My husband and I had the dream of building a cozy log cabin in the woods of Northern Michigan many years ago. Our dream finally came true! Here’s hoping our experiences will assist others in their log cabin dream. If we can assist you, please click here.
Rustic or log cabin decorating can seem like an overwhelming task but don’t let it get you down. Start small using rustic décor elements but plan big with an entire log cabin interior design laid out. Break it down into rooms or living areas and take it step by step.
Plan Big with Log Home Interior Design Themes
Start with choosing an overall décor theme. Many people like the wildlife themes for cabin decorating, like moose, bear, wolves, elk or ducks. If you go this route make sure you really love it because it becomes very easy to select log cabin decorating elements with moose or bear and pretty soon you can be overrun with woodland animals in your cabin. Nature themes include pine cones, pine trees and maple leafs.
Other log cabin interior design themes are areas and eras such as Lake Cottage décor, Western Ranch, the Lodge look, North Woods, Southwestern and Adirondack style. Each of these cabin decorating themes looks great and many rustic décor accents and furnishings can be found in these styles for your country lodge or log cabin.
Don’t be afraid to mix them up the way you like it. Pick and choose different rustic design elements from various sources; maybe decorate different rooms in your cabin in different rustic themes to give that rugged rustic country appeal.
Another idea for a log home interior design theme would be an eclectic mix of antiques and imported items. This really opens things up and almost anything that interests you can be incorporated into your overall log cabin decorating plan.
Start Small with Log Cabin Decorating Elements
Start with individual cabin decorations like rustic lighting fixtures. A cabin-style combination light and fan can anchor an entire room. Or plan around different dominating features, like the fireplace. The stone hearth and log mantle can suggest cabin decorating themes, like birch-bark canoes and pine trees, bear switch plates and moose coat hooks, metal art ceiling lights, a wrought iron fireplace screen silhouette or twig furniture.
Or start with a small room – the smallest room in the house makes planning easier to visualize. Make your bathrooms stand out with rustic hardware or wrought iron towel bars. Add a substantial outdoor-themed mirror and bear or moose light switch covers. Rustic bathroom vanity lighting sets the mood.
Colors and Textures
Log cabin interior design can be overwhelmed by the monolithic look of wood everywhere you turn. With log walls, hardwood floors and log or paneling on the ceilings, the dominating visual aspect is wood. Some people like this, but others would rather have some colors thrown in to the mix to set off the beautiful golden wood tones of the logs and timbers.
Don’t be afraid to install some drywall on your interior walls. Use this as a blank canvas to add color to a room. Add a texture to the walls with plaster and give it some depth. A bright color will reflect the cabin lighting and brighten the entire place. Muted earth tones blend well with the log cabin look and provide some contrast with the rich tones of the logs.
Light Fixtures and Lighting
Log cabin light fixtures take on a new role with their ability to set a mood or enhance a rustic décor theme. Log homes are not ordinary and their light fixtures should not be either. The high cathedral ceilings of a Great Room call for large, dramatic light fixtures such as an antler chandelier, a cedar log chandelier or a birch bark canoe chandelier that focus the eye and make a statement. Use pine cone wall sconces or twig wall lamps to continue the natural rustic décor on stairs. Rustic table lamps and dining lights round out your theme.
Fireplaces
What would a log cabin be without a fireplace? Nothing sums up the rustic coziness of log home living like a stone fireplace set against logs and timbers. While there are many factors involved in designing the perfect fireplace, the most noticeable features will be the hearth and mantle. Using artificial or manufactured stone for the hearth facing can reduce the weight load by a factor of 6 or 7.
Choosing a mantle can be an intensely personal choice and a key feature of your log cabin decorating, but you can rarely go wrong with using a massive timber made of reclaimed wood, or a red cedar log sawn in half and resting on two log corbels, or a rough-sawn slice of a log with the bark side showing, or stone slabs set on a recess above the fireplace. This is a chance to let your imagination free, but remember that there are minimum clearances required for flammable materials.
Iron Railings for Log Cabins
An ideal combination in nearly every log cabin decorating theme is wrought iron with the logs and timbers. They complement each other with their strength and rustic simplicity. Iron railings contrast nicely with the lighter wood inside and anchor down the feeling of solidity and permanence.
Log Cabin Flooring
Your floors are one of your largest log cabin decorating elements, but their importance is often overlooked or minimized. The choices you make for your log home flooring will partly dictate the overall design and look of your cabin. You can make the flooring a significant décor item or you can choose to make your flooring become a background for show pieces like soft leather couches, rustic wood tables and wrought iron benches.
You can make a small room feel larger by using flooring that is lighter in color than the walls. Mix up your cabin flooring with stone or tile at the entrances that get the most wear. Blend or contrast this with hardwood flooring and use area rugs to soften the hardwood and help define interior spaces. Spice it up with cowhide rugs and pillows.
Kitchen Cabinet and Bathroom Vanity Hardware
An easy upgrade to your log home interior design is replacing your kitchen cabinet hardware and your bathroom vanity hardware. This is easily done with just a screwdriver and you can choose from dozens of different rustic décor styles such as bear and moose drawer pulls, brass pine cone knobs and bear silhouette door knob backing plates.
Log cabin decorating or log home interior design can be as simple as choosing a few rustic décor elements to enhance your cabin decorating or as grand as selecting an overall theme for your log cabin interior design and ensuring that everything is designed and crafted around that theme.
If you enjoyed reading about rustic decorating, you may enjoy learning more about log home interior design.
Brian Gabriel is a licensed contractor, mechanical engineer and log home builder in the mountains of western North Carolina. He is the author and designer of the website Log Cabin Connection, created to offer advice, tips, ideas and resources related to log cabins.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brian_Gabriel
When someone mentions they live in a log cabin home, it invokes pictures of firelight playing across walls of wood, with massive beams overhead dancing in and out of the shadows. A cozy rug before the fireplace, with cushy, wood trimmed, rustic furniture. Large picture windows showing picturesque scenes of a mountain valley, or in winter, snow blanketing the ground, with firs standing green and tall.
This is log cabin life as we picture it and is a dream desired by many. Unfortunately, it remains a dream for many. But it need not remain only a dream. More and more people are fulfilling their ambition of owning, building or renting their log cabin home. Whether that log home is set in a tranquil wood or perched upon a rural hillside, the yearning of a peaceful serene setting is becoming more of a need for people as a way to escape our twenty-first century, technology driven existence.
So, how do you start? Here are 10 things to consider before building your perfect log cabin home.
First – Decide where you will be building your home. The size of the lot or acreage will determine square footage and much more. Consider your wants and needs, such as privacy and determining window placement with regard to maximizing your best views.
Second – Check out different log cabin home plans. There are a number of sites which sell plans. Also a number of log cabin plan books that allow you to search for the right one to maximize the footprint on your lot. There are also a number of builders who specialize in building log cabin homes that you can check out. The internet is a great place to search for log cabin home plans.
Third – Determine whether you will be building your dream home yourself or hiring a builder. Get quotes from several builders. Also, if hiring it done, be sure and ask for testimonials, check with the local builders association for unresolved issues and basically, do your homework.
Fourth – Do you want handcrafted logs (round logs and chinking) or milled logs (logs that are uniform in shape, with logs cut to fit together, such as with a tongue-and-groove or Swedish cope).
Fifth – An important consideration is getting water and sewer to your log cabin home. Some choices would be pumping water into a tank, drilling for water, hooking up to county or city water. Don’t forget estimates for well digging and septic installation if your home cannot be connected to community water
and sewer.
Sixth – Building Permits and Inspections – Probably the most intimidating part of building your own house is the permit process. Not only do the the requirements vary from county to county, but at times the decisions made seem so subjective that we find ourselves seething in frustration. However, permits and inspections are a necessary step, and they are in place predominately for your protection.
Seventh – How will you heat and cool your log cabin? Hydronic, or hot water, heating has is seeing a surge in popularity at present, mainly because of the increasing use of radiant floor heating, which is known for providing even, comfortable heat. Customers willing to invest in a quality hot-air system, rather than a bare-bones hydronic package at the lowest price, will find that forced hot air can be as comfortable as hydronic heating. Unfortunately, if the heating system is hot water and the home owner doesn’t spend the extra up front to cool their home, their finished home may be still too expensive to add the cooling system later and probably impossible to even install without doing even more expensive and inconvenient
remodeling to accommodate such an install. So be sure to investigate extensively your options, because it can be expensive to choose wrongly!
Eighth – Get quotes from electricians, plumbers, masons, roofers, excavators and even landscapers. If you can do some (or all) of this yourself, great. If not, you need to know what the expenses here will run.
Ninth – An important consideration is your foundation. Do you want a full foundation or a slab? With a full foundation you will need to do a lot of digging. Be sure to budget the cost of an excavator. You will also need to know how far down the footings and the wall should go. Be sure and check with the local building inspector.
Tenth – Financing! This should be approached after you have investigated the above steps. Before you apply for the construction loan, you must get all your quotes in order. Banks are not happy about increasing the amount of money you ask for. Be sure to account for all the sub-contractors (plumbers, masons, electricians, excavators, landscapers), the well and septic, the windows and roof, the painters, and even the grass seed. Your mortgage representative will expect you to have a handle on all your financial needs
Basically, the above list might seem a little daunting. Remember, you have access to building contractors, house plans, land, materials and financing. You can build your dream home yourself. However, if ability and time are lacking, just hire a General Contractor to put it all together and present it to to you, with a markup in cost, of course!
Theresa Sontag makes it easy to investigate building or renting a log cabin home. To learn more, visit her Log Cabin Home Site for expert advice saving you hours and days of effort.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Theresa_Sontag
Log Cabin Kit – How Does It Work?
Have you ever heard of a log cabin kit? No, this is not the Lincoln Logs you played with as a child. It is a kit to build a real, life-size cabin. If you have fond memories from your childhood of staying in a cabin with friends or family and getting away from it all to get back to nature, this may be the way for you to relive those memories for yourself or to pass them on to your children. A log cabin kit is a way for families of nearly every income level to achieve their dream of owning a vacation home.
When people think of a vacation home, they often think of something that you may have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on, only to use it a few weeks out of the year. Most people just cannot afford this type of investment. However, if you have access to some fairly inexpensive land with water and other utility rights, a log cabin kit may be well within your means. You will need a little carpentry know-how, and you may need to contract out some of the more difficult work like plumbing or electric-but you can even build it yourself if you desire. Or, you can hire a builder to use the materials and blueprints from the kit to do it for you.
You can find a log cabin kit online easily that will fit your needs, but first you will need to determine what your needs are. How many people will be using the log cabin? Will those needs change in the future? Can you make additions to the log cabin kit plan if you need to? How big is the lot? Do you want a deck or patio added on? What appliances, electronics and plumbing features do you feel are necessary?
Once you have decided what features are necessary in your log cabin kit, you can begin shopping for one. Check out the company offering the kit with the Better Business Bureau to make sure that they do not have a large number of unresolved claims or complaints. How long have they been in business? Do they have a log cabin kit with all of the features you are looking for, and if not, will they customize one for you? Are their instructions easy to follow? Are the materials of top-quality? Each of these questions is important to consider when you are looking for a log cabin to live out your dreams.
Eriani Doye writes articles on Real Estate and Finance. If you would like to find more information on a log cabin kit visit http://www.dotcabin.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Eriani_Doyel
Small Cabin Plans – Finding a Great Log Cabin Plan Online
Small cabin plans – how do you find that special log cabin plan that is just right for you? Before the internet, you would buy some cabin plans books and look through the plans to see if any appealed to you. If you found one, you could order the log cabin plan you wanted by telephone or mail. Eventually, your plans would show up. And you can still get cabin plans this way if you like.
Fast-forward to today and the internet. Here is how to use the speed and power of your PC to find small cabin plans or anything else online. Search online by putting quotation marks around your search terms so you will get the best results, like “small cabin plans” or “log cabin plan” and so on. When you arrive at a plans site, it is important to see what kind of criteria you can enter so that you only get the kind of plans that interest you. You should be able to search by:
Small cabin plans would generally be considered cabins that are under 1,000 square feet, for example. You should be able to only see plans under that size. The best log cabin plan sites will have additional features you can include when searching, such as kitchen layout preferred, special rooms desired, foundation type and how you want the results sorted — by most popular plans shown first, largest to smallest and so on.
After you enter your criteria, see what plans are shown. If you get too few results, maybe broaden your criteria some so you can see more plans. As you find small cabin plans that interest you, make note of the plans number in case you want to see it again. If you find a log cabin plan you really like, then you can shift your focus to examine the plans company, prices and so on. Here are questions you should want answers to:
Remember, rather than try and create brand new small cabin plans from scratch, you can save considerably if you can find great cabin plans that have already been built successfully somewhere. This means the plans will work. Maybe you just need to make some changes to the plans so they become exactly what you want. If you can do it this way, it will be cheaper and faster for you.
As you search online for a great log cabin plan, keep a notebook of the ideas you get when you see features and concepts in cabin plans that you like. Finding the best log cabin plan for your project is so much faster and easier with the capabilities of the internet. Take your time as you search. Those great small cabin plans probably exist already, which means you just need to find them.
Copyright 2005 InfoSearch Publishing
See quality small cabin plans from a great online plans service providing plans for 50 years. David Buster is VP of InfoSearch Publishing and webmaster of http://www.yourdreamloghome.com – learn more about cabin plans, log home plans, fireplace design, log cabin rentals and finding a log cabin plan that is just right for you.
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Americans have loved the idea of log cabins for decades or more. The allure of a log cabin even in our political history can be traced back to the Whig party under William Henry Harrison. The log cabin was so pervasive in the early history of the US that there were actually seven Presidents born in log cabins, the most famous of these was of course Abraham Lincoln. It’s these simpler times that are evoked when we see a log cabin.
The design of a cabin was deceptively simple. Stacking logs for each wall, the individual logs were notched near the ends so that they could lock together with the logs from the adjoining wall. The inevitable gaps between the logs were filled in mud and sod. For a simple birdhouse, this level of complexity is often skipped, and the “logs” may be an applique glued on to the surface of a flat wooden wall. Prices range from less than $10 to more than $100.
Log Cabin Designs for Birdhouses
There are many types of designs for log cabin birdhouses. Some are crafted from ceramic, and are finished in many colors that one wouldn’t normally associate with a log cabin. These designs tend to be smaller, and would house birds like wrens.
You find some made from traditional woods like fir, in small sizes that look like a simple fishing shack or a frontier home, to much more elegant designs that tend to look more like 2 or 3 story mansions, but retaining the log wall look.
An increasingly popular alternative is a bamboo bird house. As bamboo gains popularity as a sustainable yet sturdy hardwood, you will find more and more birdhouses built from this wood species. And while many bamboo houses are designed to reflect the oriental roots of bamboo, there are many that are built to look more like traditional designs, and this includes log cabin designs.
Take a look at some of the variety of log cabin birdhouse designs. You’re sure to find one that fits your home and garden.
You can see a large sample of the different styles of log cabin birdhouses at http://www.birdfeederz.com/Log-Cabin-Birdhouses.html
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=J_Ruppel
By Jessica P
If you’ve always been in love with the idea of living in a log cabin, you have possibly discovered how expensive they are. Yes, they are gorgeous, but some people find themselves wondering if they’re really worth it.
With the recent growth in popularity of log cabin kits, people are saying that they are definitely worth it. A good log cabin kit makes it much cheaper and far easier to have the log cabin you have always wanted your whole life. They are just as traditional and beautiful as log cabins. With log cabin kits, you won’t need cranes or other heavy equipment. When you use these kits to build your dream home, you have two major advantages.
The first is that they are much cheaper. Because all of your materials come from a specialized company, there is no need to contract different companies to gather the materials that you need. Also, with log cabin kits, your house gets finished much more quickly than a traditional log cabin.
Log cabins built from a kit can leave people totally shocked. They assume that the nostalgia and beauty of a traditional log cabin is compromised when you build from a kit, but that is certainly not the case. If you build a log cabin from a kit, you can be sure it will be just as beautiful as the cabins that cost more and take more time to construct. Most people won’t even know the difference unless you point it out to them.
So if you’re wondering if log cabin kits can save you money, the answer is: Yes! They really can.
Want to make your dreams for the perfect Log Cabin a reality? Visit Easy Log Cabin.com for what you need to know about Log Cabin Kits, Log Cabin Plans and more.
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