Our Log Home

You know when Joslyn and Emily decided to call our blog Up Shipley Creek they originally added the "without a paddle" part to it. I just thought it was kinda funny. The more I think about it the truer I realize it is. It never fails that anything Justin and I try to do it always turns out to be ten times harder than the directions say. So, of course building a house should be a frustrating, wait I mean fun adventure. Here is the story so far. Justin and I decided last fall to sell our house. I had long out grown the kitchen. We put our house up for sale and in 3 months had it sold! We decided around Thanksgiving that we would build our dream home. When we were young and in love we always said that if we ever built anything it would be a log house. We have both always agreed on the style and basic layout of the house that we would like to build. We spent all winter trying to clear the land. So, we set out to start construction as soon as we sold our house. We moved out of our house and it started raining the very next day and didn't stop for the next two months. You all know that I am not exaggerating this. Remember all of the floods we had in the spring? Starting construction was impossible! It took us two months to get our perc test done. Once we had that we got the ball rolling. We got our footings dug, blocks laid, and our concrete poured. We were movin' on. Then it came time to have the logs delivered. Well, it hadn't rained in a few weeks. Guess what? The day we scheduled the delivery for it poured all the night before and into the afternoon of the delivery day. We had plenty of guys to come over and help unload all 330 logs. (Emily and I stood by with the Kool-aid.) The delivery guy was about an hour late because when he started to load the logs at 5:30am it started to storm. Once he finally got to Jonesboro he tried to pull in the drive way. If any of you have been to our new house you know that our drive way is a little steep and all dirt. Needless to say he got stuck. Thank goodness Steven drove his big work truck and 45 minutes later we had the log truck in the driveway. The guys got the first load unloaded in about 30 minutes. The second delivery went a little smoother than that. Still raining though. So far we have the first round of logs completely down and are ready to start the second round which is where the electric boxes will have to be cut out and the wire ran in. Oh, did I mention that we are having to carry all of the logs around to the front of Ron and Jill's house in order to cut them. The saw that we got from the log company (complete death trap by the way) is a 220 plug. The only place there is 220 is in the front of their shop. So, we could have avoided getting stuck by having the logs unloaded around front in the first place!!!!! We are also now doing twice the work since we have to load them onto the trailer, drive them around front, unload them, cut them, reload them, drive them back around and unload them again. Live and learn. It does sound like a little more work than it actually is. Bright side I am building up some muscles!!! So here are the pics of the work so far.