Log Homes - Centuries Old House Style

The log house variety of house building has been in use since centuries in Scandinavia, Russia and Eastern Europe. The log house was originally built from logs. The homes were made by hand, using peeled logs that largely retained their original appearance when they were trees. The style was brought by the Scandinavian settlers of New Sweden to North America in the early 1700s. Before long, the variety of house building was widely implemented by other colonists and Native Americans. Such kinds are categorized as ‘handcrafted’ log houses.

By the 1920s, builders began using milled logs made with log house moulders. A milled log home is one constructed of logs with their natural but imperfect features removed. The logs would have been or machine-profiled – precut, shaped and converted into traditional lumbers of uniform size and appearance. Such kinds are known as ‘milled’ log houses.

The term log home is more common in modern times. A lob cabin denotes a smaller, more rustic log house, such as a hunting cabin in the woods.

Puritan handcrafted log builders refuse to term those built with milled logs as log houses. Milled log-manufacturers, while maintaining that log houses may also use milled logs, have successfully marketed the milled variety so much so that a majority of log homes today are of milled variety. Another reason for the popularity of the milled logs is that they were originally less expensive than handcrafted, and thus had a broader mass appeal. However, in modern times, log homes are quite sophisticated, come with all the urban amenities and cost more than conventional houses. In North America, several thousand log homes are built every year.

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