Homesteaders settling in the territories of the American West traditionally built log cabins; durable, rainproof, and inexpensive. Today, eco-friendly and rustically charming, log cabins with their distinctive handcrafted appearance seem to be making a comeback, with luxurious features such as whirlpools, skylight windows and heated patios.

Swedish colonists built the first log cabins in North America at the beginning of the 18th century. The design of the log cabins was influenced by typical North European farm-houses until the introduction of the Homestead Act. According to which, new colonists had to build their homes of a specific size with at least one window. These old log cabins had just one room, a spacious porch, and an elevated area for sleeping.

Building the frontier style log cabin was quite easy and required only a few days. First of all, the builder settled a solid foundation to keep logs above the damp soil. Most often, rock or stone were used for the log cabin foundation. Then the builder would square off each log and make round cuts on the top and bottom of each end. Then he assembled the logs so that round cuts would fit together. The logs were secured together with wood sticks. The remaining spaces were filled with insulation materials such as clay or mud. The windows and doors were simply cut out, and a fireplace was built afterwards.

Thanks to new construction technologies and an increased attention to all things eco-wise and natural, log cabins are gaining in their popularity. Well-constructed, weather-proof log cabins today can be built and styled similar to conventional houses. Among the advantages of log cabins and homes, experts list remarkable weather-proofing qualities with little insulation and low building costs. In addition to that log cabins require little maintenance.

A hundred years ago a log builder lived in almost all rural neighborhoods, so learning to build a log cabin was easy – people simply followed the way he built. Today, log cabin enthusiasts have access to hundreds of log cabin building manuals and resources from all over the world.

Log cabin factory kits are a practical solution for the log cabin devotee. Log packages with complete instructions can be found online from as low as $5,000, but the complete cost of the building can go twice as high. To the price of the log cabin kit you should add the costs of the assembly and the installation of plumbing, electricity, heating and other “luxuries”. The happy owner of the log cabin can actually decrease the costs by participating in the construction, even though most log building companies can provide a team of contractors to raise the log cabin. In any case, the modern log cabin can be built from scratch in less than two weeks.

Once a popular vacation dwelling located in the scenic outback, log cabins are becoming popular residence choices for many families. More than 90 per cent of all log homes are currently used as a primary residence, and many of these log homes are built in metropolitan areas. Often, when people build the log cabin for vacation getaways places, they eventually move into their log homes because of their casual rugged charm and convenience.

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Log cabins have long been breaking new grounds as an enigmatic emblem of an American character. The very first log cabins were introduced in the 1600s by Scandinavians. These earliest forms of log cabins were constructed like wooden fences. Before, they use logs with different sizes set perpendicularly in a gutter to produce the walls of the cabin.

Today, log cabins are more meticulously crafted, with logs placed parallel to each other and connected on the last part with “notches.”

Log cabins have been very popular in the United States because of the amount of trees that are of great quantity. For this reason, building log cabins had been the cheapest and the most affordable homes that can easily be built by any American.

In spite of its similarities on designs and use of materials, log cabins are not created on the same level. Log cabins may vary according to the styles they were built.

Generally, there are two kinds of log cabins according to styles. To know more about this matter, here is a comprehensive and detailed explanation about the difference between the two log cabin styles:

1. Manufactured or milled log cabins

As its name suggests, manufactured log cabins use logs that are “milled” or sometimes known as “machine-profiled.”

Logs used in this particular style of log cabin have undergone through a manufacturing procedure. This is usually done to remove the inherent features of the logs as well as well as its flaws or defects. After which, these types of logs are changed into good lumbers that have proportionate sizes and shapes. Hence, you can expect that a manufactured log cabin style use only logs that are standardized and unvarying when it comes to sizes and shapes.

In this case, when building manufactured log cabins, it is important to note that the dimensions of the whole cabin are directly proportional to each other. There would not be much difficulty in identifying these things because logs are of the same sizes.

Hence, with manufactured log cabins, you can expect that the length of a certain log would naturally be the total length of one partition or fence of a log cabin.

2. Handcrafted log cabins

This particular style of log cabin is characteristically made from logs that were stripped off with their bark. However, their natural characteristics as trees were retained on its natural condition, without altering, modifying, or changing any of its features.

Handcrafted log cabins usually create an impression of a more rustic, rugged-looking cabin. This is because logs used in making this particular log cabin style have form that is more irregular.

However, with some special devices and expertise, most handcrafters would painstakingly peel off the bark from the logs and match each log into the right place to form the wall.

Since handcrafted log cabins are more laborious than manufactured log cabins, the length of time needed to finish handcrafted log cabins would be longer. What’s more, the production of handcrafted log cabins would normally costs more than the manufactured log cabins because the work is arduously made by hands only.

Handcrafted log cabins were first constructed in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Scandinavia. In fact, it was the Scandinavians that introduced log cabins to the United States.

Between these two styles of log cabins, manufactured or milled log cabins are much preferred by many people. This is because manufactured or milled log cabins are more affordable and easier to build than the handcrafted log cabins. This is because with manufactured log cabins, machines do the work; hence, the job is easily drawn to a close without much difficulty.

Moreover, manufacturers of milled logs have more skills in marketing their products and elaborating the benefits of opting for a manufactured log cabin style. In this way, more and more people are enticed to resort to manufactured log cabins than the handcrafted log cabin styles.

Whatever style you want to employ when building your log cabin, it is very worthy to note that log cabins had tremendously grown form the typical rustic kind of homes built far from the city. With the many benefits of log cabins, most of the Americans build these types of houses not just as a vacation home but more of a residential.

In fact, surveys show that many homeowners have preferred to adorn their log cabins with more embellishments making it more costly than the typical homes. That, indeed, makes log cabins definite part of the conventional type of American dwelling.

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Time-tested log cabin styles come to life at www.Build-Your-Log-Cabin.com written by Charles H. Smith .