A: It’s best to have your property: The building site often dictates the layout of the house itself. Such factors as view, sun orientation, slope, neighborhood, well and septic system, and driveway/garage location have a major impact.

Know your budget: Being pre-approved by a financial institution gives you a guideline. They can help translate the overall project cost into a monthly payment. This information is key for us to help keep you within your budget parameters during the design and selection of materials.

Have a house style in mind: If you’ve seen a picture of a home you like, this is a great first step toward creating your design. Seeing the conceptual appearance of what you want is far superior to us than trying to read your mind. A photo or something cut from a magazine will do and it doesn’t have to be a log home.

Have a basic plan: Because log homes are timberframe construction, they require few bearing walls on the interior. This allows you the flexibility of modifying a plan from any source or providing a rough sketch (does not need to be to scale) of your ideas without concern for wall placement. Just show us where you want what rooms and we’ll take it from there. Knowing the dimensions of rooms or the size of the house footprint is also extremely helpful. Don’t forget to tell us about the specifics of your kitchen and baths, unusually large or odd-shaped pieces of furniture and any special requirements.

From this information, we then sketch your floorplan to scale and make sure your design is structurally sound, conforms to building codes, uses space wisely and allows for efficient traffic flow. Because we understand you are making a large investment, we also review for marketability.

Tags: design, FAQ, getting started