Almost every log home is custom designed, whether you’re modifying a stock plan or starting from scratch. By their very nature, custom floor plans open up a host of untested challenges, especially if you’re trying to design the house yourself. With almost all log home manufacturers, an in-house architect will take your design and turn it into a set of drawings that fit his building system. Your home will be structurally sound. However, don’t necessarily expect them to point out every drawback or error in your design. This is a hands-on business, and in the end, the design of your home is up to you… and you’ll have to live with it. Here are some tips I can suggest to make your design more efficient.

MECHANICAL: Open floor plans are the essence of the modern log home. They make a house feel bigger and keep the cook from feeling isolated. However, if you have a second story, you need to consider how you’re going to get the plumbing, electrical, and ducting (both supply and return) to the rooms above. You won’t be using the exterior walls for that, so you need to create enough interior walls on the ground floor to fit all the mechanics. In all likelihood, each object will occupy its own space between the 2x4s. Even if he uses underfloor heating, he will need ductwork for air conditioning. There are some systems that use much smaller diameter high pressure ducting than conventional ducting, so there are other possibilities if you are short on space. But the best solution is to think ahead. If you’re tempted to use a full log interior wall (or none at all), you may be sacrificing the opportunity to have more ductwork above.

PLUMBING: The smartest floor plans are the ones that try to keep the bathrooms close together (either next to each other or one directly above the other) and the shortest runs in the plumbing. This can’t always be done, but when placing the upstairs bathroom, try to align it with a downstairs interior wall. This way, the plumbing doesn’t have to meander all over the place.

CLOSETS: I’d venture a guess that log homes are often short on closet space. I know my home is. First of all, it would be a terrible waste to put a closet against an outside wall of logs. Why hide their beautiful trunks? And because we try to keep square footage to a minimum, it almost seems like a crime to waste precious closet space. However, there is more than one reason to include them. Not only do we seem to collect more things as we get older, but by law in several states, the closet determines whether a room is a bedroom or an office. This could affect the resale (or refinancing) of your home. Here’s a suggestion: place two cabinets side by side on the wall that separates two rooms; the closets may not be huge, but it doesn’t change the shape of the rooms. Try to include a coat closet near the front door.

WINDOWS: As I’m sure you’ve read many times by now, you can’t have too many windows in a log home. Wood absorbs light like a sponge. If you have a large empty wall, inserting a window near the peak not only lets in more light, it adds character. Some people add windows to both sides of a dormer shed. In my case, I had to move the roof line to increase the size of my bedroom window, because by code it was supposed to be 6 square feet for the exit. In any upstairs room, you’ll need your windows to be big enough to get out in the event of a fire. Also remember that too many direct fit windows will decrease the amount of airflow to your upstairs floor. In my house, I added an awning (a small, hinged window) to the bottom of the stationery windows in my dormers. This helped to let air in, but rooms can still be stuffy. A ceiling fan helps, but ultimately you may need to add a skylight to create airflow.

KITCHEN VENTILATION: One of the most difficult decisions we made involved how to ventilate the range hood. If you don’t want your stove to be on an outside wall, you’ll have an interesting puzzle. Will you run the exhaust duct between the floor joists to the outside? Will the run be so long that you’ll have to add another fan? I gave up and moved my stove to the outside wall, but then we had to cut a hole in the logs for ventilation. Horrors! How do you hide that? My builder built a little cedar box around the hole and we were lucky to have a porch roof underneath so you can’t see it from all directions. Still, this ugly vent is in the front of the house, and if I had thought about it, I could have moved the kitchen to the back of the house.

DRAG SPACE vs. BASEMENT: There are many reasons to opt for a crawl space over a basement, none of them particularly comfortable. Besides the obvious disadvantages of a narrow space, there are some things we don’t think about. I, in my blissful ignorance, gave the ugly electrical panel no thought. Of course, I knew we’d have meters and a panel, but I didn’t think where they were going. What I didn’t know was that, by code, we couldn’t put the panel in the crawl space. Since we don’t have a garage, the electrical panel was installed in one of our rooms on the log wall. Isn’t that lovely? Another downside of the tight space: You’ll need a short water heater if that’s where you’re going, and you may need to buy a horizontally mounted furnace. Because our water quality was poor, we had to install a purification system. This 54″ unit must be mounted upright and our access clearance is 48″ high. We had to drill a hole in the concrete floor to make room for the unit.

SPOUTS: Yes, you want to get the water out of your log home at all costs. There may be challenges; we have an alpine style house with a vaulted ceiling. However, the roof becomes a deep V at the corners creating a magnificent rain gutter. This isn’t necessarily wonderful when it falls on your deck! Because of the generous overhang that comes with a log home, the end of that V projects away from the walls and doesn’t form a logical angle from which to hang a downspout. In one corner I settled for an old fashioned rain barrel, and on the deck side we had to divert the water to the pergola we built against the house and put a gutter along the edge of the pergola.

OVERHANGS: Must have at least a 1′ foot and preferably a 2′ overhang to protect your logs. This overhang must be taken into account when designing the roof line. If you have overlapping angles, make sure you don’t create a water trap or snow trap. There are times when your overhang can collide with another roof angle. You may need to raise part of the roof a bit to clear space.

DOOR SWING – This can be one of the most annoying mistakes you can make and not realize until it’s too late. Think about what your door covers when it is fully opened. Is he covering another door? Will two doors collide together? If it’s in a tight space, will it open all the way? When we installed our bathroom vanity, we didn’t think about swinging the door until the plumbing was already connected. The door cleared the powder room by a full inch; It could have been worse. You can compensate by turning the other way (before it’s already hung, or your hinges will be on the wrong side). However, at the design stage you can use a narrower door. Or get a smaller dresser.

ELECTRICAL: The electrical and plumbing design will not come from the architectural plans of your log home. The manufacturer does not care where he places his outlets. Once the plans are firm, it’s time for you to sit down with the electrician and mark exactly where you want to put the outlets, switches, and light fixtures. Your local code will dictate the minimum distance between outlets, but any will tell you to put more than he needs; eventually you’ll probably use them anyway. Even if you don’t need it, put your cable and phone in every room; it is much easier and cheaper to do it in advance. Also remember, you can never have too many lights in a log home. Plan ahead for those fixtures, especially the ones on the ceiling. They won’t be pretty to add later.

DEAD SPACE – If you’re building a huge log home, you have so much space that it doesn’t really matter. But for most of the rest of us, every inch counts. There are a few approaches that could maximize your floor space. First of all, do you really need hallways? Some space-saving layouts organize rooms so that they all open onto a small hallway. I prefer none at all. Also, consider that each closet door creates dead space. If you can arrange your floor plan so that the closet door opens into a place that’s already dead (say, another closet door or a hallway), it might open up the room a bit. Does your loft have a purpose or is it just an open hallway from one room to another? Can you put a piece of furniture on top? If not, maybe it will serve to give it an angle and make its “open down” space a bit smaller.

I hope I have helped a little. I learned a lot of these tips the hard way, and I’m sure there are plenty more I haven’t come across yet. After all, a custom home is a big learning curve.