How It All Began

I would like to tell you of the magnificent story of God’s providence to a rural community pastor and his family in North Idaho.
We have long dreamed of building a log home. 
We felt like we forfeited the dream 5 years ago when Brian became a pastor.
However, the church family desired a larger home for our growing family than the parsonage supplied, and so encouraged us to pursue the dream once again. 
That is when the blessings started falling like rain. 
First, a man in the church GAVE us 10 acres of heavily timbered land. 
Most of the trees were of marketable size, so Brian and his (then 13 year old) son, John, began selecting house logs and felling them. 
A forester from the church body helped Brian choose straight Lodgepole pine trees for the house. 
120 of them to be exact. 
These were decked next to the house site. 
The tops from these trees produced two truck loads of saw logs for a local sawmill. 
This process started in the spring of 2005. 
Brian traveled to Duval, WA to take a log home building class from the Log Home Builders Association of North America, giving him the needed knowledge to construct his home completely by hand.
During the summer, we hosted two large work parties, inviting just about everyone we knew to come and experience the pioneer method of peeling logs by hand with a draw knife or a spud. 
Over 45 people came to the first event, and nearly 30 to the second. Most of the logs were peeled this way, the entire family, right down to two year old Benjamin, helped.
By fall, Julianne’s dad had agreed to finance a home construction loan, so the foundation was poured.
Before winter, six courses of logs were laid on the new foundation and the dream began to look very real and exciting. 
The completed house will be three stories tall, and approximately 3500 square feet.
The providence of God showed so clearly, any doubt of whether this project was of the Lord was immediately dispelled. 
ALL the heavy equipment needed to forge a home in the middle of a forest was willingly loaned, usually with a tank full of fuel to boot. 
Bulldozers, an excavator, crane, boom truck, backhoe and grader were all available for Brian to use. Brian rather enjoyed operating the heavy machinery, you know, big boy’s toys.