01/25/07 Building that Home on the Range

Building that Home On The Range. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. A lot of what you hear today is about energy efficiency and when you are thinking of building a new home, those two words can play a large role in your design planning. Hank Schaffeld with Gold Valley Log Homes suggest that a log home can easily accommodate the energy conscious home owner. SCHAFFELD: Well many people for many years have been thinking about that feel they get when they enter a log home and of course a log home is going to be obviously more natural and use more energy efficient means of producing a home. One of the terms used for that is a green log home. That doesn't mean that it's green wood, that's the term used that it's environmentally friendly because it takes less energy to produce that home than it does a stick built home even though you are using more wood, you're not using energy costs to process that wood as much as you do in a stick built house. Schaffeld is a dealer for Lincoln Log Homes and says that depending on the construction a log home is comparable to the cost of a traditional stick built home. SCHAFFELD: There's lot of different shapes of logs that Lincoln Logs offers. One of our most popular is called our "D" log which gives you a flat interior and a round exterior so of course it looks like a log home. And if you are building with that style of home, if you compare that to a custom stick built house, comparably finished, you are going to be very close to the same cost. There are other shapes of logs for example the full round, it's called a Swedish cope-style, which ranges anywhere from 6 inches to 14 inches; obviously if you get into the larger logs you're going to be getting into larger costs. According to Schaffeld if you don't see the exact home you are looking for in their catalog, all you have to do is ask. SCHAFFELD: We have about 300 standard models. The idea there is for me to get an idea of what you want because some people have this idea of yes, I want a log home but they really don't know what they want as far as a floor plan and so then we can take that combination of approximately 300 different models and pick and choose maybe if not the house with modifications but maybe portions of 8 or 10 different homes; combine them together and produce their house so they can get all the features they want into their house, then all the drafting and engineering are part of the deal of the material package from Lincoln Logs so they can get exactly their house. Tomorrow we talk about just how energy efficient is a log home. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.