……you love them all (but find you have a favorite). Painting the inside of a log home with a hand held brush is an ethereal experience. One of our programmatic criteria was that structural logs would be exposed on the interior and not covered with something sinful such as drywall. We were able to stay true to this commitment except for a small section of exterior wall in the guest shower. I had grand visions of lining the shower with glass and exposed logs behind it but in the end the Building Inspector would not sign off our CofO until the shower was 100% complete so practicality took over and I sinfully covered a few square feet of logs with cement board and ceramic tile. In retrospect it turned out quite nice!
Now back to my ‘favorite’ log. As I noted, when you hand paint each log (3 times in my case) you start to appreciate the inherent beauty of every knot, every split, each blemish and every grain as the paint flows across the log’s surface. One of the most important decisions one needs to make before finishing the inside of exposed logs is color….as a famous poet once said, “to stain or not to stain”. We worked through a plethora of stain samples and in the end decided to go ‘natural’ with a clear coating consisting of one coat of ‘Prelude’ primer followed by two coats of ‘Sure Shine’ both extremely high quality water borne products by Perma-Chink that will last as long as the log home stands.
In case you have not guessed it just yet, my ‘favorite is a short south facing log on the prow side. It is the one with the longitudinal split that aligns with the pendulum of Nan’s ‘must have’ clock. The composition of the split and the knots is nature at its artistic best.
Albeit the ‘split’ does not breach the log, it does profess itself on the outside. It’s unusually warm while I am writing this with outdoor ambient temperatures in the high 80’s. At around 7pm, my favorite log (remember she faces south) is a cool 82.9ºF on the inside and a toasty 111.0ºF on the outside. California has one of the most stringent energy codes in the US that our home met without any insulation applied to the exterior log walls.
I think I’ll have a plaque made to celebrate my ‘favorite log’.
