After spending a day on our property at Dale Hollow Lake, we went to out to Center Hill Lake last week (near Smithville, Tennessee).

While there, we enjoyed checking out a number of newly built log homes in the area.

Something that we saw close-up for the very first time was a home that looked like a log home, but wasn't. It had log siding -- inside & out.

We currently have plans to use log siding on the basement portion of our log home (to cover the poured cement walls), but we'd never thought of using it for the entire house!

The Log & Timber Homes Network has compiled a list of the most ideal areas across the country in which to build a vacation log home.

View the top log home vacation hot spots for 2007, compared to 2006...

Now here's great concept... a cookbook full of tasty recipes created in the kitchens of log home companies that are members of the Log Homes Council.

And it's for a good cause, too! 100% of monies raised from the sales of the cookbook will go right back out to families in need through the National Cancer Awareness Foundation.

Click on the book, to view a .pdf explaining the concept behind this unique cookbook.

Living in Franklin, Tennessee (a suburb of Nashville), we've gone to Center Hill Lake quite a few times in the past.

But, until last weekend, we had never gone specifically with the purpose of checking out the log homes that have been built on Center Hill Lake.

In our neverending search for a place to call home, Jim and I drove out to our property on Dale Hollow Lake this weekend to reflect on our year-long journey toward building our dream home... a log home.

We took our dog, Tenor. And we just sat there for a few hours on our land, weighing all of our options (again) as far as the lake property goes, and wondering about our likelihood of finding someone (a general contractor) to build our log home for us.

After coming to grips with the fact that we can't build this log home for $150 or even $155 a square foot at Swan Ridge Lake Resort (Dale Hollow Lake in the Celina/Cookeville, TN area) at this time, Jim and I have decided that we're not giving up.

We are simply considering this Round One.

Jim and I have come to the conclusion that we were completely disillusioned about the cost to build a log home... at least here in Middle Tennessee anyway!

So far, we've spoken to 6 general contractors now (4 of whom have many many years of experience building log homes). Each of them told us that we could build a log home for somewhere between $125 - $150 per square foot.

Baloney.