Planning Floors (Austin)

I found a website that has a free floor plan creator on it which allows you draw up your own ideas and submit them to the company (Southland Log Homes out of North Carolina) to get priced, or to take them elsewhere. So I have spent a decent amount of time drawing up various ideas and probably have eight different plans, but the more I do it the more I can feel myself having a better idea of what would be best for this homesteading dream of mine. I know a lot of it will depend on the land I end up getting, but at least getting a feel for how all the necessary pieces fit together can happen now. Below is my most recent creation and I very much like it. Some things that might strike you as strange will be explained briefly.

Yes, you are seeing this correctly. This plan has the house actually split between two building shells that are connected by a front-and-back porch and one roof that covers the middle walkway. This is actually not uncommon in many older log designs, back when logs were the way to build things. It's easier to split a residence into two shorter buildings (in this case above, the outer walls are all 35') than to try and find single logs that cover the whole distance. Look at the dimensions above. If I were to connect those two 35' walls and the 8' walkway, I'd need 78'-80' logs, and enough of them to stack high enough for two walls. From what I read, putting logs butt-to-butt to meet the length of a wall is highly unadvised and causes all sorts of problems. So I thought I'd experiment with the idea of a split plan.

If you have ever seen the John Wayne movie Chisum (one of my favorites), his ranch house is separated in a similar fashion. The log house at the end of the more recent film Lawless is also split by a walkway. So I'm not entirely crazy...all the time.

Yes, that is a fireplace you see on the front porch. That one's simple. It'd be a nice place to sit and relax with friends, maybe have a cigar. Let's be honest, I'd sit out there by myself and have a fireside cigar by myself. But the fireplace on the inside would also share the same chimney, so it would appear as one big chimney but the inside would look like two of them back-to-back. I'm not going to make them share an open space, where if you light it on one side you can see it from the other. That wouldn't work and would just be silly.

No matter which of my floor plans you're looking at, you'll see the utilities room contiguous to both the full bathroom and the kitchen. Since I intend to make this house entirely off-grid, I'm trying to keep the plumbing system as condensed and efficient as possible so as not to waste piping or water. That way any generators, converters, pumps, etc needed for the solar and other electricity converters can be held in the same area and kept away from the bedrooms since some of that technology makes noise. The utilities room will probably be the only room to have drywall instead of log walls, so that wiring and piping can be easily connected to the kitchen and shower room. As of now, electricity is planned to be wired through the ceiling instead of drilling through the log walls. But that is something I know much less about so it is likely to change between now and construction.

The toilets don't have to be next to the utilities room because I don't plan to use conventional facilities. I intend to use composting toilets, which require little to no running water. It'll be a change, but it'll make conserving water easier and will help create good compost to fertilize the gardens. So they're designed to be at the edge of the buildings so that the compost chambers underneath can be easily accessed and emptied from outside.
Just to give you an idea, this is what I have in mind when I say "log home" since people have different perceptions of the phrase. I'll leave you with this and let you dwell on how awesome this place is gonna be when it's finished. So this is me logging out (get it?)

(photo belongs to Newberg Handcrafted Log Homes, Inc)

-Austin Burke