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Erlund House floor plan – Taru

Jake | February 21, 2010

Erlund is a log home manufacturer from Finland. A family company with an interesting enough product to be featured on a fantastic TV-series Grand Designs. Erlund has developed a fascinating panel-insulation-log wall that can keep up with rising European standards for energy efficiency of housing.

HOW TO GET IN
With Erlund House, I chose a fairly simple, classic model named Taru with two entrances, one from the side of the building and one from the terrace end of the log home. Side entrance has been planned as the main entrance so let’s go in through that.

INSIDE
In front of us we have a narrow corridor that curves to the right. No cabinets or space for clothes and outdoors gear. For families with kids, I can imagine this to be congested to the max. Corridor is lined with bedrooms and a bathroom, nothing much to comment but very efficient use of space. All the rooms are simple rectangles so there are no in-built closets.

AT THE END OF THE…
Not rainbow, but corridor and it opens to combined kitchen and living room (named lounge, but in my opinion it’s not lounge quality so I’ll just call it living room). Definitive plus here is that this open area just bathes in sun light thanks to those big windows.

WHAT ELSE?
Somewhat – was that it – experience, but one can’t expect much more from house of this size. Space has been utilized fairly well, even the hall area continues all the way through the house.

However, one thing especially troubles me, the only storage room in the house has entry from kitchen only. Given the severe space limitation, this storage room is bound to turn into utility room. Awkward positioning indeed and hampers the functionality (yes, I’m from Finland and here we are all for functionality) of the floor plan.

SUMMARY
Taru floor plan makes good use of the given floor area. Floor plan is slightly on the dull side, because of straight line designing, which also keeps the floor plan clean and simple.

Storage room area is desperately needed. Bedrooms are not that big and if you have to fill them up with closets, you have very little space left for log home living.

Definite plus in this plan are two toilets and their positioning. One can access them easily. However, in order to free that much needed storage space, I would be willing to give up the toilet or rearrange the workroom and bathroom/wc combo.

Like with any floor plans, one little change here creates many little changes here and there. It is often better to redraw the whole floor plan from the start for best results.

Now to what kind of family would this house be suitable? What do you think about it?

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Categories: Log Houses
Tags: Erlund Log Houses, floor plan, floorplan, log home, log house, log houses from Finland
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Looking for a Finnish log home

Jake | February 21, 2010

So I took a glance on visitor data and what do I see, most of the people arriving to Log Homes Cabin are looking for “log homes from Finland”. I have to admit the focus of this site might have been Finnish log homes, but I guess it really is more about log homes industry in general. This got me thinking and then doing.

Now the list of Finnish log home and log cabin manufacturers is more complete. I’ll still tune it a bit in coming couple of days. I also have plenty of material on some of the companies on that list, so writing few detailed company histories is in the works. But don’t expect me to write books, I’m nowhere near that level.

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Categories: Log Houses
Tags: log homes from Finland, log houses from Finland
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Log home industry in Finland

Jake | October 29, 2009

Sometimes I do wonder this industry. It seems that our industry exists just because of a freak accident. I am talking about log home industry from Finnish point of view.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Our country is relatively large when compared to population. This means that we have lots and lots of forests. Finland’s location on northern hemisphere gives us lots of pine and fir tree forests. Accidentally these trees, especially pines, make excellent log cabin home raw material. Hence we have abundant supply of log home building material.

FURTHER HISTORY
This is the basic setting. From historic point of view, log homes and log cabins were very popular in Finland until rebuilding efforts after the Second World War. We had to move masses of people away from Carelia, an area taken by Soviet Union (nowadays Russia). To accommodate so many people, in such a sort time was hectic operation. Problems arose from these people having no land, and therefore they had no access on timber. Logs are difficult to transport over distances, unlike saw-processed timber. This resulted into increasing timber frame building.

CLOSER HISTORY
Another historic milestone was the demographic change and urbanization of Finland. People moved to cities from countryside and single-home houses turned into apartment blocks, no timber used at all. Log home building nearly vanished but there was a savior in form of recreational log cabin building.

WAY OF LIFE
You might have heard Finland to be referred as a country of thousands of lakes. All those urbanized people wanted to have a summer cottage by lake. Log cabins came to rescue. Log structure is very solid and can withstand dry, cold and unused winters as well as humid, hot and active summers. Logs also played an important role in bringing some nostalgic atmosphere for this idyllic log home living. Making log cabins provided jobs to countryside, lumber was acquired and cabins built locally. Soon Finland was full of tiny father and son operated log cabin companies. Some of these companies managed to grow.

INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT
Markets in Finland are tiny and soon biggest log cabin rush was over. Some companies had managed to build their operations to industrial level so that machinery was largely used in milling the logs instead of handcrafting. These companies worked hard to build nationwide brands and many of them managed to do this. Among these companies we got our first log home and log cabin exporters. Today Finland boasts with the world’s biggest industrial log home manufacturer Honka and several others that are somewhat smaller.

EXPORTS
Exports of Finnish log homes started with nearby area deliveries – Sweden and rest of the Scandinavia, Russia and Germany. These areas still form bulk of Finnish log cabin and log home exports. True jackpot came from Japanese markets. Finnish log home companies have been able to sell cabins to Japan by thousands. Apparently there is something in Finnish log cabin design that pleases Japanese aesthetics. The look of Finnish log cabin as well as log home is very clean and streamlined, there is something very “Scandinavian design” in them. One reason for this is that once our log home companies had filled the original market demand for rustic log cabin homes, they had to expand their product slate and offer log homes that fit into suburban setting.

FUTURE
Finnish log homes have not had much success on American soil, because of the lack of rustic feeling. Honka has been trying to educate U.S. homebuyers, but with relatively modest results. More and more Finnish companies are adapting to foreign markets, because tough domestic competition has improved their quality and design. I believe that in the future, Finland will have couple of log home industry giants.