A house is built of logs and stone
Of tile, post and pier
A home is built of loving deeds
That stand a thousand years

                             -Victor Hugo
 

About Us

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We are two ordinary people who grew up in the Seattle area.  In the early 1990's, we signed up for a weekend log homebuilding class taught by master log home builder, Skip Ellsworth.  We were city dwellers - an office worker and a pipefitter - with limited means and no prior experience in home construction.  The class was filled with all sorts of people - a single mom with her teenage son, a well-heeled yuppy couple, a retired man in his seventies, and several others from various walks of life, and all with similar lack of experience. 

 

We had approached the weekend class as a lark - just a fun thing to do together for a couple days.  We left Sunday afternoon stunned with the realization that we were capable of building a log home for ourselves.  And we were both on board. 

 

So we quit our jobs, moved to the woods in Idaho and did it.  Well, that's the short version, but admittedly there were a few hurdles along the way.  We ran out of money.  The internal temperature in the "temporary" single-wide trailer we were living in barely achieved 50 degrees during those Idaho winters.  We had to continually shovel snow off roof to keep the trailer from collapsing around us.  And we had to go back to work to support ourselves as the building project slowly plodded along.  As it turned out, we lived in that old trailer for eight years before finally moving into our log home.  Was it all worth it?  Absolutely.  

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This website began as a way to memorialize the special quadrupeds who shared our lives during the project.  And to pay forward Skip's tremendous gift of knowledge to us.  Was our process perfect?  Nope.  Would you do it differently?  Undoubtedly.  But if our experience is useful to even one future log home owner-builder, this site will have done it's job. 

 

Best wishes!

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