Log house

A log house is a structure built of horizontal logs, round, squared or otherwise shaped, interlocked at the corners by notching. Log construction developed as the dominant building technique across regions with abundant coniferous forest, notably Scandinavia, Russia, the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, and settlers carried the method to North America from the early seventeenth century, where it was rapidly adopted. Logs are stacked horizontally and locked together with a variety of corner notching techniques, and as the wood naturally loses moisture it shrinks and develops small surface cracks known as checks, a normal feature of the construction rather than a defect; the smaller, more rustic log cabin is generally distinguished from the larger residential log house. Norway exported prefabricated log houses, their components numbered for reassembly, from the 1880s through the 1920s, and American manufacturers began marketing milled log houses in the 1920s.