This section of This Heirloom Life is all about our adventures in building and living in a cozy little log cabin in the woods.
My husband Kyle and I built our log home. And by built I don’t mean we subcontracted it out and had people come in and build it, I mean, we did it all ourselves. Well, with the help of our family, friends, and books. Lots of books.
Our log home adventure started with an email that I sent to my husband Kyle.
It was 2008 and I was living and teaching in Germany, Kyle was living and working in the UK. We had been married for two years and had just finished paying off my student loans. For the first time since we’d been together we started to have money in the bank and we wondered what to do with it.
We had met each other in Ireland and both loved it so we we checked out property there but couldn’t get much within our budget, so we continued saving and daydreaming about the future.
Then one day while wasting time on a lunch break I found a a super cute (and cheap) old log cabin for sale near where my parents lived on Manitoulin Island, Canada. On a whim I emailed the listing to Kyle and said ‘we should buy this, fix it up, rent it out and have it as a back-up incase we ever accidentally get knocked up’.
Yes. That is what I wrote. Classy, I know.
He wrote back and said he loved it, but wouldn’t it be even better if we just built a log cabin ourselves - it could be a fun thing to do. Yes, ‘a fun thing to do’. Thinking about that makes me laugh. I mean it was fun, but it was more of an insane idea than a fun one. But that’s pretty much how Kyle and I roll.
So I threw myself into researching this idea. This is what I do with everything really, I love researching stuff. I found a couple in Alaska that bought land there, felled the trees and built themselves a super cool log cabin.
After devouring their entire blog Kyle and I were pretty convinced that it could be done, and we were going to do it.
The first issue we ran into is the wooded area in Canada close to where my family lives on Manitoulin Island doesn’t have many of the types of trees to build the kind of log cabin we wanted. From our research we wanted to build a log home in the Swedish Cope style which requires long, straight, and generally large diameter logs. So our first decision was to purchase the logs we needed, instead of purchasing land and harvesting the trees ourselves.
We found a supplier and priced out the logs. Since we were purchasing the logs and investing a good deal of money in the project, we decided to really look into learning everything we needed to make this project happen.
The Pat Wolfe Log Building School is located in Lanark County, Ontario and Kyle signed up for their 4-week course. So we travelled to Canada for Easter and then I returned to my teaching job and Kyle went to stay with some of my family in the area and attend the log building school.
He sent me regular updates and photos of everything he was learning. I was busy organizing things (and saving every penny I was making) for the summer ahead. Our plan for the summer was to camp out on my parents farm and construct the ‘shell’ (the four exterior log walls) on an old quarry on the back of their farm. A few friends of ours planned come to Canada for the summer and camp out and build with us.
Mid-May Kyle finished log building school and arrived at my parents farm. Soon after he travelled to Killarney (Ontario) to purchase the logs and have them delivered.
One of his best friends Dave, and Dave’s dad Steve joined him. Their first two major jobs were to peel all of the logs and to build a crane that would be used to lift the logs into place once the construction began.
Peeling the logs proved to be tedious, difficult, and of course - there were record breaking temperatures that June. I was still away teaching in Germany but they kindly saved me a few to do when I arrived! 😂
Until next time!