I am thinking of buying some land that borders National Forrest. I will keep you updated.

That being said, if I pay $100/log, thats really not that much. Say you need 90 logs, that's 9k. Even with my scrounging, this will be the least of my worries, as my roof/foundataion will be much more than this.

-Peter

The only TRULY free logs will be the ones on your own property that Al Gore will let you cut down. Yuhjn told you pretty much everything else though. I know at least one member finally managed to get his free "houselogs" from uncle sam recently. I forget who though. Hopefully they will post here. But the reality is, though, that most folks do end up paying for theirs.

Ya know, it just depends.
For a few dollars and some fuel I had a lot more Grand fir and Engleman Spruce than I could
ever begin to haul. They rolled out the red carpet for me.
I went back less than a year later and the door was practically slammed in my face.
The situation is always changing. Depends on weather, rules, what is being cleared, where and when,
how badly they need fire breaks, beetle kill removed.... Seems like nothing is constant. shopping for
logs is not like going to Walmart. More like an Easter egg hunt. Prepare to have some fun exploring,
and hunting, and dickering. I found a great price on house logs several years ago. Today I can go
back to my contacts and may be turned away, or even get them for much less.

You may be disappointed if you want to write a check and have discount logs delivered on such-and-
such a date. If you love the art of the deal, and the journey more than the destination, and you have
a semi loose time window then you could have a lot of fun, and get a free to cheap price.

Sometimes the logs are free, sometimes very pricey. If you're not happy with the deal look elsewhere.
You may find a much better deal.

-Rick

Yea, it's easy to underestimate how difficult it is to get a tree wrestled down, bucked, hauled, etc. In the end I think, IMHO, it's cheaper to pay somebody else than it is to do the work yourself.

Cy (and everyone else who is interested),

I've seen all the comments on this thread and how if you're not doing the work yourself, you'll probably end up paying *somewhere* along the line. Someone mentioned $10k for house logs - and that was jsut for labor and delivery, not for the rights to the wood itself. I spent about $18k for what amounted to about 120-130 logs, suitable for building a 2.5-story 30x30. Along the way, I learned so much about getting logs that if I had known at the beginning of the process what I knew at the end, I probably coulkd have gotten all those logs for under $2k.

As everyone has already said... if you're lucky enough to get the rights to the logs for free, you need you pay someone to cut them down. If you can get them cut for free, you need to pay someone to load them. If you can get them loaded for free, you need to pay someone to deliver them to your land.

I learned several things when I was clearing my log field (before my project got canceled) and having logs moved to it:
-First, that the guy who I hired to cut down a bunch of trees for me had just finished cutting down a few hundred BEAUTIFUL pine trees and shredding them into mulch for disposal. And so if I had talked to him about why I needed him to cut down my logs, instead of just hiring him for the job, I could probably have acquired as many of those 200 pines as I wanted, for just the cost of loading and delivery, minus whatever the person who hired the logger for the job had already agreed to pay for disposal
-Second, that the folks that I hired to rack up my logs, and turn them from piles into log fields, often get hired to clear land, and that again, the cheapest way to dispose of the logs is to shred them. Since that company owns the dumpster truck instead of having to rent it, they jsut load up the truck with logs and drive it to the wood chipping place, which pays them maybe a dozen bucks a ton. The person I was talking to said that a really full load of logs could net *maybe* $300 in cash. I said that I'd happily pay them $350 a load if I needed more trees - with the right to request their biggest and best - and that deal was sealed on the spot. (She said they got about $400 a load for hardwoods, because of their weight, and I said I'd go for $450 for those. Again, instant deal. And the same company had one of those portable sawmill-on-rails setups - i was going to hire them to get truckloads of hardwoods and cut them up into the hardwood flooring (2x6 TnG, or whatever was the most cost-effective to do) - for a price of only a few cents per board foot.)

The moral of the story, at least for me, is that whatever you're looking for, someone else is in the process of throwing it away, so go find the trash man for that particular product and make friends with him. In this case, in that part of Virginia, Pine trees are considered weeds, and are destroyed at every opportunity. Land-clearing firms, tree-removal specialists, small-time loggers... they're all being hired by homeowners year-round to get rid of trees and dispose of them, and it can take almost nothing to get them dumped on your land instead of at the shredding mill - and that's *AFTER* all the other stuff has been paid for by someone else.

As it is now, I am probably going to have to pay someone to shred my 130 logs, because my project had to be canceled, and now I have log fields that have to disappear. None of the nearby LHBA members have expressed interest in the logs - chances are that the same folks that racked them up for me will haul them away to the pulp mill, and get about $300 a load for them. Now that's irony.

Where are we talking about in Virginia? I'm in the Shenandoah Valley (near Harrisonburg) and I may be a few months from having some land.

Even if I couldn't get your logs, I'm definitely interested in picking your brain.

And I'm curious why your project is canceled. You can get me at joel dot west at gmail dot com.

EDIT: And has anyone addressed the fact that we can't send PMs or see the posters' locations on the left of their posts?

Cardiff,

My logs are located in Louisa, VA, just a few minutes from Lake Anna. Ping me at benjamin.kleber@gmail.com with where you're building - that's by far the best way to get in touch with me.

I'm glad to see a lot of VA people on this board. I'm in Abingdon, VA (just outside of Bristol).

Our logs were free. Mark spent two weeks cutting down Ponderosa Pine and skidding logs with an old Wagoneer. We then had a neighbor who was a log hauler haul them out for us for beer & gas. Pretty good deal. The land where we got the logs was owned by a friend who actually wanted his place thinned out. Mark made sure he left everything in good shape, neat slash piles, etc.