Remember– All of our floor plans, from small cabins to luxury log homes, can be modified for you! There is no cost change to do this. It is simply part of the complete customer service that we offer. This floor plan below is the original first floor of the Yellowstone plan. I would like to share with you the thoughts that lead to the revised version of the Bear Creek log home plan.

Finished Yellowstone Log Home

First let’s consider the original Yellowstone floor plan.  This is an attractive floor plan. It flows nicely from one room to the next. Some of its strongest points are the spacious master suite, large great room/ kitchen combo, and first floor laundry.

Click to Enlarge Floor Plan

With this as a starting point we can begin to modify the plan. This plan was originally designed as a SIP panel framed home with log siding. We want to change it over to a handcrafted log home. The log corners are drawn in and the log walls are widened to allow for an average of 13 diameter logs.  With the great room through the center it is a good idea to change two of the interior framed walls to log walls. So two interior log walls are added, one on each side of the great room.

The next step is to redraw the bedroom and great room. Instead of two entry doors into the front of the great room, the owners want to remove the door on the right and put in a corner stone fireplace. The fireplace along the wall by the master bedroom is deleted and the entertainment center will go on that wall. The closets that jut into bedroom #3 the owners want to delete one of them and move the second down to the second bedroom and have it open into the great room. This will be a storage closet and coat closet.

Click to Enlarge Original Floor Plan

The next order of business is the master suite wing.  In a luxury log home the master needs to be a spacious as the design allows. For the master bath we have decided that it is important to fit a wider shower, an antique claw foot tub, a free standing linen closet, and an antique mirror dresser (to be converted into the vanity). This means that the walk-in-closet (WIC), is going to have to shrink in size. We are going to take out the closet that goes into the garage to make the master bath larger. The claw foot tub will go along the same wall the garden tub occupied. A linen closet will be added at the right end of the claw foot tub. Also the owners want a five foot wide shower, so that is sketched in as well.There is a solid log interior wall running on each side of the great room, so that is our boundary for the bedroom, but the closet, garage closet, and laundry room walls can all be shifted to allow for more bathroom space.

Now with this marked up floor plan and a whole list of notes we send this drawing to our log home designer. He takes about a week and provides us with this detailed redraw. Now is the process of working with our customer’s wish list and applying it against log spans, the confines of the existing walls, and other technical data. A log archway is added over the entryway into the small hallway and bath between bedrooms 2 and 3.  There is not enough room to allow for the small privacy wall going into the master bedroom so it is deleted. The front of the plan does not allow enough space for the interior door to work in conjunction with minimum number of inches needed between a door opening and a corner in the handcrafted log wall, so the front of the great room is stepped out to a total of 7 feet.

On the job site we discovered that with the location of the existing septic, the garage doors need to be put on the left side instead of the rear. Also the owners want a little more space in the garage so it is enlarged to 26 feet wide.

Now looking to the finished preliminary drawings. I would like to explain about the dotted lines that crisscross the plan, this is the roof system of the log home. With the removal of the loft we had to include one king truss for support. The owners loved the king trusses so much they decided to add a second one over the great room. If you look closely at the plan you will see “log truss” written on the two trusses. Each truss has a circle in the center of it designating an overhead post within the truss. We love the look of this big log ceiling so we also decided to add two purloins. There are now a total of three logs running from the front of the home to the back. The center is the ridge beam and the other two are the purloins.

Final Yellowstone Log Home Floor Plan CLICK TO ENLARGE

The wings of this floor plan are going to have standard flat trusses. So to help give more of a log feel we are going to add in some log beams and 1×6 pine tongue and grooves on the ceilings.  So this upgrade will also be added to this home.

That completes our walk through of modifying this  luxury log home plan from the original to this customized version. We are going to be building the Yellowstone this summer in the Bozeman, Montana area. Be sure to check our PROJECTS page and VIDEOS page for more details as the construction commences for this custom log home. If you are in the area and would like to see it in person, just give us a call.

Cowboy Log Homes