Steve Howard cuts a strip of wood paneling while working on a new log home in Cumberland on Thursday. He said he’s seen a roughly 20 percent increase in sales from 2019 and he expects that will rise 25 to 30 percent next year. Ron Silliboy, director of sales and marketing, has been with Ward for 15 years. The American Legion log cabin in Yarmouth is a Ward structure built in 1932. Bruce Ward founded the company in 1923 after inventing an interlocking milling technique. The oldest log home manufacturer in Maine is Ward Cedar Log Homes of Houlton. “Certainly as the pandemic rages on, homeowners’ desire for natural surroundings and more rural locales have increased, and historically low interest rates as well as a strong stock market/retirement funds have afforded people the means to make these dreams come true.” “Anecdotally throughout the entire log home industry, we have heard manufacturers say that business is booming,” Peak wrote in an email response to a request for current data. Donna Peak, editorial director of Log Home Living magazine, helps compile the survey and said data gathering from 2020 will begin early next year. That organization is one of six subsidiaries of the Building Systems Council, which itself is one of seven subsidiaries of the National Association of Home Builders. A national survey of log home builders comes out every two years, and was last released in 2019 by the Log and Timber Homes Council. Numbers are hard to come by for the log home industry, so it’s difficult to measure whether Howard’s experience is similar to what’s happening throughout the state. That differs from a log-sided home, in which a conventional stick-built dwelling is covered in log siding to give the appearance of a log home. A true log home is constructed with horizontally stacked logs that interlock at the corners.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |