How did you start in the log home business?

My dad started Baldwin Log Homes back in 1975 in Kalispell, Montana, and has grown the business bigger and bigger every year, with about 450 to 460 log homes being built and delivered across the country, United States. We have a log yard in Kalispell where we do all of the construction for log homes. And once the log home or log shell rather, is complete, dissemble that log shell and take it anywhere in the country and re-assemble it on the owners' foundation.

Now in areas and states that we're licensed in, which would be Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and Montana, as general contractors, we can do full turnkey construction in those states. The uniqueness of our small, family owned business is that we still build exactly the same type of log homes that we built back in the mid-70s, which are non-machined, hand scribed, hand peeled, and fully hand built log homes. So they're fully custom, they are one of a kind.

You'll never have the same log home as anyone else that we built. We build your floor plan, or we help you design a floor plan based on what you want, and we are currently building several log homes in Arizona, Montana, and currently in Utah.

 Are log homes eco friendly or "green" ?

In the construction of a log home in today's world, you'll hear people criticize the fact that we're using a lot of logs or a lot of trees to build a log home. The fact of the matter is we consume less timber than a regular framed house of the same square footage, almost a third less. So in fact, we're consuming less timber than a regular framed home would during construction. From that perspective we're green. The R factor, or the insulation factor of a log, is significantly more than a standard framed wall with insulation as well.

Isn't a log biodegradable but insulation is fiberglass and not biodegradable?

Yes. And standard two by six framed wall has an R 19 insulation value on a standard, standard log. Twelve inch log is somewhere around an R 25. And it gets higher and higher as the logs get bigger. So much more efficient in terms of energy, which is a lot.

Are bigger size logs used for different rooms to improve the "R Factor"?

In terms of building a log room with a different size log, unless we just give a small log action within the house after it was already built, we can't do that. What we do is we determine the size of log based on the homeowner's desires. So one person may want a twelve inch log, the other may want a twenty four inch log. We will build the entire house out of either size, depending on what they want.

What's the common size?

Fifteen to sixteen inch and we've built a couple of them up in Flagstaff, one of them is mine, they're twenty one and twenty two inch logs. And they're hand peeled, hand scribed, it's all full custom hand construction.

Summary

There aren't that many log home builders that build the old style, handcrafted log home. Most of them now are either log siding or they're machined and they look like a standard house. You don't have the rusticness. You don't have the single custom creation of your specific home. So our homes are very unique.

 The other unique thing about our small family business is that our overhead is low which enables us to extend high savings to the consumer. We own all of our own equipment and we have employed by us crews that have been working for us for years and so we're efficient in providing materials and labor at a better cost than our competitors.