Log profiles
If you are building a log home, this is one of the first choices you make and one of the few you cannot change afterwards. Here is what each shape is, and more to the point, what it does to the house you end up living in.
The walls are Eastern White Pine. The six below are the profiles worth choosing between for most houses; the mill's full line runs to more than a dozen. Most profiles can be hand‑hewn instead of milled smooth, inside or out or both.
The cross-sections are ours, and they are schematic. Each section is generated from its own nominal dimensions, so a 6″ log is drawn six inches thick and a 12″ course is drawn twice as tall as a 6″ one — every profile below is at the same scale, so you can compare them by eye. They show the shape and the proportions. They are not shop drawings, and the tongue-and-groove detail in particular varies from mill to mill. When you are choosing for real, we will put the actual sections in front of you.
-
D
6″ thick × 8″ course
Round on the weather side, flat on the room side.
You get a log house from the driveway and a straight wall inside, so bookcases, cabinets, and trim sit flat against it. It is the profile most people picture when they picture a log home, and the one that asks least of your furniture.
-
D, stout
8″ thick × 6″ course
The same shape carrying two more inches of wall.
Wider and shorter, so the courses read heavier and the window and door returns get deeper. Worth walking through a finished one before you decide — the difference is obvious standing in a room and almost invisible on paper.
-
Colonial, single bevel
6″ thick × 8″ course
One angled cut along the outside face, flat inside.
The bevel throws rain off each course instead of letting it sit on the joint. From the road the wall reads closer to a sided house than a round-log one, which is what some people want and some people came here to avoid.
-
Colonial, double bevel
6″ thick × 8″ course
Angled top and bottom outside, flat inside.
A crisper shadow line at every course, and the most formal-looking of the log walls. It suits a house with symmetrical elevations better than a rambling one.
-
Dovetail
6″ thick × 12″ course
Flat both faces. The joinery, not the section, is the point.
This is the Appalachian wall — squared logs with the corners cut so they lock together and shed water without an overhang. At twelve inches the courses are tall enough to count from across a field.
-
Double round
8″ thick × 8″ course
Curved on both faces.
The most rustic wall available and the least forgiving to live against: nothing flat sits flush to it, so cabinetry, trim, and anything wall-mounted needs scribing or furring. Beautiful in a great room, a nuisance in a kitchen.
Closing the course: chinking or V-groove
Where one log meets the next you either leave a visible joint and fill it, or you close it tight. Chinking is the band of filler between courses — on an old cabin it was mud and horsehair, today it is a flexible synthetic that moves as the logs settle. It reads as a white or gray line and it is the look most people mean when they picture a cabin. A V-groove closes the courses against each other and leaves a shadow line instead of a stripe, which reads quieter and more modern.
You can have different answers inside and out, and people often do — chinked on the weather side where it suits the house from the road, V-grooved inside where a wall of stripes would be a lot to live with. Neither is more weathertight than the other when it is done properly; the sealing happens in the joint itself, not in what you see.
The log-sided wall
There is a middle road, and it is worth knowing about before you rule it out. A conventional framed wall — studs, cavity, insulation — carrying milled log siding on the outside gives you the same elevation from the driveway with a great deal more insulation in the wall, and it takes normal drywall or paneling inside.
What you give up is the thing itself. A solid log wall is structure and finish and insulation all at once, and you can feel that standing in the room; a sided wall is a framed house that looks like a log one. Some people want the look and the lower running cost and are perfectly happy. Some would be disappointed every day. We will tell you which we think you are, if you want us to.
Not sure which of these you want?
That is a good first conversation, and it is easier standing in a finished house than reading about it. We can usually arrange that.
Talk it through with us