4. The Log Furniture

What’s a log cabin without rustic log furniture?!

Before Becky and I even decided on many of the specifics of our cabin, I knew that I wanted to try my hand at building log furniture. This might be because it required new tools… what guy doesn’t like having more tools! 🙂

I found Lumber Jack Tools online that supplied just about everything you could ever need. The actual tool list to build this furniture is extremely minimal. You really only need the following:

1. Chainsaw
2. Tennon cutter & drill bits
3. Draw knife
4. Glue

Of course, there are a lot of other tools that I’ve been using to make it easier, but the above is the bare minimum.

To get started, we headed up to the build site to gather standing dead Aspen to use as the lumber for the log furniture. Becky really enjoyed the larger trees I took down, especially since she had to haul them to the pickup! (mwahahahaha) 😉

Once home, I started with a demo project to see how everything worked and to hopefully get the hard lessons out of the way. The project itself was a large end table that was simple enough.

Having some knowledge of woodworking (thanks to 6 years of woodworking in high school under an amazing teacher), I followed the plans to a “T” and was flummoxed when nothing lined up. I had measured twice and cut/drilled once, but nothing seemed to line up as I’d hoped.

Well, big news flash: logs aren’t perfectly straight! (Duh!)  You really need to take into account how you want the end piece to look more than simply cutting to the right measurements. So after a couple ruined pieces, I soon discovered that I needed to build and design as I go instead of following the plans down to the millimeter.

Few key points I learned the hard way: