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Getting Started:  Planning and Site Work
"If I have to make one more trip to the blasted building department..."

You don’t need to be an architect to design your own home, or draw your own plans.

 

There are many good references that describe the home planning process, including how to position your home to make the most of your lot, and how to make the best use of space in a floor plan.  We realized that the more corners and angles we wanted to add to the home, the more time consuming it was going to be.

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This page describes the process we used to draw our own plans and estimate costs.  It also lists the tools we collected for construction.  

 

Drawing the House Plans

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We drew our own plans.  The county building department required us to hire a structural engineer to review them and provide a brief report confirming the log sizes we planned to use for different structural members were big enough.  

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Neither of us had experience with computer drafting programs, so we just drew our plans by hand on large sheets of white butcher paper.  Our only other tools were some smaller sheets of graph paper, a few pencils, lots of gum erasers, a T-square, some easy to remove masking tape, and a couple of scales and rulers.  A vacuum came in handy to take care of the mountain of eraser shavings.

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Our rickety kitchen table doubled as a drafting table.  It happened to have a glass top, so sometimes we set a desk lamp underneath the table and placed a sheet of graph paper under our butcher paper so that we could use the graph paper grid as a guide.  (Or sometimes we taped the paper to a window.)

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We invested in an architectural book that showed the typical sizes of things like bathtubs, showers, toilets, cabinets, furniture, appliances, etc.  And we bought a residential building code book to refer to as we went along.

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House Style and Size

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We did our best to keep it simple, realizing that lots of corners and angles, and complicated roof lines would be a recipe for frustration since we were attempting to construct a home yourself for the first time.   

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You’ll see from our photos that we weren’t able to restrain ourselves to four corners.  Our log shell was a basic rectangle, but it had an additional 8’ by 15’ area that jutted from one side.  This resulted in eight log corners, a more complicated roof line, and much whining about the extra work those eight corners created for us.  

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We're also glad that we started small.  From time to time while we were building our house, we’d notice “for sale” ads for incomplete log homes.  It was so tempting to be overly ambitious.  We might have had dreamed of a palatial log home, but it's a good thing we started with smaller self-contained “phase one”.  It was plenty big enough for us in the end.  

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Basic Structural Concept

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In typical frame construction, a floor is built on top of a foundation, and then the rest of the house’s structure is built on top of the floor.

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With the log building method we used, concrete piers or foundation walls are used to support vertical (upright) logs.  Vertical logs support the ridge pole and purlins, which in turn support the roof.  The floor is attached later to the vertical logs.  
 

Barney the dog racing down a snowy road
Basic structural concept for a diy log house

The spacing of piers and vertical support logs depends on the size and strength of the logs selected.  We used these rules of thumb as a starting point:

 

  • Concrete piers and vertical logs supporting the ridge pole no more than 15 feet apart (measured from the center of one pier to the center of the next). 

  • Concrete piers and vertical logs supporting purlin logs no more than 12 feet apart, center to center. 

  • Piers supporting wall logs no more than 7 feet apart, center to center; or use continuous foundation walls.

 

Windows and Doors

 

We kept the tops of our windows and doors on the main floor at the same height to help give our home a uniform appearance.  The code book came in handy when we had to determine how many windows we needed, how high the bottoms of the windows needed to be from the floor, and how many windows needed to be openable. 

 

We made sure our exterior doors were at least 3 feet wide, and at least 6’-8” tall. 

 

Stairs

 

We thought it would be interesting to have a loft in our home and discovered that ladders aren’t permitted for access to living space.   So, we opted for a circular staircase.  Again, the code book had clear advice on minimum headroom, dimensions for “rise and run” (height and depth of each stair), and handrail requirements.

 

Crawlspace

 

In considering different designs, we thought about having a crawlspace, or possibly a basement.  In the end, we elected to have a concrete slab floor, because it accommodated the radiant floor heating system we wanted.  However, when we were considering a crawlspace we knew we needed to allow at least 18 inches of ground clearance under the house and more would have been better in case we had to squeeze under there to work on plumbing or wiring.

 

Roof

 

Our house was in snow country, so we chose a steep roof pitch, with metal roofing that would allow snow to slide off easily. 

 

The roof of a log house is the most important element of the shell since the roof overhang protects the wall logs from the elements.  Our roof overhung the perimeter walls by about three feet, which was adequate.  In hindsight, however, an even greater roof overhang would have better protected our log walls from blowing snow and driving rain.   

 

Tools

 

Here are some tools that we couldn’t have done without:

 

  • 100-foot tape measure

  • Shovels

  • Post hole digger

  • Pick

  • Digging bar

  • Gasoline-powered chain saws (large and small)

  • Chain saw chains and sharpener

  • Heavy chain, rope, cable, and straps

  • Peavy

  • Block and tackle

  • Snatch blocks

  • Chain fall

  • Winch

  • Old surveyor’s level

  • Water level

  • Carpenters level

  • Plumb bob

  • Carpenters square

  • Chalk line

  • Draw knife

  • Floor scrapers / garden edger (for peeling logs)

  • Drill (we burned up two good quality ½ inch drill motors)

  • Long drill bits

  • Sledgehammer

  • Rebar cutter

  • Chisels

  • Truck w/ homemade boom (not necessary, though – see Step 4 for an alternative method of lifting logs.)

  • A cousin in the concrete business.

 

Here are some others that we considered, but didn't need:

 

  • Laser level

  • Froe

  • Alaska mill (a chain saw attachment for cutting your own dimensional lumber.  Instead of making our own lumber, we purchased commercial 2x4’s, etc. when we needed them for rafters and interior walls.)

  • Swede hook

  • Log dogs

  • Scriber (essential for walls constructed with the Scandinavian Chinkless method or Saddle Notch method.)

  • Calipers

  • Spud (for peeling logs.  We used a garden edger and floor scrapers instead.)

  • Hand drill or gas-powered drill (if no power to your site)

  • Tractor

  • Crane

 

Estimating Costs

 

Getting an idea of how much our project would cost was tough.  Since we were doing all the work ourselves, and since we had all of the trees we needed on our own property, we knew that the log shell would consume mostly time, not money.  We had bought about 30 used windows at a garage sale, and a big stack of rigid insulation from a local insurance liquidator, anticipating those bargain finds would save us a bundle.  But we knew that we’d have some foundation and roof costs, as well as additional windows, doors, and all of the “guts” of the house (plumbing, wiring, interior walls, fixtures, flooring, and finish work.)

 

The plan was to pay as we built, and not to incur debt.  So, to get started, we decided to focus only on the money it would take to complete the site work and shell (foundation, log walls and roof) and worry about the “guts” later. 

 

We prepared a simple estimate for our shell using the template below.  We got bids from local contractors for clearing the land and bringing utilities to the house site.  We called equipment rental companies to determine how much it would cost us to rent a backhoe for a few days, to dig out our foundation area.  We got estimates for the rest by calling local building supply stores and ready-mix concrete plants.

A template for estimating the cost of building a log house shell

 

A Note About "Pay as You Go"

 

If we had waited to save enough to pay for the whole project, we would never have started.  However, in holding to our “pay as we go” philosophy, it took us eight years to finish.

 

We had a tolerant local building department, and our messy building site was not visible to surrounding neighbors.  But everyone’s situation is different.  We were lucky to push our construction timeline as far out as we did.  

 

Site Work

 

The initial site work – clearing the land, leveling a place for the house, installing a septic tank, and getting water, power, and other utilities to the site is something that is covered in many other books.  We won’t spend time on it, so if you are not planning to hire a contractor to perform your site work, check out the many other owner-builder references available for how to go about this.

 

For our house, we cleared the land ourselves, but hired a local contractor to install the utilities and septic tank.  Then we rented a backhoe to do the earthwork for our foundation ourselves, which was, well, highly entertaining, at least for the onlookers.  It was our first experience with heavy machinery, and it was a good thing we had cleared more trees than we needed for the house site.  The few that remained nearby still bear the scars of that fateful weekend with the backhoe. 

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