Our Trees and Materials
Our Trees and Materials
A beautiful handcrafted log home starts with a tree.
At Coyote Log Homes, our trees are not harvested by “clear cutting” – the trees we use in the construction of your dream home are individually selected and cut from our hand-picked network of local landowners to ensure you receive only the highest quality and character of wood.
We are one of the only log builders in Ontario that has the industry connections to import all of these types of wood from across the country, providing you with the ultimate selection in how your handcrafted log home is constructed.
About Our Wood
We use only softwoods for our handcrafted log homes and log cabins, with Eastern White Pine being our preferred building log because of its natural look, straightness, and abundance due to our location Central Ontario, Canada.
Other popular types of wood used in our log homes include Western Red Cedar and Western Douglas Fir, and we can also use Eastern Red Pine, Eastern White Cedar, and White Spruce, as requested.
White Pine
An excellent building choice because the trees grow tall, straight, and large, allowing them to be used in all types of log construction projects.
White Pine has a very natural look with minimal taper, and offers minimal shrinkage and excellent insulating properties.
Douglas Fir
A very easy wood to work with due to its straight grain and minimal taper (although to some people, the natural straightness of the logs looks manufactured).
Douglas Fir has very good insulating qualities, and its tighter fibers give it incredible strength and stability, making it ideal for larger beams and roofs.
Red Cedar
The most stable softwood, its low density gives it the highest insulating qualities of the wood we use.
In addition, Red Cedar does not contain a lot of moisture (meaning there is less shrinkage), and its large size allows for the construction of massive log structures.
Dried Logs vs. Green Logs
We can build your log cabin using either green logs or dried logs – the choice is yours! While there is no difference aesthetically (they both create beautiful log houses), we consider ourselves to be experts in building with green logs.
We have extensive experience with the overscribing technique that is necessary to account for the increased settling and shrinkage associated with green logs. In addition, we know how to use the heavier weight of a green log to our advantage to produce greater compression and tighter fitting notches – meaning your log home will retain more heat and be more durable over the years.
While we prefer to work with green logs, if requested (or required by local building codes), we do have access to kilns to dry and treat the wood as necessary. The advantage of using kiln-dried logs is that there is less shrinkage, therefore reducing the overall amount of maintenance you log home will need over the years.