordinary, says Allen Halcomb, president of
MossCreek Designs.
“People building a log home often want to have the wood floors instead of carpet and the wood ceilings instead of sheetrock, and they want their kitchen to have the granite countertops and all the best appliances, so it becomes a very intoxicating situation,” he explains. “And it’s a positive thing to have that fantasy and to want the best, but for those who are working with a budget, it’s imperative that they manage that fantasy, otherwise they might end up with a wedding cake and no icing.”
Homeowners with limited resources shouldn’t be discouraged. Most people who build homes — whether traditional or log — come into the planning stage
YELLOWSTONE LOG HOMES / BY JAMES RAY SPAHN
with a little too much bang and not quite Because square homes are cheaper than
enough buck. But homeowners can still rectangular homes or “T” or “L” shaped
get what they need (and much of what homes, and a two-story house is cheaper
they want) if they take the time upfront than a one-story home boasting equal
to think everything through and rely a square footage.
few insider planning secrets that can help 3. The thing to always keep in mind is
maximize a design. “that one of the most expensive compo-
nents of any home is the perimeter wall,”
Biggs explains, noting that a large or com-
plicated house boundary typically means
a bigger foundation, a bigger roof, more
exterior logs and more windows. “The
bigger the perimeter, the higher the basic
cost of the home.”
COUNTRY LOG HOMES
Compare a square-shaped house to a rectangle-shaped house. A house that is 30 by 30 feet in measurement encloses 900 square feet and has 120 feet of perimeter, while a home that is 10 by 90 feet still has 900 square feet of living space but a 200- foot perimeter wall.
“The square footage didn’t change, but your cost of building the second house
How To continued on page 102
1. One of the first considerations, of course, is size and style. If you’re tied to a particular square footage, one trick of the trade that is extremely critical for homeowners to understand is that each and every foot of space can have a very different price tag. Recognizing this will allow you families that need a larger home to actually get it without having to increase their budget.
2. Stephen Biggs, chairman of the board at Town and Country Cedar Homes, explains that picking a house shape is critical to increasing your ability to maximize living space at a minimal price. Why?
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