One of the hardest decisions Greg and I had to make was whether to build a handcrafted log home or a manufactured log cabin kit. 

If we waited another 3-4 years, we would have the money to build the custom log home -- which is generally more expensive.  But ultimately, our need to have our log home dream now and the discovery of the affordability and flexibility of the log cabin kit sealed our fate.

My motto has always been: Change Is Good. But never has that seemed more true than now.

You see, it's been about 2 years since we started the process of building our log home. We had the land picked out, the bank picked out, the GC picked out, the builder picked out, the logs picked out, the floorplan designed the way we wanted it, and we even started clearing the land.

Then why isn't our log home done yet? Why haven't we even raised the first log yet?

We've been forced into a slight holding pattern right now due to all the banking & loan issues going on these days. Now is not a good time to get money -- especially large amounts of money.. Especially for home loans.

So, we are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess. And we have to wait it out a little longer until banks are willing to lend money like normal again.

In Everything Bad, There Is Something Good
Fortunately, this gives us plenty of time to take a step back and reflect on where we are and how we got here -- in terms of planning and building our new log home. And I have to say, I'm honestly quite glad that the process of getting everything in order to build our log home has taken so long this far.

What I mean is...
If we had built right away (back in August of 2006), and gone with our first gut instincts on the details including:

• where to build


• what we want the house to look like


• where we want the windows


• ...etc, etc. etc.

Then we wouldn't have truly ended up with the log home of our dreams! (Which is right around the corner... I'm sure of it.)

We are actually toying with a couple of "non-traditional" ideas when it comes to color choices for both the outside and inside of our log home.

I'll talk more about our exterior color choices later...

For now, let's focus on some of the color ideas that we are considering for one or two of our full-log walls inside.

What follows are some of the interior color choices we're thinking about... and why we've kind of had a change of heart after considering resale values.

The photo above gives you an idea of what I currently envision most of the interior walls of our log home will look like: 6x12 flat logs, no chinking, dark stair railing, and darker brown accents throughout.

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!

When we first started designing our log home with Honest Abe Log Homes (about a year ago), Jim and I both gravitated toward the D-Log for some reason.

So naturally, we've been thinking all along that our log home would be built with D-Logs, right?

Well, fast-forward one year, and now we're considering a switch to Genesis Logs!

See why below... plus a listing of some of the differences between Genesis Logs and D-Logs.