Handcrafted Log Homes

Welcome to Appalachian Log Homes, and thank you for your interest in our handcrafted log homes. We are pleased to provide the following photo page with information on the handcrafting process. All of our handcrafted homes are custom designed to suit the individual needs of our clients, anything from the smallest cabin to a majestic family mansion.

     

To live in a log home is to return to the pleasures of an era gone by. With increasing mass marketing and high technology materials, it is now difficult to find a unique home built using the nearly perfect bio-engineered product known as the humble log. There has been a resurgence of interest in the traditional methods of building in North America and Asia, and as a result we have brought this unique and exclusive technology to Australia.

        

All our handcrafted log homes are crafted and assembled in our work yard to ensure a professionally finished home. We select the best cypress logs and water peel each log by hand to enhance the natural beauty of the log. Using the most up to date log crafting techniques, we then individually scribe each log to a near perfect fit on the wall using traditional handtools and chainsaws. All corners are saddle notched, and a technique known as a "shrink to fit lateral" or "overscribing" is used to ensure the lasting tightness of notches and laterals. We use the latest "W" cut for our laterals, ensuring a weathertight fit.

Our work yard and a detail of a handcrafted log showing different components of log work

 

Examples of an external and internal corner

Chink Style handcrafted log homes are quite popular, less costly and very well sealed. Each corner is still saddle notched, but the logs are stacked with a rougher scribe between each log along the length. This gap is filled with a foam backing rod and then sealed with state of the art polyurethane sealant, which is available in a variety of colours. This style of home is shown extensively in North American magazines, where the chinking can be used to provide a good contrast to the logs. The home shown above is a ski chalet called the Chilliwack Lodge located in Jindabyne and available during the ski season as accommodation.

Post and Beam Construction has become quite popular, and we have constructed several hybrid homes to date. Our latest Post & Beam can be seen in Penrith as the new Tourist Information Centre. In Tea Garden, NSW we constructed a custom design Post & Beam with a combination of handcrafted infill, engineered infill and bushrock infill. In Greenvale, Victoria we built the log work only for an architect designed post and beam home. Post and beam can be infilled with full scribe logs, chink style logs, conventional wall systems, bushrock or even engineered logs. See our Gallery for pictures of these projects.