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We discovered that the first story and a half of this home was made of logs. But the remainder of the home’s second story was made of framed lumber, likely purchased from a sawmill in the early 1900’s.

There was a time when no one wanted to live in an old log cabin. And everyone wanted to live a modern farmhouse. (there goes that theme from the Walton’s playing in my head again)

I crawled up into the attic of the house. (no buzzards there… whew!) And I further discovered that the 1900 builders had reused the rafters from the original cabin. I could see the old notching in these rafters where the roof on the shorter cabin had had a 12/12 pitch and had now been changed to a shallower 8/12 pitch for this two-story farmhouse.

We debated what to do about this situation…

We could put the siding back up that we had removed. We could remove the siding that covered the logs all the way around the house (we thought that would look odd). Or, we could blow the entire top of this house off and either restore the original cabin to it’s original shorter form, or we could finish the cabin with old replacement logs creating a two-story cabin.

The owner decided to leave it like this for a few years so that she could enjoy looking at her logs, and then she would cover them back up.

What would you have done?

Originally posted 2015-04-30 14:27:31.