Designing / BuildingHome & Garden

Floorplanner.com and other online programs like this make it easy to design and decorate all the rooms in your house! They're great because they let you to see exactly how things will look inside the rooms of your house without having to just visualize it in your mind. Most of these tools also permit you to enter your exact room dimensions. Some even allow you to draw in objects of your own choosing. Here are some free online design tools to consider.

Should you mix things up a bit and use some light brown pieces and some darker brown pieces of furniture and accents? Or should you try to match all your browns with the color of your logs? Here's my opinion...

Pictures and details of our 5 acre property in Williamson County Tennessee.

Whether you want to build an entire home that looks like a log cabin --on the inside -- or you just want to decorate one specific room in log cabin decor, interior log siding is the answer! When used INSIDE a home, the terms 'log siding', 'log paneling' and 'tongue & groove wood' are often used interchangeably. Log siding tends to be raised and rounded -- like a log... or a half log -- whereas log paneling tends to be flat and narrow -- like a plank of wood found at the lumber yard. When used inside a home, they are both applied using the tongue & groove method... generally speaking

With hurricane season upon us -- June 1 through November 30 -- I thought it might be worthwhile to see how well log homes fare under typical hurricane conditions. You'll also find some excellent tips here if you are currently building a log home and you want it to be able to withstand hurricane force winds!

Now you can experiment with color on your walls, trim, ceilings and accents before even picking up a paintbrush! Try colors made by Glidden, Benjamin Moore, Behr, and Sherwin Williams.

These online quizzes are fun... and informative! Really. See what your home and your personal space say about you, as a person. And how much of your individual personality goes into your decorating, organizing, and living spaces.

Here are the top 5 places to build a log home. Is your favorite not on the list?... Share it with others in the Comments below.

While looking at log homes along Center Hill Lake in Smithville, Tennessee last week, 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 -- or tongue & groove -- inside and out.

Check out this one-of-a-kind cookbook that's filled with recipes that were created and tested in the kitchens of log home companies that are members of the Log Homes Council. All proceeds go to the National Cancer Awareness Foundation. Or, enter to win one for FREE here!...

Here's a photo collage of a day spent at our property -- at Swan Ridge Lake Resort on Dale Hollow Lake. It was our dog Tenor's first time visiting the property. Also his first time off-leash to roam free. He did great!

We're down but not out! After a year spent securing the land, finding a log home builder, designing the blueprints, and saving money to build the log home of our dreams, we had a minor setback when we learned that we couldn't build our log home for under $160/SF. Now we're gearing up for Round Two in the log home building process. See what we're planning now...

This article is one of the few in which we have actually vented our yearlong frustrations in dealing with finding a general contractor to build our home, topped off with some of the runaround we've received from the banks who seem unwilling to finance log homes in this area.

HGTV is running a special about log homes. It's called 'Amazing Log Homes' and it will air on April 29, April 30, and May 6, 2007.

The Orvis Company has teemed with Rocky Mountain Log Homes to sell 6 different log cabins to outdoor enthusiasts. The Orvis log homes range in size from 1,500 SF to 3,944 SF and range in price from $141,000 to over a million dollars, for a top-of-the-line custom-built log home.

The world's first RV -- built in 1914 -- was actually made from a single redwood tree! As a result, they called the vehicle 'the Travel Log'. Read the interesting story about this RV built from the log of a redwood tree.

Blemishes and nail holes in wood trim and log walls are two things that most log home owners are going to want to 'hide' at some point -- especially if you're trying to sell your log cabin or log home.

Since the master bathroom will be utilized several times each day by both Jim and myself, adequate amounts of hot water AND water pressure are a necessity for our new master bath shower & wet room. See why the placement of the hot water heater is so important...