What size log is best for a log cabin?

A quote from Wikipedia this morning…

“The Goldilocks principle is derived from a children’s story “The Three Bears” in which a little girl named Goldilocks finds a house owned by three bears. Each bear has their own preference of food and beds. After testing all three examples of both items, Goldilocks determines that one of them is always too much in one extreme (too hot or too large), one is too much in the opposite extreme (too cold or too small), and one is “just right”.

The same holds true of log cabins.

Here are three different log structures, each offers an example of too small, too large, or “just right”.

When I first started my love affair with log buildings, I loved them all.

I must admit, I still do.

But, my tastes have refined over time. When someone comes to me and requests that I build them a cabin as nice as I can what do I look for in seeking out an old cabin? Well, one the key features on my list is log size.

Take a look at the photo of the wonderful old tobacco barn. She is still in remarkable condition thanks to that nice roof still providing protection from the rain. This cabin is perfect for what she is (an outbuilding). She could also be made into a fine home, but we would find that once she was chinked the finished cabin would look a bit “busy”… sort of like a pin-stripe shirt.

From “too small” it’s easy to move onto the concept of “bigger is better”. Certainly massive logs are impressive, and I went down that path early in my career (as you can see in the photo posted below of the log structure without a roof). I bought the new pine logs that make up this cabin off of a Mennonite sawyer and notched out this cabin myself. Each log was more than two feet wide. I was going to make something spectacular out of these logs, but I found when I finished assembling this cabin that the logs themselves were distracting from the overall cabin. Everyone would comment on the logs, not on the cabin. (I ended up selling this cabin to man who wanted to finish building it himself, I learned later that the cabin had burned to the ground before he finished… so sad)

So, what size logs do I look for?

Well, the perfect size log depends upon how large of a cabin I am building. For instance years ago when I built a play log cabin for my kids five inch logs worked perfectly there. For a large log home I like logs that are ten to sixteen inches wide (a bit of variety is good) with four to six inch wide chink joints in-between.

Lastly, I have posted here a photo of a corner of a cabin that was “just right”… in fact, it was so perfect that I had to reach out and touch the logs.

That is the great indicator of having found perfection. When your eyes tell your brain that more input is needed and you find your hands reaching out without giving a thought to doing so… you’ve likely found something special.

Originally posted 2015-06-21 15:44:03.