Log Cabin Floor Plans

My brother called me the other day. “Joe,” he said, “I think I've got our project.” I asked for more details, but he wouldn't tell me. All he would say is, “I'll be over soon.”

The project that he was talking about was a vague notion that we had both had in the middle of a long, listless winter. We knew that, come summer time, we had to do something together besides bum around, and we had waxed dramatic filling our days and nights with grandiose possibilities. So, I wasn't as surprised as you might think when, half an hour later, he came over to my house, grinning and holding a set of log cabin floor plans.

You see, we have a piece of property on lake Michigan. It's beautiful, and sits right on the lake, but years ago the house that used to sit on it burned down, and no one in the family has ever gotten around to doing anything with the land since then. The log cabin floor plans that he brought over happened to be just the right size for the property, and although neither of us had actually built a house before, we both had plenty of experience working with our hands.

Having log cabin floor plans and actually building a log cabin are two very different things. Everything looked so simple and straight forward on the log cabin floor plans, but there is nothing straight forward about building a house. Just getting the right material is a major run around, not to mention a huge expense. Then there is digging out and setting a foundation, and making sure that everything sits in accordance with the log cabin floor plans. Not to mention minor details like plumbing and electricity. Well, all I can say is that it is good that we had all summer and the help of a good half a dozen relatives.

But if log cabin floor plans don't convey the difficulty of building an actual log cabin, they also don't give you a sense of the joy of actually owning one. Once we had the log cabin all finished, I could swear that there was never a more beautiful house in all of the world. There it sat, surrounded by majestic pines, cozily sitting before the great expanse of lake Michigan. Although the log cabin floor plans had shown a picture of it, it hadn't compared to the real thing – not by a long shot.