Tom Ross

08-14-2009

Tom Wood and his two-man crew have just completed the walls of a new log house and can’t wait to take it all apart Monday.

“We’ll give each log a letter and a number, take it down, truck the logs to the owners’ property in Badger Meadows (near Steamboat Lake) and it will take us about three days to reassemble it,” Wood said.

He is the longtime owner of Thomas Wood Handcrafted Log Homes and has built nearly 80 homes since establishing his business in 1986.

The walls of the log structure that will be the new home of Jeffrey and Nancy Richards have been under construction since March on an industrial lot just off Shield Drive, within a nine-iron shot of the Yampa River. The logs were all standing dead timber, about a third of them cut from the Richards’ own land. While the logs were being peeled of their bark, cut and scribed, subcontractors were busy digging a well, building a septic system and pouring the foundation of the new home. When a walkout basement is included, it will comprise 3,500 square feet.

Wood has built a number of log homes on their building lots, but assembling the walls off-site offers several advantages. In addition to allowing simultaneous foundation and house construction, it’s much easier to sort and stage logs best suited to different purposes on a well-organized yard, where there aren’t stumps and rocks to stumble over. The process of peeling bark from the logs and cutting them to size with chain saws creates large piles of by-products that are more difficult to deal with on a wooded lot.

From the construction yard in Steamboat, said Wood’s employee Jason Ruemelin, they can conveniently arrange for the waste materials to be hauled off by Twin Environmental Services to its compost pit.

Wood is clearly proud of the green aspects of building homes from native logs. Not only is the creation of waste products far less than that generated by the milling of dimensional lumber, but the amount of fossil fuels consumed in moving the logs from the forest, to a mill, on to a lumber yard and ultimately to a job site is vastly reduced.

“By the time you get a two-by-four to a job,” it’s traveled hundreds if not thousands of miles, Wood observed. “The furthest I’ve gone to get logs is Saratoga, Wyo. (just across the Colorado state line from North Routt County).”

Supply rising, demand falling

Wood said Northwest Colorado should have an unlimited supply of suitable building logs for many years, until

thousands of acres of lodgepole pine killed in the beetle epidemic finally fall to the ground.

“There are billions and billions of board feet out there,” he said.

Once the trees topple in the forest and fall across one another like jackstraws, their value for building purposes begins to decline.

Wood and his crew, which in­­cludes longtime employee Kevin Carty, can comfortably complete three log homes in a year.

At one time, Wood ramped up his business to employ more people and build more houses, but he found the increased revenue didn’t justify the increased headaches.

He expects to keep Carty and Ruemelin busy on the Richards’ home until shortly after the first of the year.

However, this is the time of year when he is typically building several projects for next spring. So far, there aren’t any new homes in the pipeline for spring 2010.

“A lot of people come by and get all excited by this house, but when I ask them when they’d like to get started, they say they’re waiting for the economy to recover,” Wood said.

He quotes log structures on a flat fee basis, then produces a line-item spreadsheet containing reliable bids from a variety of subcontractors needed to produce a finished home. He relies on a stable of subcontractors with whom he’s worked for many years and has acquired expertise in blending their trade with the specific needs of log home construction.

Among the design details they get excited about are Wood’s trademark octagonal dining nooks, which protrude from the exterior wall like a small turret capped with a circular roof.

“Everyone who does this work develops some attraction to it,” Wood said. “It’s an art form. It’s really a handcrafted work of art.”

Wood’s employees must be able to work precisely and get it right the first time. In addition to chain saws, they use hand chisels and draw knives on the job.

“We only get one cut,” Ruemelin said. “You don’t want to waste a whole log.”

Wood will try to keep his guys busy this winter doing smaller projects, from dramatic log entry monuments at cattle ranches to stair and deck railings for other contractors as add-ons to traditionally framed homes. Wood’s employees recently built a log cross for a special ceremony and are willing to tackle lawn gazebos and log storage buildings.

If major new jobs fail to materialize by early next year, Wood will resort to Plan B.

“We’ll go down to Australia and do a little surfing,” he said.